"All the Troubles of the World" response

The short story “All the Troubles of the World” by Isaac Asimov is a truly amazing story; it really gets me thinking about all the horrible things that humans have done. In my opinion, humans’ sins made Multivac want to shut it self down. Humans’ brains are limited, and so is the computer, it can only carry limited amount of information like secrets, pressure, and expectations.

Multivac has memories and feelings like humans. Humans’ carries lots of secrets, maybe some secrets are not as ugly as the ones Multivac has in its computer brain, but even so, carrying secrets is not the most pleasant thing to do. Secrets can affect our emotions because when a person tells us a secret about themselves, we have to be responsible to keep their secrets in order to keep a relationship with them. Therefore we cannot tell anybody and we would keep the secret in our hearts for a long period of time and we would begin to choose our words carefully when we talk to our friends, afraid that we would spill somebody’s secrets. Like Multivac, we are under big pressure of trying to keep those secrets and would begin to think of shutting ourselves down.

We, as humans, would always receive expectations from others, especially teenagers and adults. Teenagers usually get expectations from their parents, expecting them to go to a good university or get a good job when they grow up. Adults get expectations from bosses or even their own children. Bosses expect them to make lots of money and work really hard for them, and children expect their parents to buy them what they want and could always afford what they want. Multivac, like humans, gets expectations from others expecting him to keep all the criminal records with out being human like and expects it to not feel pressure of the entire human burden he carries in his computer brain.

Pressure is what every human would go though. Some people enjoy pressure and view it as a positive thing, but others can’t get through it, and they would decide to end their life because of the huge pressure on their shoulders. Some teenagers face pressure because they would have to face their parents everyday planning out their life for them. Some university students face pressure because they want to do a good job on their studies and successfully graduate from university. Some adults face pressure because they have to be responsible for their families. As humans, pressure is something we can’t ignore, it’s also really stressful. Even a computer like Multivac can’t take all the burden of all humankind and eventually wants to shut itself down.

In the short story “All the Troubles of the World”, the computer Multivac is very much like humans because it kept secrets of humans who did crime, had expectations from people who depended on it, and it has a lot of pressure on it’s shoulders. People’s sins made the computer human-like and made it want to die more than anything else in the world.

Picture from: ntloanfund.org