The meta lathe that isn’t
Over on the meta lathe, there’s the suggestion that the programmable computer isn’t something people should be trusted with, and more importantly don’t need to be trusted with. What it misses is that the reason we have computers that can do anything and programs which can do 20 times more than any of us ever want to do individually. Is that the combination of things that each of us want in a platform is different, sure everyone uses a spreadsheet, an email client and a wordprocessor, but then there’s games. The how to juggle program Aunt Maud recommended, the Astronomy assistant etc. are all used by a few people, creating a device with all these combinations that people would want would be impossibly expensive, and would almost certainly rely on deliberately hobbling devices, once the applications had been installed - no-one is going to want that.