This is Bill James again, from his comment on the Oakland A’s in the 1984 Baseball Abstract; the essay was republished in This Time Let’s Not Eat the Bones: Bill James Without the Numbers under the title “On Computers in Baseball,” which is where I have it. Nearly a quarter-century after he first wrote this, it still seems to me to be as true as ever.
The main thing that you are struck with in the process of learning about a computer is how incredibly stupid it is. The machine simulates intelligence so well that when you accidentally slip through a crack in its simulations and fall to the floor of its true intelligence, you are awed by the depth of the fall. You give it a series of a hundred or a thousand sensible commands, and it executes each of them in turn, and then you press a wrong key and accidentally give it a command which goes counter to everything that you have been trying to do, and it will execute that command in a millisecond, just as if you had accidentally hit the wrong button on your vacuum cleaner at the end of your cleaning and it had instantly and to your great surprise sprayed the dirt you had collected back into the room. And you feel like, “Jeez, machine, you ought to know I didn’t mean that. What do you think I’ve been doing here for the last hour?” And then you realize that that machine has not the foggiest notion of what you are trying to do, any more than your vacuum cleaner does. The machine, you see, is nothing: it is utterly, truly, totally nothing.