ABSTRACT
Computers are widely used in business, industry, and research. Many things that we take for granted, such as making telephone calls and withdrawing money from cash dispensing machines, would be difficult or impossible without them. By AI standards most of these computers are not intelligent, neither is there any need for them to be. Although it is annoying to receive bills for £0.00 - and indicative of a 'stupid machine!' - a trivial change to a program could prevent such bills from being mailed. More efficient bill preparation and dispatch depends primarily on the advent of faster, cheaper printers, and better ways of monitoring which bills have been paid. The performance of computers that perform such tasks will only be improved, and their range of applications increased, by technological developments. There are, however, many tasks that computers would perform better than they do now, and some which could only be performed by computers, if those machines could be made more intelligent.
