Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer
Still, having Rome with a full flown bureaucracy and an efficient system of accounting is a radical change.
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But less and less connected to the mechanical innovation. Really despite cyberpunk derived fiction wanting them to be really pivotal early computers are almost useless - indeed 1970s computers aren't good for very much. They're niche products with a few specialized, and frankly not all that revolutionary applications until they're cheap enough to start putting them everywhere in the 1980s (or alternately for an old school future setting, until the expensive giant electronic brains achieve a level of AI that's still cutting edge or better here in 2020).
And if you are looking for improvements in bureaucracy and government, well, even the computers we have now don't seem to have improved the effectiveness of government bureaucracies to vastly higher levels than the late 19th century achieved without them. Maybe they're a little smaller for the amount of work, but that's about it. And Roman bureaucracy wasn't that bad to begin with, or any more chronically short staffed than it was forced to be by limited budgets, which expensive computers are not going to help with.