[muir_redwoods]

Fredric Brown ping

[steveo]

Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own image as promised by the sacred words, and spoke of the beast with their children.

Mammon awoke, and lo! it was naught but a follower.

[HiTech RedNeck]

This is not nearly so much true of "computers" per se as of the advanced forms of man made media machines that computers have made practical. We wanted alternative environments, well, we got them. The physical makeup of man is still beyond their ken. When it is not, we shall be at the nightmare point envisioned by C. S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man.

[VeniVidiVici]

Waiter! I’ll have what he’s having!

[Cicero]

You might enjoy Vernor Vinge’s last novel, “Rainbows end.”

[UCANSEE2]

[backwoods-engineer]

Computers, now teeming like herring in early spring, began pooling their intelligence, exchanging states of mind in the blink of an eye, half a dozen languages removed from those that we can comprehend. Only an esoteric fraternity, uttering one line of code at a time, still holds congress with the machines.

Uh, as one of the "esoteric fraternity" who "holds congress with" (and designs) the machines, I can say most of this rant is nonsense. There is now, and never was, no such thing as artificial intelligence. The only thing that has improved computers is HUMAN intellect and HUMAN thought, amplified through computer aid.

Von Neumann was a crackpot.

[dinodino]

Garbage. Perhaps in 200 years, but not now...