Thursday, March 25, 2010
The first inventors of machines that augmented not the power of muscle but the power of thought fell victim to a delusion that attracted some and frightened others: that they were entering upon a path of such amplification of intelligence in nonliving automata that the automata would become similar to man and then, still in a human way, surpass him. About a hundred and fifty years were needed for their successors to realize that the fathers of information science and cybernetics had been misled by an anthropocentric fiction–because the human brain was the ghost in a machine that was no machine.
— Stanislaw Lem, Fiasco #
