from the Preface

The whole question comes down to this: Can the human mind master what the human mind has made?
Paul Valéry

When I was young, computers were far off and extravagantly expensive. No ordinary person, I thought, could actually own one, far less understand one. I had only heard them mentioned on my visits to the bank (I was always a thrifty child) and in overheard snatches of my parents' conversations: "The computer sent us this bill," and "Oh dear, what'll we do about this computer card?" and "Oops, I've bent it. Will it still work, do you think?"

I'd also seen a few of them on television -- room-filling machines surrounded by worshipful supplicants and dozens of grim, crewcut engineers. Obviously, using these mythic devices, never mind understanding them, was for the privileged few with power and wealth. To compound my confusion, I'd heard that the important part of the computation was done in (or was it by?) silicon. Silicon, I knew from science class, was the main ingredient of rocks and sand.

So how could a rock think?

One day at the beach, sitting on the hot sand, I realized I was surrounded by tons of silicon. What had happened to change sand, apparently good only for digging in and lying on, into these amazing machines? It was then I knew I wanted to read a book like this.

This book is my attempt to explain to my younger self what computers are and where they're going. Each chapter addresses a simple question: "What are computers?" "How do we build them?" "How do we talk to them?" "Why is programming them hard?" "What can't they do?" "Could they think?" Each chapter carries its topic all the way from its historical beginnings to the state of the art as of 1997, and on into the future.

This book also touches on some of the most fundamental questions of human life: What are we? What do we value? Where are we going? Our earliest uses of computers predetermined their structure and what we could -- or should -- do with them. Our choices today are both narrowed and widened by those shortsighted choices we made decades ago, and our choices today are similarly going to influence our choices tomorrow. Ultimately, the future development of computer technology will determine whether we continue to exist as organic beings or evolve into something other.

This book is for you if you don't know much about computers and want to know what they can do for you -- or to you. It tells the story of how we became slaves to our silicon dependents, and how they may one day become slaves to us.

Read it at the beach.

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