The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst Book

The technological Djinn, now loosened from all restraints, tempts us with visions of a surreal future. It is a future with robots who surpass their masters in dexterity and wit; intelligent agents who roam the Net on our behalf, seeking the informational elixir that will make us whole; new communities inhabiting the clean, infinite reaches of cyberspace, freed from war and conflict; and lending libraries of "virtually real" experiences that seem more sensational than the real thing. Not all of this is idle or fantastic speculation -- even if it is the rather standard gush about our computerized future. Written by one of our editors, this book explores the networked computer as an expression of the darker, dimly conscious side of the human being. What we have been imparting to the Net -- or what the Net has been eliciting from us -- is a half-submerged, barely intended logic, contaminated by wishes and tendencies we prefer not to acknowledge. The urgent necessity is for us to wake up to what is most fully human and unmachinelike in ourselves, rather than yield to an ever more strangling embrace with our machines. The author's thesis is sure to raise a controversy among the millions of users now adapting themselves to the Net.