I admit that I'm of two distinct minds on the question posed by Richard Foreman as to whether the technological explosion has led to an expansion or a flattening of our selves. In fact, a few years ago when I was invited to represent the humanities at Princeton University's celebration of the centenary of their graduate studies, I ended up writing a dialogue to express my inner bifurcation. My way of posing the question was to wonder whether the humanities, those "soul-explorations," had any future at all, given that the soul had been all but pounded out of existence, or in any case pounded into a very attenuated sort of existence.

My one character, dubbed Lugubrioso, had a flair for elaborate phraseology that rivaled the Master's, and he turned it to deploring the loss of the inner self's solemn, silent spaces, the hushed corridors where the soul communes with itself, chasing down the subtlest distinctions of fleeting consciousness, catching them in finely wrought nets of words, each one contemplated for both its precise meaning and euphony, its local and global qualities, one's flight after that expressiveness which is thought made surer and fleeter by the knowledge of all the best that had been heretofore thought, the cathedral-like sentences (to change the metaphor) that arose around the struggle to do justice to inexhaustible complexity themselves making of the self a cathedral of consciousness. (Lugubrioso spoke in long sentences.)

He contemplated with shuddering horror the linguistic impoverishment of our technologically abundant lives, arguing that privation of language is both an effect and a cause of privation of thought. Our vocabularies have shrunk and so have we. Our expressive styles have lost all originality and so have we. The passivity of our image-heavy forms of communication—too many pictures, not enough words, Lugubrioso cried out pointing his ink-stained finger at the popular culture—substitutes in an all-too-pleasant anodyne for the rigors of thinking itself, and our weakness for images encourages us to reduce people, too—even our very own selves—to images, which is why we are drunk on celebrity hood and feel ourselves to exist only to the extent that we exist for others.

What is left but image when the self has stopped communing with itself, so that in a sad gloss on Bishop Berkeley's apothegm, our esse has becomepercipi, our essence is to be perceived? Even the torrents of words posted on "web-related locations" (the precise nature of which Lugubrioso had kept himself immaculately ignorant) are not words that are meant for permanence; they are pounded out on keyboards at the rate at which they are thought, and will vanish into oblivion just as quickly, quickness and forgetfulness being of the whole essence of the futile affair, the long slow business of matching coherence to complexity unable to keep up, left behind in the dust.

My other character was Rosa and she pointed out that at the very beginning of this business that Lugubrioso kept referring to, in stentorian tones, as "Western Civilization," Plato deplored the newfangled technology of writing and worried that it tolled the death of thought. A book, Plato complained inPhaedrus, can't answer for itself. (Rosa found the precise quotation on the web. She found 'stentorian,' too, when she needed it, on her computer's thesaurus. She sort of knew the word, thought it might be "sentorian," or "stentorious"but she'll know where to find it if she ever needs it again, a mode of knowing that Lugubrioso regards as epistemologically damnable.)

When somebody questions a book, Plato complained, it just keeps repeating the same thing over and over again. It will never, never, be able to address the soul as a living breathing interlocutor can, which is why Plato, committing his thoughts to writing with grave misgivings, adopted the dialogue form, hoping to approximate something of the life of real conversation. Plato's misgivings are now laughable—nobody is laughing harder than Lugubrioso at the thought that books diminish rather than enhance the inner life—and so, too, will later generations laugh at Lugubrioso's lamentations that the cognitive enhancements brought on by computers will make of us less rather than more.

Human nature doesn't change, Rosa tried to reassure Lugubrioso, backing up her claims with the latest theories of evolutionary psychology propounded by Steven Pinker et al. Human nature is inherently expansive and will use whatever tools it develops to grow outward into the world. The complexity suddenly facing us can feel overwhelming and perhaps such souls as Lugubrioso's will momentarily shrink at how much they must master in order to appropriate this complexity and make it their own. It's that shrinkage that Lugubriosos is feeling, confusing his own inadequacy to take in the new forms of knowing with the inadequacy of the forms themselves. Google doesn't kill people, Rosa admonished him. People kill people.

Lugubrioso had a heart-felt response, but I'll spare you.

I am constantly astounded by people who use computers but who really don't understand them at all when I hear people talk about artificial intelligence (AI) . I shouldn't be surprised by most folk's lack of comprehension I suppose, since the people inside AI often fail to get it as well. I recently attended a high level meeting in Washington where the AI people and the government people were happily dreaming about what computers will soon be able to do and promising that they would soon make it happen when they really had no idea what was involved in what they were proposing. So, that being said, let me talk simply about what it would mean and what it would look like for a computer to be intelligent.

Simple point number 1: A smart computer would have to be able to learn.

This seems like an obvious idea. How smart can you be if every experience seems brand new? Each experience should make you smarter no? If that is the case then any intelligent entity must be capable of learning from its own experiences right?

Simple point number 2: A smart computer would need to actually have experiences. This seems obvious too and follows from simple point number 1. Unfortunately, this one isn't so easy. There are two reasons it isn't so easy. The first is that real experiences are complex, and the typical experience that today's computers might have is pretty narrow. A computer that walked around the moon and considered seriously what it was seeing and decided where to look for new stuff based on what it had just seen would be having an experience. But, while current robots can walk and see to some extent, they aren't figuring out what to do next and why. A person is doing that. The best robots we have can play soccer. They play well enough but really not all that well. They aren't doing a lot of thinking. So there really aren't any computers having much in the way of experiences right now.

Could there be computer experiences in some future time? Sure. What would they look like? They would have to look a lot like human experiences. That is, the computer would have to have some goal it was pursuing and some interactions caused by that goal that caused it to modify what it was up to in mid-course and think about a new strategy to achieve that goal when it encountered obstacles to the plans it had generated to achieve that goal. This experience might be conversational in nature, in which case it would need to understand and generate complete natural language, or it might be physical in nature, in which case it would need to be able to get around and see, and know what it was looking at. This stuff is all still way too hard today for any computer. Real experiences, ones that one can learn from, involve complex social interactions in a physical space, all of which is being processed by the intelligent entities involved. Dogs can do this to some extent. No computer can do it today. Tomorrow maybe.

The problem here is with the goal. Why would a computer have a goal it was pursuing? Why do humans have goals they are pursuing? They might be hungry or horny or in need of a job, and that would cause goals to be generated, but none of this fits computers. So, before we begin to worry about whether computers would make mistakes, we need to understand that mistakes come from complex goals not trivially achieved. We learn from the mistakes we make when the goal we have failed at satisfying is important to us and we choose to spend some time thinking about what to do better next time. To put this another way, learning depends upon failure and failure depends upon having had a goal one care's about achieving and that one is willing to spend time thinking about how to achieve next time using another plan. Two year olds do this when they realize saying "cookie" works better than saying "wah" when they want a cookie.

The second part of the experience point is that one must know one has had an experience and know the consequences of that experience with respect to one's goals in order to even think about improving. In other words, a computer that thinks would be conscious of what had happened to it, or would be able to think it was conscious of what had happened to it which may not be the same thing.

Simple point number 3: Computers that are smart won't look like you and me.

All this leads to the realization that human experience depends a lot on being human. Computers will not be human. Any intelligence they ever achieve will have to come by virtue of their having had many experiences that they have processed and understood and learned from that have helped them better achieve whatever goals they happen to have.

So, to Foreman's question: Computers will not be programmed to make mistakes. They will be programmed to attempt to achieve goals and to learn from experience. They will make mistakes along the way, as does any intelligent entity.

As to Dyson's remarks: "Turing proved that digital computers are able to answer most ­ but not all¤ programs that can be asked in unambiguous terms." Did he? I missed that. Maybe he proved that computers could follow instructions which is neither here nor there. It is difficult to give instructions about how to learn new stuff or get what you want. Google's "allowing people with questions to find answers" is nice but irrelevant. TheEncyclopedia Britannica does that as well and no one makes claims about its intelligence or draws any conclusion whatever from it. And, Google is by no means an operating system—I can't even imagine what Dyson means by that or does he just not know what an operating system is?

People have nothing to fear from smart machines. With the current state of understanding of AI I suspect they wont have to even see any smart machines any time soon. Foreman's point was about people after all and people are being changed by the computer's ubiquity in their lives. I think the change is, like all changes in the nature of man's world, interesting and potentially profound, and probably for the best. People may well be more pancake-like, but the syrup is going to very tasty.

Mr. Foreman complains that he is being replaced (by "the pressure of information overload") with "a new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance" because he is connected to "that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button."

I think that this is ridiculous because I don't see any basic change; therealways was too much information. Fifty years ago, if you went into any big library, you would have been overwhelmed by the amounts contained in the books therein. Furthermore, that "touch of a button" has improves things in two ways: (1) it has change the time it takes to find a book from perhaps several minutes into several seconds, and (2) in the past date usually took many minutes, or even hours, to find what you want to find inside that book—but now, a Computer can help you can search through the text, and I see this as nothing but good.

Indeed, it seems to me that only one thing has gone badly wrong. I do not go to libraries any more, because I can find most of what I want by using that wonderful touch of a button! However the copyright laws have gotten worse—and I think that the best thoughts still are in books because, frequently, in those ancient times, the authors developed their ideas for years well for they started to publicly babble. Unfortunately, not much of that stuff from the past fifty years is in the public domain, because of copyrights.

So, in my view, it is not the gods, but Foreman himself who has been pounding on his own head. Perhaps if he had stopped longer to think, he would have written something more sensible. Or on second thought, perhaps he would not—if, in fact, he actually has been replaced.

In the 1990s, I used to complain about the "suffocating nerdiness and blandness" of Silicon Valley. This was how the pioneer days of Richard Foreman's pancake personhood felt to me. I fled to live in New York City precisely for the antidote of being around venues like Foreman's Ontological-Hysterical Theater and his wonderful shows. But computer culture broke out of its cage and swallowed Manhattan whole only a few years later.

The very first articulate account of what information technology would be like was written by E.M. Forster in 1909, in a story called "The Machine Stops". The characters have something like the Internet with video phones and the web and email and the whole shebang and they become pancake people, but realize it, and long for a way out, which ultimately involves a left-wing tableaux of the machine smashed. The pancakes walk outside into a pastoral scene, and the story ends. We don't really learn if they leaven.

Computer culture's reigning cool/hip wing of the moment, the free software —or "open source"—movement, uses the idea of the Cathedral as a metaphorical punching bag. In a famous essay by Eric Raymond ("The Cathedral and the Bazaar"), the Cathedral is compared unfavorably to an anarchic village market, and the idea is that true brilliance is to be found in the "emergent" metapersonal wisdom of neo-Darwinian competition. The Cathedral is derided as a monument to a closed, elitist, and ultimately constricting kind of knowledge. It's a bad metaphor.

All this supports Foreman's pancake premise, but I recommend adding a wing to Foreman's mental cathedral. In this wing there would be a colossal fresco of two opposing armies. One one side, there would be a group led by Doug Englebart. He'd be surrounded by some eccentric characters such as the late Jef Raskin, Ted Nelson, David Gelernter, Alan Kay, Larry Tesler, Andy van Dam, Ben Schneiderman, among others. They are facing an opposing force made up of both robots and people and mechochimeras.

The first group consists of members of the humanist tradition in computer science, and are people that Foreman might enjoy. They are not pancakes and they don't make others into pancakes. They are no more the cause of mental shrinkage than the written word (despite Plato's warnings to the contrary) or Gutenberg.

The only way to deal with other people's brains or bodies sanely is to grant them liberty as far as you're concerned, but to not lose hope for them. Each person ought to decide whether to be a pancake or not, and some of those pre-pancakes Foreman misses were actually vacuous soufflés anyway. Remember? There are plenty of creamy rich three dimensional digitally literate people out there, even a lot of young ones. There is a lot of hope and beauty in digital culture, even if the prevalent fog is sometimes heavy enough to pound your head.

If Foreman is serious about quitting the theater, he will be missed. But that's not a reason to offer computers, arbiters on their own of nothing but insubstantiality, the power to kick his butt and pound his head. The only reality of a computer is the person on the other side of it.