Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. – First Commandment in the Orange Catholic Bible (Dune)

Fascinating post a day that I’m going to use to discuss the fear of computers, more specifically artificial intelligence and the inherent dangers as expressed in science fiction.

The line in the title comes from a short story entitled Answer written by Frederic Brown in 1954. The protagonist switches on a computer and declares that he will ask his machine the only question that no machine had thus far been able to answer. The question is, of course, “is there a God?” and the machine replies with the line above. This is neither the most memorable nor the first instance of the danger of “thinking machines” in science fiction but it is the most chilling.

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the…