can see the possibilities in part because of shannon's work, in part because of predecessors like alan turing who i write about as you know in some detail in the book he was at the end of his career and was close to his tragic death, but he was thinking philosophically about whether these digital machines could ever think and if they could, how would we know? and of course a lot of people were terrified by that prospect. a lot of people didn't like the idea. shannon was one of those who for whatever reason was entirely comfortable with the idea and he didn't mind. i think that he essentially felt that we humans are more or less machines anyway. they had a fairly materialistic view of what we are so it didn't bother them to consider the possibility someday there would be electronic machines that could fit. but again, this was so far from the world we live in where it just this spring we saw on tv ibm's machine playing in jeopardy and a revived that line of conversation. finally this genuine artificial intelligence. here was a task solving these funny jeopardy questions that smells like somethi