Chapter 9: Rage Against the Machines Summary and Analysis

Edgar Allan Poe was fascinated by the Mechanical Turk that had beaten Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin at chess. Poe thought it was an elaborate hoax and that a chess master was hidden under the Turk. He wrote a paper on the implications if machines (computers) were able to mimic man and actually improve upon his abilities. Poe thought that if the Turk was a machine that it would win all games which it did not. That is flawed thinking that still exists today. But computers do make mistakes which are based on the mistakes that are made when they are being created. While computers are beneficial and are labor-saving devices, we should not expect them to think for us.

MIT's Claude Shannon, a mathematician who is considered to be the founder of information...