Maybe I should've stuck around when I was in Austin last week; then I could have heard the keynote address by one of my favorite writers, Bruce Sterling. At least there's the next best thing, hearing it over the Internet. In the speech, he describes our social situation as "a kind of slider bar between the unthinkable and the unimaginable now, beteween the grim meathook future and the bright green future." In another recent speech at an O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference, Sterling pulled back the curtain on his next project, a nonfiction book called Shaping Things:

"Computers are not 'smart,' in any useful sense of that term. They don't 'think.' They don't have 'intelligence.' Computers don't 'know' things and they don't have any literal 'memories.' They're not artificially intelligent sci-fi beings like HAL 9000. Computers are boxes of circuitry, with strings, and slots for the strings. They are not alive and mentally active, they are just sitting there, ordinating. What is 'ordinating,' exactly? Well, if we'd invested our attention in figuring that out, instead of awkwardly struggling to make these devices think like a human brain does, then we would have successfully explored the very large set of interesting problems that computers turned out to be really good at."