"…the emergence of a mind"

You can accuse him of hyperbole if you like, but I think James Gurney is exactly right. The fact that this sort of thing is happening all around us with increasing frequency is both fascinating and a little spooky.

There's a sublime scene in the first Terminator movie where a hapless psychiatrist turns off a pager on the way out of a building just as Arnie's cyborg from the future walks in. Most viewers see the link: how the tiny, primitive devices of today lead to something far more...