Congo

by Michael Crichton

Travis had managed to keep a sense of humor after a decade of high-tech problems; his management philosophy was summarized by a large sign mounted behind his desk, which read “S.D.T.A.G.W.” It stood for “Some Damn Thing Always Goes Wrong.”

It’s hard to decide who’s truly brilliant; it’s easier to see who’s driven, which in the long run may be more important.

For better or worse, the very intelligence that made apes worthwhile subjects for study also made them as unstable as human beings.

Behind the face people considered so repulsive was an intelligent and sensitive consciousness, sympathetic to the people around her.

Today we are surrounded by man and his creations. Man is inescapable, everywhere on the globe, and nature is a fantasy, a dream of the past, long gone.

Elliot recognized at once the most serious consequence of the speed-of-light weapons—they were much too fast for human comprehension. Men were accustomed to mechanized warfare, but a future war would be a war of machines in a startlingly new sense: machines would actually govern the moment-to-moment course of a conflict which lasted only minutes from start to finish.

Such a war was only manageable by machines; human response times were simply too slow.

World War III would not be a push-button war because as General Martin said, “It takes too long for a man to push the button—at least 1.8 seconds, which is an eternity in modern warfare.”

Since human beings responded too slowly, it was necessary for them to relinquish decision-making control of the war to the faster intelligence of computers.

abandon any hope of regulating the course of the conflict.

“But you can’t give up control,” Elliot said. “We’ve been doing it for centuries,” Ross said. “What’s a domesticated animal—or a pocket calculator—except an attempt to give up control? We don’t want to plow fields or do square roots so we turn the job over to some other intelligence, which we’ve trained or bred or created.” “But you can’t let your creations take over.” “We’ve been doing it for centuries,”

even if we refused to develop faster computers, the Russians would.