The Cyberiad

by Stanisław Lem

and now no one spoke of Trurl other than with the utmost respect, though not long ago he had been commonly called the Constructor of the World’s Stupidest Computer.

Consciousness, it seemed, formed a deadly trap, in that one could enter it, but never leave.

After a while it became clear to him that the construction of the machine itself was child’s play in comparison with the writing of the program. The program found in the head of an average poet, after all, was written by the poet’s civilization, and that civilization was in turn programmed by the civilization that preceded it, and so on to the very Dawn of Time, when those bits of information that concerned the poet-to-be were still swirling about in the primordial chaos of the cosmic deep. Hence in order to program a poetry machine, one would first have to repeat the entire Universe from the beginning—or at least a good piece of it.