Eventually, computers might outperform humans in the very fields that made Homo sapiens the ruler of the world: intelligence and communication. The process that began in the Euphrates valley 5,000 years ago, when Sumerian geeks outsourced data-processing from the human brain to a clay tablet, would culminate in Silicon Valley with the victory of the tablet. Humans might still be around, but they could no longer make sense of the world. The new ruler of the world would be a long line of zeros and ones.
