Beyond science fiction, the matter of whether a machine can be intelligent didn’t really arise among technologists and the general public until the digital took over from the mechanical and analog in the 1940s and vacuum tubes gave way to semiconductors in the 1950s. It was as if ghosts could be imagined in the machines as soon as their processes could no longer be followed by the naked eye. Mechanical calculators had been around since the seventeenth century and key-driven desktop versions were produced in the thousands by the middle of the nineteenth. Programmable mechanical calculators were
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