Today is an exciting moment—indeed, I suspect, a defining moment in human history. We are making a transition from a world in which computation is just one element to a world in which computation is our central concept, in which our thinking, our actions, and our knowledge all revolve around computation. And what makes this possible is that we are finally now getting into a position where we can take all that knowledge that we as humans have accumulated in our civilization, and encapsulate it in an active computational form. And when we do this, we make it possible to dramatically extend and
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