Word: frankenstein
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...adolescence Berners-Lee read science fiction, including Arthur C. Clarke's short story Dial F for Frankenstein. It is, he recalls, about "crossing the critical threshold of number of neurons," about "the point where enough computers get connected together" that the whole system "started to breathe, think, react autonomously." Could the World Wide Web actually realize Clarke's prophecy? No-- and yes. Berners-Lee warns against thinking of the Web as truly alive, as a literal global brain, but he does expect it to evince "emergent properties" that will transform society. Such as? Well, if he could tell you, they...
Could the Heaven's Gaters distinguish pop fable from cold truth? Can we? Once we could. Not many of us took My Favorite Martian or Mork & Mindy as sacred texts. Frankenstein may have been a parable of science gone haywire and Dracula a metaphor for the wages of sex, but we knew they were just stories. Invasion of the Body Snatchers didn't spur an epidemic of podophobia...
...enough when Scottish researchers cloned a sheep named Dolly and commentators started writing about virgin births and Frankenstein. But then one week later, researchers at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center let it be known that they had cloned a pair of rhesus monkeys, named Neti (for nuclear embryo transfer infant) and Ditto, that squinted in the glare of the TV lights and clung to each other for dear life...
...creator wore chinos. Wilmut may not look the part, but he plays it. He took a cell nucleus from a six-year-old ewe, fashioned from it a perfect twin--adding the nice Frankenstein touch of passing an electric charge through the composite cell to get it growing--and called it Dolly...
...right. Modern history teems with tales of the potential usurpation of mankind by its own technology: John Henry vs. the steam drill. Dr. Frankenstein vs. the monster. Linda Hamilton vs. the Terminator. The genius of chess lies in the sublime tension between logical analysis (call it Truth) and human intuition (call it Beauty). Our fascination with Deep Blue derives from fearful wonderment at the possibility that computers, which have already surpassed us at the former, may soon produce some chilling emulation of the latter. Kasparov, the latest standard bearer in humanity's war against our own obsolescence, is stoical...