ABSTRACT
Okay, the chapter title is a bit provocative. We admit that computers, as
inanimate devices, don’t actually “know” anything. (In the movie they
do. At one point in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the on-board system-control
computer HAL declares, “I am putting myself to the fullest possible use,
which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.” But
HAL is fiction, although many of the leading artificial intelligence re-
searchers in the late twentieth century reported that they first became in-
terested in the subject after seeing the movie.)
But for all that real computers are not conscious, they do store a lot
more information than any human, and they can generally access it a lot
faster, and sometimes the astute human can take advantage of this fact.
