It seems I have spent my whole life thinking. Not about any one particular thing, but many small things and a few big things too.
About twenty-five years ago I was deeply involved in the microcomputer revolution. Computers impressed me with the ease at which they achieved the cool perfection in their heads. I had a computer and I was programming all the time, often late at night. One night I grew weary of the programming task at hand and I decided to go outside for some air. I stood outside of my garage and I observed something that sent me on a long, philosophical exploration that continues to this day.
That night the garage door was up and the light was on. Some weeks before, a bird had built its nest in the roof rafters. As I stood in front of the garage, I could see the bird flying around inside in circles. I thought to myself, "If I disturb the bird so much, why doesn't it just fly through the open garage door and away to freedom?"
After a few minutes of pondering this seemingly useless problem, a thought came into my head: "Because its software doesn't branch that way."
At that moment I began to see the bird in a radically new way. No longer was it a little animal that sat in a tree and sang, now it was a little computer controlled flying machine. And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. It had everything you would put into such a machine. It had mechanical actuators, it had vision sensors, it had a computer with a control bus running down its back to drive everything. But most of all it had software to make decisions about what to do. Confronted with its situation, the bird's software was deadlocked. It wanted to get away, but it could not fly into a dark opening, so it just flew around and around.
In the days that followed, I considered the implications of this idea. I began to extend the idea to other creatures. At one end you have simple creatures, like insects. It's easy to visualize an ant being a little robotic device and you start from there and move upward to more complex creatures. Lizards, small mammals, birds, larger mammals, and you begin to realize that you cannot draw a line where this idea no longer applies. You cannot exclude Man.
