Comment by abecedarius

"Non Serviam", Lem 1971:

> Professor Dobb's book is devoted to personetics, which the Finnish philosopher Eino Kaikki has called 'the cruelest science man ever created'. . . We are speaking of a discipline, after all, which, with only a small amount of exaggeration, for emphasis, has been called 'experimental theogony'. . . Nine years ago identity schemata were being developed—primitive cores of the 'linear' type—but even that generation of computers, today of historical value only, could not yet provide a field for the true creation of personoids.

> The theoretical possibility of creating sentience was divined some time ago, by Norbert Wiener, as certain passages of his last book, God and Golem, bear witness. Granted, he alluded to it in that half-facetious manner typical of him, but underlying the facetiousness were fairly grim premonitions. Wiener, however, could not have foreseen the turn that things would take twenty years later. The worst came about—in the words of Sir Donald Acker—when at MIT "the inputs were shorted to the outputs".