WHAT CAN WE DO? Daniel C. Dennett Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of a dozen books, including Consciousness Explained and, most recently, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. Many have reflected on the irony of reading a great book when you are too young to appreciate it. Consigning a classic to the a/ready read stack and thereby insulating yourself against any further influence while gleaning only a few ill-understood ideas from it is a recipe for neglect that is seldom benign. This struck me with particular force when I reread Zhe Human Use of Human Beings more than sixty years after my juvenile encounter. We should all make it a regular practice to reread books from our youth, where we are apt to discover clear previews of some of our own later “discoveries” and “inventions,” along with a wealth of insights to which we were bound to be impervious until our minds had been torn and tattered, exercised and enlarged by confrontations with life’s problems. Writing at a time when vacuum tubes were still the primary electronic building blocks and there were only a few actual computers in operation, Norbert Wiener imagined the future we now contend with in impressive detail and with few clear mistakes. Alan Turing’s famous 1950 article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in the philosophy journal Mind, foresaw the development of AI, and so did Wiener, but Wiener saw farther and deeper, recognizing that AI would not just imitate—and replace—human beings in many intelligent activities but change human beings in the process. We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. (p. 96) When that was written, it could be comfortably dismissed as yet another bit of Heraclitean overstatement. Yeah, yeah, you can never step in the same r