problem eight years sooner!*3, Between 2007 and 2015 the number of connections a Hillis-style neural computer could handle grew from 1 million to 100 billion. This speed did produce things very like science fiction: Accurate voice recognition. Real- time genetics. And it also began to mark out, clearly, the powerful network territory where our future will be decided. eF Of all the things that mark a change between our modern lives and the days of those who came before us, few are as sensationally obvious as the sheer acceleration of life, the reduction of delay and the emerging instantness of experience. Faster. What is going on inside the machines, as Mel Conway’s old law would have told us, is happening too on the surface of our lives. A feeling of breathlessness in the face of speed isn’t new, of course. When Anna Karenina folds herself under an oncoming train at the end of Tolstoy’s novel, for instance, her suicide is as much metaphor as personal tragedy, a comment on the disorienting steam, engine, and rail pace of modernity. Speed kills, old habits and ideas particularly. Between 1840 and 1940 travel times between Anna’s St. Petersburg and Vronsky’s Moscow shrunk by 10 minutes every year on average, loosing deep cracks in Russian economics and politics, tearing apart Anna’s slow-moving world of glittering balls and hereditary estates with the fast force of industry, modernity and then the awful pliers of communism. Tolstoy’s own death in 1910 held a bit of this acute tension between old and new velocities: At 82, hoping to live out his final days in the peace of a small hut, he left his family for the rural Russian town of Sharmardino. By train. He died at a station on the way, stopped quite literally, like an absurd figure in a Gogol novel, as he was enacting the tragedy of trying to use the modern to get to the past. At the same time in the late 19t Century, the American rail system was working its own transformation, but with almost no ambivalence. America