1 A Conspiracy Of Parts.- Doubly flawed anatomical design.- Computer technology as a product of world war.- The brilliance of John von Neumann.- When there was one transistor per person.- A game of leapfrog.- The "cotasking" of biological systems.- Neural networks and genetic algorithms.- The promise of nanotechnology.- Quantum computation.- The fate of the conspiracy.- 2 Toward A Theory Of Machine Consciousness.- The boondoggle of artificial intelligence.- Double obfuscation.- Extreme difficulty.- Progress in AI.- Input starvation.- Output modes: expert systems and intelligent agents.- The mysterious "Gedankenexperiment".- A theory of machine consciousness.- 3 Multimedia: Mélange Obscur.- A night at the opera.- The meaning of media.- Visual data.- Audio data.- Text still suffers.- Ink as data medium.- Teleconferencing as canonical testbed.- A scenario for unified multimedia.- Scientific visualization and the demolition of science.- 4 A Network Orange.- Unpredictability.- Oracles and actors.- The BBS as canonical educational testbed.- Language mangling.- The emergence of the World Wide Web.- On the issue of network responsibility.- 5 Virtual Reality, And All That.- What does virtual really mean?.- VR implementations.- The fascination with VR.- From little reality to big reality.- Simulating from the vacuum.- Maps, models, and immersion.- The Holy Grail.- GVR.- 6 Education Be Not Automatic.- Education pursuant to technology.- What education is and what it is not.- Incremental revolutions.- Enriching the curriculum with the computer.- Computer technology and liberal education.- How not to teach writing.- From words to pictures.- The Scottish Verdict: not proven.
