You have heard this talk from faraway lands about a new type of machine that can supposedly do more than a person with a stick and something to put it against a

You have heard this talk from faraway lands about a new type of machine that can supposedly do more than a person with a stick and something to put it against as a lever. The Watt steam engine, some people call it. If thousands of years before Our Lord, humans could roll on logs, pull on pulleys, or push on the inclined plane vast blocks of stone culminating in a Pyramid to their pretended gods, the argument goes, what is to keep someone from making a device more powerful than a man? I am here to tell you that such lunacy rests on seven wrong misconceptions. While I will freely grant that perhaps it is possible to apply a lever, yet it is human power and human power alone that moves that lever. The idea that anything but a human could do work is absurd on its face. Nobody will ever get from one town to another except on foot, or perhaps on a horse. To allow the idea that a machine could do this or any other task is as deranged as suggesting that machines will fly like birds across continents, carrying people, or that one day men will simply climb up and into the atmosphere and go and land and walk upon the moon. It is clear from first principles that raising or moving anything takes work and power: it is just as clear that nobody but man shall ever provide that power, let alone any more. I do not have time to rewrite the above: substitute a hundred billion neurons doing chemical reactions, and add that it is clear computers can never do either the same or even less so, any more, and you will see how completely wrong the author is in every way. Nobody but a man can ever do work, and nothing but a hundred billion neurons can or will ever think.