Fiction, Computers in

Computers appeared in fiction centuries before they materialized as working devices, helping to inspire the creation of real computers and also warning of their dangers. The first fictional computer appears in Jonathan Swift's 1726 satire Gulliver's Travels and has all words of a language on "Bits" turned by wires and cranks. Scribes make hard copy by recording any sequence of words that seems to make sense, thus showing the absurdity of valuing machine-generated texts more than human thought.

Actual mechanical automata, common in the eighteenth century, suggested the possibility of lifelike creatures with mechanical brains. An influential fictional automaton of the early nineteenth century was Olympia, who slavishly dotes on her human lover in E. T. A. Hoffman's story "The Sandman" (1816). There is a direct connection between Olympia and the slavish women constructed by computer scientists to replace their uppity wives in...