“The nature of our epoch,” he [Hofmannsthal] wrote in 1905, “is multiplicity and indeterminacy. It can rest only on das Gleitende [the slipping, the sliding].” He added that “what other generations believed to be firm is in fact das Gleitende.” Could there be a better description about the way the Newtonian world was slipping after Maxwell's and Planck's discoveries? “Everything fell into parts,” Hofmannsthal wrote, “the parts again into more parts, and nothing allowed itself to be embraced by concepts any more.”

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Police Officer: Sir, are you classified as human?
Corben Dallas: Negative, I'm a meat popsicle.

The introjection of symboling into primate social life was revolutionary. Everything was transformed, everything acquired new meaning; the symbol added a new dimension to primate—now human—existence. An ax was no longer merely a tool with which to chop; it could become a symbol of authority. Mating became marriage, and all social relationships between parents and children and brothers and sisters became moral obligations, duties, rights, and privileges. The world of nature, from the stones beside the path to the stars in their courses, became alive and conscious spirits. “And all that I beheld respired with inward meaning” (Wordsworth). The anthropoid had at last become a man.

Link by link, click by click, search is building possibly the most lasting, ponderous, and significant cultural artifact in the history of humankind: the Database of Intentions.

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.