Kevin Kelly:

"Can computers achieve everything the human mind can achieve?"

Computers can't, but the children of computers will.

KEVIN KELLY is Editor-At-Large, Wired; Author, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World.

The only way to deal with other people's brains or bodies sanely is to grant them liberty as far as you're concerned, but to not lose hope for them. Each person ought to decide whether to be a pancake or not, and some of those pre-pancakes Foreman misses were actually vacuous soufflés anyway. Remember? There are plenty of creamy rich three dimensional digitally literate people out there, even a lot of young ones. There is a lot of hope and beauty in digital culture, even if the prevalent fog is sometimes heavy enough to pound your head.

Jaron Lanier:

In the 1990s, I used to complain about the "suffocating nerdiness and blandness" of Silicon Valley. This was how the pioneer days of Richard Foreman's pancake personhood felt to me. I fled to live in New York City precisely for the antidote of being around venues like Foreman's Ontological-Hysterical Theater and his wonderful shows. But computer culture broke out of its cage and swallowed Manhattan whole only a few years later.

The very first articulate account of what information technology would be like was written by E.M. Forster in 1909, in a story called "The Machine Stops". The characters have something like the Internet with video phones and the web and email and the whole shebang and they become pancake people, but realize it, and long for a way out, which ultimately involves a left-wing tableaux of the machine smashed. The pancakes walk outside into a pastoral scene, and the story ends. We don't really learn if they leaven.

Computer culture's reigning cool/hip wing of the moment, the free software —or "open source"—movement, uses the idea of the Cathedral as a metaphorical punching bag. In a famous essay by Eric Raymond ("The Cathedral and the Bazaar"), the Cathedral is compared unfavorably to an anarchic village market, and the idea is that true brilliance is to be found in the "emergent" metapersonal wisdom of neo-Darwinian competition. The Cathedral is derided as a monument to a closed, elitist, and ultimately constricting kind of knowledge. It's a bad metaphor.

All this supports Foreman's pancake premise, but I recommend adding a wing to Foreman's mental cathedral. In this wing there would be a colossal fresco of two opposing armies. One one side, there would be a group led by Doug Englebart. He'd be surrounded by some eccentric characters such as the late Jef Raskin, Ted Nelson, David Gelernter, Alan Kay, Larry Tesler, Andy van Dam, Ben Schneiderman, among others. They are facing an opposing force made up of both robots and people and mechochimeras.

The first group consists of members of the humanist tradition in computer science, and are people that Foreman might enjoy. They are not pancakes and they don't make others into pancakes. They are no more the cause of mental shrinkage than the written word (despite Plato's warnings to the contrary) or Gutenberg.

The only way to deal with other people's brains or bodies sanely is to grant them liberty as far as you're concerned, but to not lose hope for them. Each person ought to decide whether to be a pancake or not, and some of those pre-pancakes Foreman misses were actually vacuous soufflés anyway. Remember? There are plenty of creamy rich three dimensional digitally literate people out there, even a lot of young ones. There is a lot of hope and beauty in digital culture, even if the prevalent fog is sometimes heavy enough to pound your head.

If Foreman is serious about quitting the theater, he will be missed. But that's not a reason to offer computers, arbiters on their own of nothing but insubstantiality, the power to kick his butt and pound his head. The only reality of a computer is the person on the other side of it.

JARON LANIER is a Computer Scientist and Musician.

...the kind of door-opening exploration that Google offers is in fact much more powerful and unpredictable than previous modes of exploration. It's a lot easier to stumble across something totally unexpected—but still relevant and interesting—using Google than it is walking through a physical library or a bookstore. A card catalogue is a terrible vehicle for serendipity. But hypertext can be a wonderful one. You just have to use it the right way.

Steven Johnson:

I think it's a telling sign of how far the science of information retrieval has advanced that we're seriously debating the question of whether computers can be programmed to make mistakes. Rewind the tape 8 years or so—post-Netscape, pre-Google—and the dominant complaint would have been that the computers were always making mistakes: you'd plug a search query into Alta-Vista and you'd get 53,000 results, none of which seemed relevant to what you were looking for. But sitting here now in 2005, we've grown so accustomed to Google's ability to find the information we're looking for that we're starting to yearn for a little fallibility.

But the truth is most of our information tools still have a fuzziness built into them that can, in Richard Foreman's words, "often open doors to new worlds." It really depends on how you choose to use the tool. Personally, I have two modes of using Google: one very directed and goal-oriented, the other more open-ended and exploratory. Sometimes I use Google to find a specific fact: an address, the spelling of a name, the number of neurons estimated to reside in the human brain, the dates of the little ice age. In those situations, I'm not looking for mistakes, and thankfully Google's quite good at avoiding them. But I also use Google in a far more serendipitous way, when I'm exploring an idea or a theme or an author's work: I'll start with a general query and probe around a little and see what the oracle turns up; sometimes I'll follow a trail of links out from the original search; sometimes I'll return and tweak the terms and start again. Invariably, those explorations take me to places I wasn't originally expecting to go—and that's precisely why I cherish them. (I have a similar tool for exploring my own research notes—a program called DevonThink that lets me see semantic associations between the thousands of short notes and quotations that I've assembled on my hard drive.)

In fact, I would go out on a limb here and say that the kind of door-opening exploration that Google offers is in fact much more powerful and unpredictable than previous modes of exploration. It's a lot easier to stumble across something totally unexpected—but still relevant and interesting—using Google than it is walking through a physical library or a bookstore. A card catalogue is a terrible vehicle for serendipity. But hypertext can be a wonderful one. You just have to use it the right way.

STEVEN JOHNSON, columnist, Discover; Author: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.

I don't see any basic change; there always was too much information. Fifty years ago, if you went into any big library, you would have been overwhelmed by the amounts contained in the books therein. Furthermore, that "touch of a button" has improves things in two ways: (1) it has change the time it takes to find a book from perhaps several minutes into several seconds, and (2) in the past date usually took many minutes, or even hours, to find what you want to find inside that book—but now, a Computer can help you can search through the text, and I see this as nothing but good.

Marvin Minsky:

Mr. Foreman complains that he is being replaced (by "the pressure of information overload") with "a new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance" because he is connected to "that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button."

I think that this is ridiculous because I don't see any basic change; there always was too much information. Fifty years ago, if you went into any big library, you would have been overwhelmed by the amounts contained in the books therein. Furthermore, that "touch of a button" has improves things in two ways: (1) it has change the time it takes to find a book from perhaps several minutes into several seconds, and (2) in the past date usually took many minutes, or even hours, to find what you want to find inside that book—but now, a Computer can help you can search through the text, and I see this as nothing but good.

Indeed, it seems to me that only one thing has gone badly wrong. I do not go to libraries any more, because I can find most of what I want by using that wonderful touch of a button! However the copyright laws have gotten worse—and I think that the best thoughts still are in books because, frequently, in those ancient times, the authors developed their ideas for years well for they started to publicly babble. Unfortunately, not much of that stuff from the past fifty years is in the public domain, because of copyrights.

So, in my view, it is not the gods, but Foreman himself who has been pounding on his own head. Perhaps if he had stopped longer to think, he would have written something more sensible. Or on second thought, perhaps he would not—if, in fact, he actually has been replaced.

MARVIN MINSKY is a mathematician and computer scientist; Cofounder of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Author, The Society of Mind.

We give up the illusion of our power as deriving from some notion of individual collecting data, and find out that having access to data through our network-enabled communities gives us an entirely more living flow of information that is appropriate to the ever changing circumstances surrounding us. Instead of growing high, we grow wide. We become pancake people.

Douglas Rushkoff:

I don't think it's the computer itself enabling the pancake people, but the way networked computers give us access to other people. It's not the data—for downloaded data is just an extension of the wealthy gentleman in his library, enriching himself as a "self." What creates the pancake phenomenon is our access to other people, and the corresponding dissolution of our perception of knowledge as an individual's acquisition.

Foreman is hinting at a "renaissance" shift I've been studying for the past few years.

The original Renaissance invented the individual. With the development of perspective in painting came the notion of perspective in everything. The printing press fueled this even further, giving individuals the ability to develop their own understanding of texts. Each man now had his own take on the world, and a person's storehouse of knowledge and arsenal of techniques were the measure of the man.

The more I study the original Renaissance, the more I see our own era as having at least as much renaissance character and potential. Where the Renaissance brought us perspective painting, the current one brings virtual reality and holography. The Renaissance saw humanity circumnavigating the globe; in our own era we've learned to orbit it from space. Calculus emerged in the 15th Century, while systems theory and chaos math emerged in the 20th. Our analog to the printing press is the Internet, our equivalent of the sonnet and extended metaphor is hypertext.

Renaissance innovations all involve an increase in our ability to contend with dimension: perspective. Perspective painting allowed us to see three dimensions where there were previously only two. Circumnavigation of the globe changed the world from a flat map to a 3D sphere. Calculus allowed us to relate points to lines and lines to objects; integrals move from x to x-squared, to x-cubed, and so on. The printing press promoted individual perspectives on religion and politics. We all could sit with a text and come up with our own, personal opinions on it. This was no small shift: it's what led to the Protestant wars, after all.

Out of this newfound experience of perspective was born the notion of the individual: the Renaissance Man. Sure, there were individual people before the Renaissance, but they existed mostly as parts of small groups. With literacy and perspective came the abstract notion the person as a separate entity. This idea of a human being as a "self," with independent will, capacity, and agency, was pure Renaissance—a rebirth and extension of the Ancient Greek idea of personhood. And from it, we got all sorts of great stuff like the autonomy of the individual, agency, and even democracy and the republic. The right to individual freedom is what led to all those revolutions.

But thanks to new emphasis on the individual, it was also during the first great Renaissance that we developed the modern concept of competition. Authorities became more centralized, and individuals competed for how high they could rise in the system. We like to think of it as a high-minded meritocracy, but the rat-race that ensued only strengthened the authority of central command. We learned compete for resources and credit made artificially scarce by centralized banking and government.

While our renaissance also brings with it a shift in our relationship to dimension, the character of this shift is different. In a holograph, fractal, or even an Internet web site, perspective is no longer about the individual observer's position; it's about that individual's connection to the whole. Any part of a holographic plate recapitulates the whole image; bringing all the pieces together generates greater resolution. Each detail of a fractal reflects the whole. Web sites live not by their own strength but the strength of their links. As Internet enthusiasts like to say, the power of a network is not the nodes, it's the connections.

That's why new models for both collaboration and progress have emerged during our renaissance—ones that obviate the need for competition between individuals, and instead value the power of collectivism. The open source development model, shunning the corporate secrets of the competitive marketplace, promotes the free and open exchange of the codes underlying the software we use. Anyone and everyone is invited to make improvements and additions, and the resulting projects—like the Firefox browser—are more nimble, stable, and user-friendly. Likewise, the development of complementary currency models, such as Ithaca Hours, allow people to agree together what their goods and services are worth to one another without involving the Fed. They don't need to compete for currency in order to pay back the central creditor—currency is an enabler of collaborative efforts rather than purely competitive ones.

For while the Renaissance invented the individual and spawned many institutions enabling personal choices and freedoms, our renaissance is instead reinventing the collective in a new context. Originally, the collective was the clan or the tribe—an entity defined no more by what members had in common with each other than what they had in opposition to the clan or tribe over the hill.

Networks give us a new understanding of our potential relationships to one another. Membership in one group does not preclude membership in a myriad of others. We are all parts of a multitude of overlapping groups with often paradoxically contradictory priorities. Because we can contend with having more than one perspective at a time, we needn't force them to compete for authority in our hearts and minds—we can hold them all, provisionally. That's the beauty of renaissance: our capacity to contend with multiple dimensions is increased. Things don't have to be just one way or directed by some central authority, alive, dead or channeled. We have the capacity to contend with spontaneous, emergent reality.

We give up the illusion of our power as deriving from some notion of individual collecting data, and find out that having access to data through our network-enabled communities gives us an entirely more living flow of information that is appropriate to the ever changing circumstances surrounding us. Instead of growing high, we grow wide. We become pancake people.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF is a media analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Media Virus.

Roger Schank: