AI Bites Man?
[originally published January 2003] Over the years, people have explored the broader implications of many seminal ideas in technology through the medium of speculative fiction. Some of these works tremendously influenced the technical community, as evidenced by the broad suffusion of terms into its working vocabulary. When Robert Morris disrupted the burgeoning Internet in 1988, for example, the computer scientists trying to understand and counteract his attack quickly deemed the offending software a "worm," after a term first introduced in John Brunner's seminal 1975 work, The Shockwave Rider . Brunner's book launched several terms that became standard labels for artifacts we see today, including "virus." In future installments of this department we'll look at the important writers, thinkers, works, and ideas in speculative fiction that have got us thinking about the way technological change could affect our lives. This is not to imply that science fict...