I'm a fan of Lewis Thomas, but some essays in the book hold up better than others. In particular, the one on computers and AI is a bit amusing in retrospect:
"Even when technology succeeds in manufacturing a machine as big as Texas to do everything we recognize as human, it will
still be, at best, a single individual. This amounts to nothing, practically speaking. To match what we can do, there would have to be 3 billion of them with more coming down the assembly line, and I doubt that anyone will put up the money, much less make room."
But to be fair, he was bringing up computers to emphasize just how more complicated living beings are than any computers existing in 1974. Not that we are really at the human-level computer stage either, but when we do, they won't be huge Texas sized things made in isolation of each other.
"Even when technology succeeds in manufacturing a machine as big as Texas to do everything we recognize as human, it will still be, at best, a single individual. This amounts to nothing, practically speaking. To match what we can do, there would have to be 3 billion of them with more coming down the assembly line, and I doubt that anyone will put up the money, much less make room."
But to be fair, he was bringing up computers to emphasize just how more complicated living beings are than any computers existing in 1974. Not that we are really at the human-level computer stage either, but when we do, they won't be huge Texas sized things made in isolation of each other.