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A Computer is a state machine. Threads are for people who can't program state machines.
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http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0106.2/0405.html

 

Alan Cox

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In 1936 the notion of a computable function was clarified by Turing, and he showed the existence of universal computers that, with an appropriate program, could compute anything computed by any other computer. [...] In some subconscious sense even the sales departments of computer manufacturers are aware of this, and they do not advertise magic instructions that cannot be simulated on competitors machines, but only that their machines are faster, cheaper, have more memory, or are easier to program.

 

John McCarthy

 

We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man. He will continue to exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off in his state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than he is in his present wild state. We treat our horses, dogs, cattle and sheep, on the whole, with great kindness, we give them whatever experience teaches us to be best for them, and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has added to the happiness of the lower animals far more than it has detracted from it; in like manner it is reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower animals.

 

Samuel (novelist Butler

 

Machines which ape people are tending to encroach on every aspect of people's lives, and that such machines force people to behave like machines. The new electronic devices do indeed have the power to force people to "communicate" with them and with each other on the terms of the machine. Whatever structurally does not fit the logic of machines is effectively filtered from a culture dominated by their use.
The machine-like behaviour of people chained to electronics constitutes a degradation of their well-being and of their dignity which, for most people in the long run, becomes intolerable. Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down, because people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed.

 

Ivan Illich

 

Machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs, and having beliefs seems to be a characteristic of most machines capable of problem solving performance. However, the machines mankind has so far found it useful to construct rarely have beliefs about beliefs, although such beliefs will be needed by computer programs that reason about what knowledge they lack and where to get it. Mental qualities peculiar to human-like motivational structures , such as love and hate, will not be required for intelligent behavior, but we could probably program computers to exhibit them if we wanted to, because our common sense notions about them translate readily into certain program and data structures. Still other mental qualities, e.g. humor and appreciation of beauty, seem much harder to model.

 

John McCarthy

 

Spontaneous social action will be broken up over and over again by State intervention; no new seed will be able to fructify. Society will have to live for the State, man for the governmental machine. And as, after all, it is only a machine whose existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports around it, the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of machinery, more gruesome than the death of a living organism. Such was the lamentable fate of ancient civilisation. … Already in the times of the Antonines (IInd Century), the State overbears society with its anti-vital supremacy. Society begins to be enslaved, to be unable to live except in the service of the State. The whole of life is bureaucratised. What results? The bureaucratisation of life brings about its absolute decay in all orders.

 

Jose Ortega y Gasset