Computers

Its kind of a shame, in my little opinion, that young people today have never had a chance to do this ... when I was in high school, in a simpler time, I built a little counting machine. I had an old telephone rotary dialer. I went up to Radio Shack (which, in those days, actually sold parts that you could use to build radios) and bought the requisite transistors, resistors, capacitors, wires light bulbs, and so forth. I put everything together with my own soldering iron. The little light bulbs were lined up in the front so that they could display the count of the pulses coming out of the dialer (using the binary number system, of course, which is still the one they have to use even if people don't, anymore).
Somewhat after that, computer manufacture changed in two ways. The circuits that they relied upon got smaller and there got to be more of them in a single machine. That's pretty much it.
No one would ever, ever imagine that a bucket could think. Well, if you had ever built one of these little counting things, then you would understand. Modern computers are nothing but a bucket of on-off switches. Granted, there may be several billion of them in a single unit nowadays. But that's still all that's in there. Absolutely, that's all they can do. Computers are no more capable of thought than they are of sex. Which, by the way, is still the number one thing that people think about, isn't it ....