In a speculative 2050 future, humanity banned general-purpose computing after deeming it too dangerous and unpredictable, rebuilding civilization around analog, task-specific 'world computers' at enormous human and economic cost, though a trillion-dollar general-purpose analog mind may still be possible.

In Jack Clark's fiction piece 'The Brass Gears of Civilization,' general-purpose computers were banned as existentially dangerous, forcing a costly global shift to analog, purpose-built machines for problems like weather and flood prediction, though the risk of a trillion-dollar analog general mind lingers. ✦ AI generated

Jack Clark · Import AI · 2026-07-06 · original ↗

In the past, we had general computers. But they were deemed eventually too dangerous - too unpredictable. The more powerful they became and the more diffuse the knowledge about them grew, the more they tickled at the tails of various dragons.

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