On Stephen Hawking, Vader and Being More Machine Than Human
Click-click-click: This is what you hear when having a conversation with Stephen Hawking. No voice, no other sounds, no facial expressions. For those who know him, Hawking may be able to communicate through his eyes; but for the rest of us, his sole means of communicating is through infrared connection to his computer.
January 8 was Hawking’s birthday, yet it’s worth examining just who and what we were really celebrating: the man, the mind or … the machines?