The late, great Alan Turing -- generally considered a giant of computing theory and artificial intelligence -- neatly sidestepped this theoretical gridlock by proposing his own functional definition: A computer that responds with enough subtlety and complexity to convince users that it's human is said to pass the Turing Test, and thus meets the standard for true machine intelligence.

Turing Tests are commonly staged as chat-style conversations, since natural language -- with all the subtleties of syntax, semantics and wordplay -- is widely intuited as an unmistakable earmark of real intelligence. There have been many attempts by artificial intelligence researchers to create language generators that pass the Turing Test. One example is the Eliza program -- a popular, decades-old conversation module written to mimic a psychotherapist. A recent exchange between me and Eliza went like this:

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Greetings from Planet Chance. Feeling stuck in a deductive
rut? All those logical linkages, causality chains and
first-order predicate calculations have kept you rule-bound
and earthbound for way too long. Take a hint from that wacky
genetic algorithm cabal: Sometimes the most elegant
solutions to complex problems make absolutely no intuitive
sense whatsoever. So this month I'm prescribing a dangerous
dose of randomness to jump-start your bad-ass, nonlinear
alter ego. Start out slowly, say, with dice, roulette or
Brownian motion, then progress to harder stuff like
Amazon.com's customer service or the political target="new" href="http://www.larouchepub.com/">writings
of Lyndon LaRouche. In no time you'll be wowing fellow geeks
with your outrageously fresh and chaotic insights.

Gemini (May 21-June 20)
Disrobed! This lunar
cycle finds you feeling particularly vulnerable as hackers
demonstrate that there's no such thing as security -- short
of taking an ax to all your network connections and lining
your walls with lead. Privacy is dead, secrecy is a myth
and the king's not wearing any clothes -- but this time
around, we're all buck naked as well.

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As Paulina Borsook might reply, "yeah -- right." But then, she's making a fine career out of challenging, rebutting, baiting and vexing the conspicuously libertarian technology community. Last year's essay, "How the Internet Ruined San Francisco," touched off a vintage Borsookian conflagration, unleashing a hell-storm of flaming responses across the Web from angry and aggrieved Northern California computer elites.

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It seemed until recently that a new article of faith had been entered into the financial canon: that information technology in general and the Internet in particular have replaced the cycle of boom and bust with a single, terminal Long Boom. Occasional, short-term market wobbles notwithstanding, we should all invest as if the upside were a new law of physics.

Certainly the springtime swan dive of the NASDAQ seems to have germinated some fresh doubts to the contrary: What if the immutable optimism of the Information Age prophets is wrong? What if today's Way New Economy is just another version of the Same Old Story? After all, there have been world-changing technological revolutions before, and the worlds that followed were no more immune to widespread financial catastrophe. What makes us so sure it's going to be any different this time?

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April-May 2000

Are you really a geek Taurus? If you
disagree with at least three of the
statements below, your moon or ascendant
is in a conflicting sign. Either that,
or astrology itself is constructed on
completely bogus astrophysical
assumptions. You decide.

1) You're a raving skeptic, but you're
mysteriously drawn to this column
anyway.

2) You don't believe in UFOs, but you do
believe that the market capitalization
of Amazon.com is justified.

3) Not only was there a second gunman,
there was a second grassy knoll.

4) You call the shots in a relationship
-- er, hypothetically, anyway.

5) Linus Torvalds? Total babe!

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I saw the best minds of my occupation destroyed by venture capital, burned-out, paranoid, postal,

dragging themselves through the Cappuccino streets of Palo Alto at Dawn looking for an equity-sharing, stock option fix,

HTML-headed Web-sters coding for the infinite broadband connection to that undiscovered e-commerce mother lode in the airy reaches of IP namespace,

who poverty and ripped Yahoo tee shirts, cubicle-eyed and wired on Starbucks sat up surfing in the virtual ether of one-million-dollar, one-bathroom condos next to the railroad
tracks, skipping across the links of killer Web sites contemplating ... Java,

who rammed their brains into compilers and saw Intel angels staggering on microchips under the insane weight of investor expectation,

who blew off the search for Truth for as-yet-undreamed New Economy scams, business models hallucinating infocapitalist messiahs on clouds of market cap,

who abandoned lucid dreams of a Better Way for Shockwave fluff and RealAudio baubles dangling from the buggy venality of digital commerce,

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March -- April 2000

Hey, Geek! Have you noticed? The dark orbit of shameless commercial self-interest has intersected with your electronic paradise. The signs are everywhere: Brazen patent grabs and rapacious domain-name squatting have created an atmosphere of manic scarcity. There's a drive-by intellectual property lawsuit every 90 seconds. And ever since the dot.commification of everything under the sun it's been the lawyers, bankers and MBAs who are having the most fun -- let's face it, folks, these are not the kind of people who are known for their innovation.

The question is, Mr. or Ms. Geek, are you part of the problem or the solution? I propose a simple algorithm for calculating your share of the blame:

1) Count how many times you say "merger," "shareholder," "IPO" and "BMW" over the next 72 hours.

2) Add the number of shares you hold in Microsoft and Amazon.com.

3) Multiply by the amount -- in U.S. dollars -- spent on your desktop operating system.

4) Add 500 if you're reading this on Explorer for Windows. Subtract 1,000 for Lynx.

5) Divide by the square root of the number of times you've edited a file with "Emacs" or "Vi."

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It was an ordinary West Coast garden drama, right out of Sunset magazine: The guests arrived and hit their marks on cue, the standard poolside blocking on a flagstone stage played against a background of blooming lavender, terra cotta and palm trees as the sun slouched into an angry purple scrim of spent hydrocarbons.

Sometime before 11, after the coals had cooled and the police helicopters descended into the L.A. basin to begin trolling in earnest, the party considered a number of after-dinner entertainments. The debate quickly split into two factions: venturesome cosmopolitan nature-lovers advocating a steep hike into the hills for a dance with coyotes (while gingerly sidestepping other semi-feral, leather-clad scrub dwellers exercising more urban libidos) and dipsomaniacal couch-dwellers listing sharply in favor of a downhill expedition to the Tiki Bar of the moment.

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But what about the age-old advice: Ignore at your peril the ominous shadows cast by the creepy glow of hubris; if there's any time the gods love to strike you down, it's during your victory lap. I was haunted by a half-formed notion that, despite all the economic chest-thumping and political high-fiving in the so-called Free World, we were converging on our own reckoning, a day when we would realize our own failures beneath the weight of unacknowledged Western tyrannies.

I had no good idea how this might actually come to pass. But reading Simson Garfinkel's new book, it's starting to become clear: The combination of free markets and ubiquitous information technology imposes its own kind of tyranny, the end results being often as scary as a KGB nightmare.

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Each cohort brings along its own totems and fetishes -- flappers with their bathtub gin and hot jazz; beatniks with their freewheeling road trips and angular, free-verse poetry; hippies with their free love and electric Kool-Aid acid tests.

The latest generation of malcontents has joined the timeless chorus of dissent with some decidedly modern accouterments, booting up their computers and flocking onto the Internet to pursue their own underground culture of Quake-style video games, rogue MP3 sites, hacking and other variations on the digital sock-hop. They have co-opted the designation "geek" -- formerly an archaic pejorative for ghoulish circus performers and unsavory, un-personalitied computer addicts -- to describe their own brand of freethinking, nonconformist cyber-hip. Geek chic, if you will.

In "Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho," journalist Jon Katz shoulders the prickly mantle of geek bard/apologist and attempts to explain this newest subculture to the rest of the world.

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February -- March 2000

There's plenty of reason for confidence and optimism lately: Y2K was a nonevent; the NASDAQ keeps motoring upward; even Amazon.com continues to pair record losses with a burgeoning stock price. Still, many of us have this unrelenting suspicion that all may not be well in Net-ville. Could fiscal reality be encroaching into our economic never-never land? IPO's are tightening up, genomics are stealing the spotlight and mysterious denial-of-service attacks from the Resistance have everybody -- especially investors -- feeling more skittish than usual. Roiling waters ahead? Hey, who can tell? -- despite the predictive infallibility of celestial bodies, even astrologers hedge their bets from time to time.

Pisces (Feb 19-March 20)

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The essential thesis of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" is that the Internet has turned the tables on the forces of mass industrialization. No longer is the cycle of production and consumption a corporate monologue; ubiquitous networking has enabled under-served masses and powerless workers to organize, energize, assert their own voices and thereby push back on their corporate oppressors. As consumers and workers become ever-more internetworked, interoperable and interdependent, both become smarter and more powerful -- perhaps more powerful than the corporations that serve and employ them. Corporate control is an inevitable casualty as intellectual capital becomes more important than material capital.

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January - February 2000

Brittle networks, missed connections and random timeouts will threaten the status quo this lunar cycle. Try to imagine the horrors unleashed by a widespread IP meltdown: a brief interval of mass panic, followed by hoards of people committing unthinkable acts -- like picking up their dry-cleaning (it's been months!), and going offsite for coffee. Only the nerdly network admin stands between civilization and a chaotic world in which we're all forced to eat our own PDAs.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 18)

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December 1999 - January 2000

Will there be life as we know it after the clock strikes Y2K? For all your hyper-rational geek smugness, you've reached a juncture in your career you never thought you'd see: You haven't got a clue, have you? There's just too damned much uncertainty tucked away in the crevices of the fin-de-millennium digital infrastructure.

So, in your quiet desperation, you've clicked on Geek Astrology -- your last-ditch effort to grapple with the specter of a worldwide millennial core-dump. Perhaps this will be the prognostication that will help you eff the ineffable that lurks on the other side of the Y2K event horizon.

And perhaps not. But what do you have to lose? Just tell your manager you're thinking outside the box.

Capricorn (Dec. 22 - Jan. 19):

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Two new books -- "High St@kes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars," and "Renegades of the Empire: How Three Software Warriors Started a Revolution Behind the Walls of Fortress Microsoft" -- demonstrate the tedious inevitability of the martial metaphor.

Don't get me wrong -- I like tales of the campaigns as much as the next guy. A well-wrought war story can easily hold my attention. As a child I loved the "Flashman" series. Biographies of Churchill and MacArthur have kept me awake far past midnight.

If only the captains of the infotech wars had one-tenth that style and ilan. Today's cyber-warriors, having traded their sabers for expense reports, lack a certain kind of gut-level appeal. For instance, there's an account in "High St@kes, No Prisoners" where author Charles Ferguson -- founder of Vermeer Technologies, now playing the risky game of mid-life autobiography -- recounts a chance meeting with legendary venture capitalist Andy Marcuvitz: "[O]n a flight from Boston to San Francisco, I used frequent-flier miles to upgrade to first class and found myself two rows away from Andy. Since the seat next to him was empty, I moved over and sat with him. Our conversation started out reasonably enough, but quickly turned into a full-blown, brutal argument."

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The appearance of railroads, for instance, once prompted otherwise rational people to pronounce the imminent end of class stratification; as the rails annihilated the distances between rich and poor, a universal brotherhood of mankind would surely result. The arrival of the telephone similarly prompted others to declare the end of the city -- nearly a century before present-day suburbanites more soberly decided that telecommuting was a mixed blessing at best.

The Internet has hardly been an exception; the age of the Web has set high watermarks for just this kind of Panglossian fever. In his book, "The Control Revolution: How the Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know," Andrew Shapiro continues this durable tradition, telling us the Internet brings with it a new era of universal empowerment. The formerly voiceless, choiceless masses, once trapped on the wrong side of the one-to-many broadcast equation (radio, TV) or confined within one-to-one networks (telephony), can now look forward to the exponentially greater personal control that the ubiquity of many-to-many Internet connections will certainly bring.

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Worse still, a survey of e-commerce victors reveals a decidedly motley bunch: digital pornographers, discount brokers and purveyors of bit-crunching hardware to the already-wired. Where, we may ask, are the opportunities for the rest of us? How might ordinary folks establish viable businesses on the digital frontier while giving wide berth to the unsavory armies of nerds, perverts and day traders who seem to be generating all the online profits?

Jaclyn Easton is a shameless cheerleader for everyman's e-commerce. Her book, "StrikingItRich.com: Profiles of 23 Incredibly Successful Websites You've Probably Never Heard Of," makes the case that there is indeed a place for the rest of us. The age of the Internet, the author asserts, also signals the beginning of a new era of possibility for small proprietorships on the Web -- even straight-ahead, main-street style businesses your mother might understand without dying of embarrassment.

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"I feel so bad, leaving you here all alone with nobody but the spiders for company," she confessed as she packed her duffel bags.

Liz was losing her longtime roommate to wanderlust. It was just as well; Laurel hadn't really been happy here in the Silicon Valley, not since graduation. And when Vero -- seemingly gifted with a sixth sense for finding the Zeitgeist in any decade -- had declared her next destination to be somewhere in Eastern Europe, well, Liz shouldn't have been surprised by her roommate's eagerness to tag along. After all, Laurel was an art history major, and places like Prague and Budapest had some of the highest culture-to-rent ratios going.

"Oh, I'll be OK, honey," Liz reassured her friend.

"Yeah, I know -- but I never meant to leave you holding the lease on your own. I mean, I hope you can find another roomie who isn't a psychopath. Or a total geek."

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The most challenging part had been the remedial hydrodynamics -- 20 years had passed since Barry put fire to his big red bong, and Kiki had more than a little difficulty remembering the relative positions of water and herb.

After a few false starts, Kiki managed to kindle a small glow in the bowl of the ancient water pipe. She put her lips to it, clumsily pulled a little smoke through its bubbling innards and inhaled.

She coughed explosively. She hadn't smoked pot in a decade, and her searing lungs painfully instructed her that she wouldn't be starting again. No matter; Kiki wasn't seeking the canonical cannabis euphoria. She was in mourning, jonesing for a buzz at once more elusive and sentimental.

And she had found it. For a smoky, luminous moment, she felt close to Barry.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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But it wasn't the showdown he was hoping for. Though he shouted his argument to the rolling stars and pitch-black sky, no reproach would issue from that moonless night. And though the storm continued largely unabated, the sea seemed somehow kinder than the malevolent vortex of the day before. Now it extended a strange, turbulent comfort; Barry, to the end an admirer of unmitigated power, gave himself over to the muscular rocking of Neptune's massive arms, and there took shelter from his doubts.

And like centuries of imperiled mariners before him, he turned the wheel beneath white knuckles and comforted himself by singing a little sea chantey. Well, almost:

I skipped the light fandango

Turned cartwheels 'cross the floor

I was feeling kind of seasick

The crowd called out for more

Some kind of seaman he was turning out to be. No old, salty verses, just fragments of bygone hippie anthems. "Note to self," he shouted ironically over the storm's din. "Learn to sail."

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