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Many an imaginative author, from Isaac Asimov in Boston to Peter Gärdenfors in Lund, has sketched a future world where the computer thinks things out for itself. You can teach a computer to do a lot of things; you can join up chains of computers; you can make tasks automatic: but ultimately it's quite clear that a computer can't think for itself - can't experience - can't feel...

The authors of the handbook for the great multimedia program 'Director' expressed the ultimate tragedy: 'The computer does not know that the banana should be yellow'.

In Peter Gärdenfors' saga about his workaholic computer Hal, in the end it's the computer we feel sorry for:

  Hal