The Fourth Discontinuity

A famous cartoon in The New Yorker magazine shows a large computer with two scientists standing excitedly beside it. One of them holds in his hand the tape just produced by the machine, while the other gapes at the message printed on it. In clear letters, it says, "Cogito, ergo sum," the famous Cartesian phrase, "I think, therefore I am." My next cartoon has not yet been drawn. It is a fantasy on my part. In it, a patient, wild of eye and hair on end, is lying on a couch in a psychiatrist's office talking to an analyst, who is obviously a machine. The analyst-machine is saying, "Of course I'm human-aren't you?"1 These two cartoons are a way of suggesting the threat which the increasingly perceived continuity between man and the machine poses to us today. It is with this topic that I wish to deal now, approaching it in terms of what I shall call the "fourth discontinuity." In order, however, to explain what I mean by the "fourth discontinuity," I must first place the term in a historical context.