Fairy Tales for Computers, compiled over 30 years ago, is frightenly relevant to these technologically obsessed times. "There is a sort of pact between the machine and ourselves, like the terrible contract between the nervous system and the subtle demon of drugs. The more useful the machine seems to us, the more it becomes so; and the more it becomes so, the more incomplete we are, the more incapable of doing without it," said Paul Valery in his book History and Politics.