“There was the great chess showdown of 1965, when MacHack won a chess game against a critic of artificial intelligence named Herbert Dreyfus, who had bluntly asserted that no computer program would ever be able to beat even a 10-year- old. None of the computer specialists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology cheered when the program won, because they knew it was going to happen. They lived in the world of hackers, a mere extension of the incredible computer environment. There was the Great Subway Hack, in which an M.I.T. student programmed a computer to figure out a route by which someone could ride the entire New York City subway system on a single token, and then a bunch of his fellow students went out and actually did it. And there was the incident when the security people in charge of M.I.T.’s Artificial Intelligence laboratory had to ask one of…