Lewis Carroll (in life Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) wrote two books about a young girl named Alice. In "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," she falls asleep by a river and dreams of a strange world filled with talking animals, active playing cards, and unexplained oddities. She meets a talking Rabbit, a magical Cat, a crazy Queen, and a Mad Hatter. All have unpredictable personalities and habits, like life in Virtual Reality and the opaque chaos of centralized binary computers and dictatorial operating systems.
In "Through the Looking-Glass," she enters a fantastical world by climbing through a mirror in her house. Here, she encounters many new characters, including the evil Red Queen, who makes up new rules as she plays, and the argumentative twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They all play a chess game, and Alice is one of the pieces learning the rules and the world as she goes. Both books are beloved classics adapted into films, plays, and digital media as the stories explore philosophical themes that apply to life in A.I. cybersociety.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898) was born in Cheshire, England. He attended Oxford University, where he lectured in mathematics. Although shy and reclusive, he enjoyed the company of children. On a boating trip with his friend the Liddell family, he told a fairy story to Alice that became "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." Although Dodgson was a private person, he impacted literature and popular culture as an important figure in the literary nonsense genre, exploring human learning and growing. His lessons highlight the difficulty of building a stable, democratic, A.I.-enabled cyber society built on individual, innocent citizens who are unskilled in the magic of computer science.
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