| Sumario: | Maureen McHugh's short story "The Kingdom of the Blind," from her collection After the Apocalypse, is about the evolution of artificial intelligence. It tells the story of a woman working in an otherwise all-male information technology office, who, amidst the annoyances of everyday on-the-job sexism, discovers that the computerized expert system whose functioning it is her job to oversee may well be sentient. She is unable ever to prove her hunch definitively, because the computer system, if it is in fact conscious, has such different interests and aims than any human or animal intelligence, that we cannot actually hope to communicate with it. The story thus explores both the possibilities of machine sentience, and the limits of human comprehension and communicability.
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