| Sumario: | Part of a special issue on technology and culture. The writer argues that although computers had a clear, cultural identity as linear, logical, and mechanistic machines for many decades, there has been a change in the cultural identity of the computer. Nowadays, computers offer themselves as models of mind and as “objects to think with” for thinking about the self. Computers do this in two ways: through the world of artificial intelligence research, where researchers explicitly attempt to build machines that model the human mind, and through the world of computational objects in the culture, such as toys, games, and simulation packages, which provoke reflection on the nature of the self.
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