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"A Logic Named Joe" is a science fiction short story by Murray Leinster that was first published in the March 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The story actually appeared under Leinster's real name, Will F. Jenkins, since that issue of Astounding also included a story under the Leinster pseudonym called "Adapter". The story is particularly noteworthy as a prediction of massively networked personal computers and their drawbacks, written at a time when computing was in its infancy.

[edit] Plot

The story's narrator is a "logic" (that is, a personal computer) repairman nicknamed Ducky. In the story, a logic named Joe develops some degree of sapience and ambition. Joe proceeds to switch around a few relays in "the tank" (one of a distributed set of central information repositories analogous to servers on the World Wide Web), and cross-correlate all information ever assembled (massive data-mining) -- yielding highly unexpected results. It then proceeds to freely disseminate all of those results to everyone on demand (and simultaneously disabling all of the content-filtering protocols). Logics everywhere begin offering up unexpected assistance, from designing custom chemicals to alleviate inebriation, to giving sex advice to small children, to plotting the perfect murder. Information runs rampant as every logic worldwide crunches away at problems too vast in scope for human minds to have attempted. Societal chaos quickly ensues.

[edit] Publications

"A Logic Named Joe" has appeared in the collections Sidewise in Time (Shasta, 1950), The Best of Murray Leinster (Del Rey, 1978), First Contacts (NESFA, 1998), and A Logic Named Joe (Baen, 2005), and was also included in the Machines That Think compilation, with notes by Isaac Asimov, published 1984 Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

[edit] Story

• A Logic Named Joe

[edit] Listen to

• A Logic Named Joe, Dimension X, NBC radio, 1950