Table of Contents

Preface to the Second Edition vii
Dialogues
I 3
II 21
III 31
IV 47
V 63
VI 99
VII 115
VIII 163
Supplement 1: The Dialogues Sixteen Years Later
Lost Illusions, or From Intellectronics to Informatics 193
Applied Cybernetics: An Example from Sociology 219
Supplement 2: Additional Essays
The Ethics of Technology and the Technology of Ethics 241
Biology and Values 283
Translator's Notes 335

About the Author

Stanisław Lem (1921-2006), a writer called "worthy of the Nobel Prize" by the New York Times, was an internationally renowned author of novels, short stories, literary criticism, and philosophical essays. His books have been translated into forty-four languages and have sold more than thirty million copies.

Reviews

"More than half a century ago, Stanislaw Lem gazed into the future and saw, rather than rockets or ray guns, the evolution of the synthetic mind and the humans creating it. Thanks to these translations, English-language readers can share in his vision—long after he first imagined the internet and its thinking machines." —The Wall Street Journal

"Dialogues is important now because it describes (or described, rather, more than half a century ago—you can almost hear Lem's slow hand-clapping from the Beyond) all the ways we do not comprehend the world we have made... Peter Butko’s translations of the Dialogues, and the revisionist essays Lem added to the 1971 second edition, are as witty and playful as Lem’s allusive Polish prose demands. His endnotes are practically a book in themselves (and an entertaining one too). Translated so well, Lem needs no explanation, no contextualisation, no excuse-making."—The Times (UK)