animate/inanimate

The boundary between what has an interior and what does not, and how little it takes to make it fail. Two vacuum tubes and a photocell did it in 1949 — small cybernetic machines whose builders and audiences alike read moods into them — which is why Braitenberg's vehicles is a demonstration rather than a metaphor: nothing about the effect depends on the sophistication of the machinery. What has changed is density. The capacity to eventually settle an ambiguous case assumed such cases arrived with space between them, and standby names the condition where they no longer do.