Three dimen­sional char­ac­ters come into con­flict, but these card­board cutouts crit­i­cize. End­lessly. At least if they were moral crit­i­cisms we could say the women are per­son­i­fi­ca­tions of super­ego, but their crit­i­cisms aren’t about right and wrong, they’re essen­tially self­ish: what’s this going to mean for me?

Last April, bio­com­put­ers got even more impres­sive. Swiss bio­engi­neers announced that they had pro­grammed human cells to do binary addi­tion or sub­trac­tion, which is how a com­puter does arithmetic.