* You may have already invented machines that help with thinking: at their core, clocks are just machines that count the number of seconds that pass so you don’t have to, and an abacus is just a bunch of beads on a stick that you can slide around to jot down numbers as you calculate them in your head. But what you really want is an analytical engine: some sort of machine with a crank we can turn (or get another machine to turn for us) that re-creates the steps humans take when reasoning, thereby transforming physical labor into mental processing.