Cities, electronic circuits and software all have architectures; they are machines that process signals and messages, balance forces and respond to demands, strongly analogous ways. Cities are much older than circuits and software. They are full of lessons about systems - I think some of these lessons van apply directly to our work in software, and I think that Prague, our host city, has some special ones. Some of the lessons are built literally into its buildings: Prague has the most intense concentration of Cubist architecture in the world.

Architecture springs from ideas - this talk will discuss those ideas, and the people who had them, and what we can think about our software when we think about them. I'll discuss, amongst other things, Karel Čapek, the Czech writer who gave us the word "robot" in 1920, and who also offers us ways of thinking about how artificial intelligence might occupy a space in our life and civilisation, and the Czech movement from Cubism to functionalism in architecture, and the connection between them, and more besides.