Dial 'F' for Frankenstein

One of the basic characters of Patriots of Mars is MOM, the sentient, manmade, wetware... well, you'd call her a 'computer' but they don't use that word anymore. Calling MOM a computer would be like calling your shiny new MacBook Air a fancy, high-tech abacus. It just isn't done.

A few years ago, William Sawyer began a series of novels premised on the World Wide Web 'waking up' to become sentient.

One of the commenters in the post linked above, however, noted that Arthur C. Clarke had more or less the same idea, years before the WWW developed. In his story, it's the phone networks (on which the web would one day be built) that achieve sentiency.

Gotta give Clarke credit - the title alone is genius, and clearly a meme whose time has come.