I'm no expert (not even close), but I believe they'd have to run Pharo itself, yes. So you could redistribute the Pharo runtime along with your app code (similar to, say, Python).
Anyone interested in playing around with Smalltalk can use https://pharo.org - I recently tried it and was pretty amazed with the quality of documentation available. It is quite a different experience working in an interactive live environment.
> SMSs written to appear they are from someone that knows the recipient
I don't think this means they are sent from numbers known to the recipient. Only that the content is written such that it appears to be from someone who knows the recipient.
> When you send an e-mail today it’s sent in plaintext. This means that when you connect to your local coffee shop’s WiFi they can intercept all e-mail that is sent through their router. This is probably not the relationship you have with your barista…
Um, how many users use native clients on unencrypted ports as opposed to https based web-clients or TLS?
If you're familiar with Python, try the Jupyter notebook (jupyter.org) - very useful for quick visualizations while also allowing you to quickly transform the data when necessary. The big advantage is your interactive 'repl' session is persisted as well as editable so you can resume anytime.
The argument that we are machines made of meat and so machines made of any other substance may be conscious too is a remarkably weak one to me (a lay person, not a consciousness or AI researcher).
Isn't any arbitrary region in space a machine? Because it has physical inputs, physical outputs can some kind of physical computation within? An elevator is a machine but so is the building with many elevators. A city with many buildings, cars, people etc. (all the physical space and things in it withing the bounds of the city) is another machine. Is a city conscious? Clearly it is more complex than an individual brain?
From a slightly different angle - why does my consciousness stop at the limits of my body while the physical chain of reactions extends smoothly well beyond it, and infinitely into the universe?
You may be able to build web applications too (http://seaside.st/).