reading: Computer Power and Human Reason

Not long ago, I got a copy of Jospeh Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason from a pile of free books -- there's so much great stuff on the free books table when a professor retires!

I’d recommend reading it if you’re into the ethical issues surrounding computing or the history of AI. The book was published in 1976; our relationship with computing has changed a lot since then, and that was probably the most striking thing about reading the book now.

Weizenbaum was worried about trust that society placed in the computer systems of the time. He describes situations in which people felt they were slaves to systems too complex for people to understand and too far removed from human judgement to be humane; examples include planning systems that told pilots where to bomb during the Vietnam War. But the systems had computers involved, and they were made by experts, so they must be right! "Garbage in; gospel out". And down came the bombs.

I'd argue that we've become less dazzled by computers as such, that we no longer think of them as infallible. But perhaps we're less likely to think about the computers themselves at all. They've become ubiquitous, just the infrastructure that makes society work. My mother (a keen observer of technology) recently remarked that it's strange that we still call them "computers" when the point is to use them for communication. We may still have problems of blind obedience, but perhaps it's better understood as blind obedience to people.

Similarly, Weizenbaum was concerned about the social power wielded by scientists, engineers, and other experts. To me, in the fair-and-balanced political climate, this sounds like a good problem to have: people used to listen to experts? Did they listen to experts when they said things that were politically inconvenient for those with money? Perhaps not...

Computer Power and Human Reason also spends some time with the exuberant claims about AI from before the AI Winter. Herbert Simon said, "... in a visible future – the range of problems they [machines] can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied", which was clearly somewhat premature. But we have made progress on a lot of fronts! Weizenbaum was quite skeptical that machine translation would be any good, despite claims (which he relates in the book) that MT really just needed more processing power and more data. A few decades later, MT is often pretty good! All it took was more processing power and more data.

There's also some beautifully strange writing. Towards the beginning, he spends a few chapters explaining how computers work, in a formal, abstract way. And then we get this:

Suppose there were an enormous telephone network in which each telephone is permanently connected to a number of other telephones; there are no sets with dials. All subscribers constantly watch the same channel on television, and whenever a commercial, i.e., an active interval, begins, they all rush to their telephones and shout either "one" or "zero," depending on what is written on a notepad attached to their apparatus. ...

I have trouble imagining that this metaphor has helped many people understand digital logic circuits; but I enjoyed reading the book! Perhaps you'd enjoy it as well.

Guns, Germs, and Steel on invention

For my holiday break reading, I just finished Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. I heartily recommend it! It's about the broad patterns in human history: lots of it is about the development of agriculture ("food production", he usually calls it), how and why it happened where it did, and the historical ramifications as societies develop and come into contact/conflict with other societies.

There's a lot about germs, too. The diseases that a society carries and develops resistances to are extremely important when running into another group. A people can be totally wiped out, faced with a disease it's not accustomed to.

But I wanted to share with you a bit that particularly resonated with me, as a technology-producing person.

Thus, the commonsense view of invention that served as our starting point reverses the usual roles of invention and need. It also overstates the importance of rare geniuses, such as Watt and Edison. That "heroic theory of invention," as it is termed, is encouraged by patent law, because an applicant for a patent must prove the novelty of the invention submitted. Inventors thereby have a financial incentive to denigrate or ignore previous work. From a patent lawyer's perspective, the ideal invention is one that arises without any precursors, like Athene springing fully formed from the forehead of Zeus.

In reality, even for the most famous and apparently decisive modern inventions, neglected precursors lurked behind the bald claim that "X invented Y." For instance, we are regularly told, "James Watt invented the steam engine in 1769," supposedly inspired by watching steam rise from a tea-kettle's spout. Unfortunately for this splendid fiction, Watt actually got the idea for his particular steam engine while repairing a model of Thomas Newcomen's steam engine, which Newcomen had invented 57 years earlier and of which over a hundred had been manufactured in England by the time of Watt's repair work. Newcomen's engine, in turn, followed the steam engine that the Englishman Thomas Savery patented in 1698, which followed the steam engine that the Frenchman Denis Papin designed (but did not build) around 1680, which in turn had precursors in the ideas of the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens and others. All this is not to deny that Watt greatly improved Newcomen's engine (by incorporating a separate steam condenser and a double-acting cylinder), just as Newcomen had greatly improved Savery's.

you need more retrocomputing: Mini vMac and old Apple software

So I was looking for cool activities for my new XO laptop, and I ran across Mini vMac, an emulator for the Macintosh Plus; it's cross-platform, but if you happen to have an XO, here's the .xo activity.

And it works really well! You'll need a ROM image, y'know, taken from the Mac Plus that you personally own, and also an image from a "System" disk (available on that same page).

But! As the Mini vMac page points out, you can get old Macintosh System software from somewhere else -- Apple's own Older Software Downloads page, which features all sorts of outdated Apple software. System disks, drivers for bizarre old SCSI hardware... and Hypercard.

The Mini vMac page also links to this fantastic compendium of old macintosh software from third parties, which has even more wild old stuff, like vim 3, forgotten Lisps and MLs, games that you might remember.

I'm going to have to run this fullscreen on my Macbook Pro, woo!

more retrocomputing: procedural graphics languages!

One of my first online experiences -- and probably the first for a lot of people, came in the form of Prodigy, over dialup, on an old DOS box. At the time, Prodigy wasn't an ISP as such -- it was an insular online community, with its own exclusive content and games and message boards and email. Of course, this model wasn't sustainable forever...

But! The interesting thing about Prodigy was the graphics. It was clear, at the time, that it wasn't downloading "images" as such -- y'know, like raster graphics -- it was drawing in terms of commands that would build pictures out of shapes. This was kind of cool; the dialup link was slow enough that you could see it building the picture, usually bigger background shapes first, then the details would get filled in. It occurs to me now that it must have been somebody's job to work out how to draw pictures like this...

It turns out that Prodigy was using the standard language for this: NAPLPS, the North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax. And there were several other services that used the same approach -- some of them sent the commands over modems, like Prodigy, but some went over TV, during that mystical vertical blanking interval that broadcast engineers talk about.

Speaking of sending non-raster graphics down the wire: did you know that there's a set of drawing commands understood by some DEC terminals? It's true. It's called ReGIS. At one point, Brett and I got our hands on some old DEC terminals and spent a few afternoons messing around with this on something that must've been a vt340 or vt420. You can find out all sorts of wonderful things about DEC terminals at the super-top-notch vt100.net. These things seem to be indestructable; I held on to the vt220 for years, passing the joy forward sometime in college; it was still chatting amiably over the serial port on my Linux box, and almost as old as I was.

That's all for now. Happy hacking!

retrocomputing from the other side of the pond

Here's what I found out on my recent voyage through the wikipedias! Semi-vicarious nostalgia ahoy!

In the early 1980s, the BBC started an initiative called the BBC Computer Literacy Project, a major part of which was the production of the BBC Micro, a machine produced by Acorn Computers, complete with its own line of peripherals including expandable memory and various pluggable co-processors. There was an associated television show, The Computer Programme, which ran in various incarnations through the decade and featured music from Kraftwerk. The computers came with BBC BASIC, a rather more advanced system than the BASICs that were shipping stateside -- it had proper named subroutines and if/then/else, features most users on the MS-DOS side of things wouldn't see until QBASIC.

The mind-blowing part of the project was Telesoftware, whereby computer programs were sent embedded in the broadcast television signal, using Teletext, which is how the closed-captioning data was sent in Britain at the time. Analogue technology like broadcast TV feels so alien these days... but the Beeb was busy using it to send example programs to eager learners at home.

There seems to be a pretty active online community of BBC/Acorn enthusiasts out there, two and a half decades later.

You know how to use the Googles, of course, but here's another, more detailed overview of the BBC/Acorn system.

Possibly interesting, but almost definitely not useful!

- My aunt, years ago, had a Newton eMate 300, and I recently found a Newton PDA while cleaning out the space behind an A/C unit -- in any case, I've had this weird fascination with Newtons for years. Now, you can relive the Newton Magic that you probably never experienced in the first place, under emulation! The Einstein Platform is a Newton emulator that works pretty well -- and you can find Newton ROM images here. It's kinda interesting. (Although I got stuck in fullscreen mode once, careful!)

- Self. It's been ported to Linux. It's one of those languages that one feels like one should learn more about. It has interesting family relationships with SmallTalk and Dylan and JavaScript...

- Thinking Meat celebrates the holidays. I just found this blog, but over at the Thinking Meat Project, she has a lovely article about taking part in the culture around the holidays and coming to terms with the cognitive dissonance from enjoying good Bach choral music while feeling like one shouldn't be participating in religious rites, for consistency's sake. It can hard to balance these things, particularly soon after giving up a faith.