Until very recently, the architects of human-machine interfaces have
been unsung heroes (and villains) in a rarely visible and even-more-rarely
appreciated specialty. For example, if you look inside the case of a classic
black desk telephone, you don't find the names of the patient designers
and researchers at AT&T who spent years refining the ergonomics of that
humble instrument. There was no equivalent of Steven Jobs at Bell Labs to
immortalize these fellows! Similarly, most of the older literature on human-machine
interfaces lies far off the beaten path in obscure journals, conference
proceedings, and graduate student theses.
But the rapid proliferation of PCs and their "productivity" applications
over the last decade has focused public attention on interface issues that
were previously only dimly perceived, because the interaction between a
user and a computer program is so much more intimate and intense than the
interface between a user and a toaster, a telephone, or even a typewriter.
You can put up with a toaster whose darkness control is difficult to adjust,
or a telephone that is shaped like Mickey Mouse, but it's frustrating and
aggravating to work with a computer program whose interface is inconsistent,
inefficient, or unforgiving. When you're forced to use a "bad"
program, you take it personally.
Unfortunately, the track record of the PC software industry with regard
to human interfaces has not been good. Experienced interface designers are
often brought into the software development process late, or are not consulted
at all. As Ted Nelson of Xanadu fame has commented:
"Historical accident has kept programmers in control of a field in which most of them have no aptitude: the artistic integration of the mechanisms they work with. It is nice that engineers and programmers and software executives have found a new form of creativity with which to find a sense of personal fulfillment. It is just unfortunate that they have to inflict the result on users."
"The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games," said the voice-over, "in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks." On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes. "Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..."Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net is, on the surface, a vision of a kinder, gentler future that Gibson's. His characters jog on the beach and are ecologically oriented, the nuclear family in some form or other is still important, a New-Age philosophy of the Optimal Persona and a low-energy, Gaia-friendly school of architecture prevails. All this, however, plays out against a backdrop of political fragmentation, high-tech terrorism, tiny third-world nations that survive by harboring data pirates and skimming a percentage of their profits, and near-total depletion of the world's natural resources. And again, the whole world's facilities for information storage, business transactions, education, and even recreation have been subsumed into an all-knowing, all-embracing, all-prevading network.
He settled the black terry sweatband across his forehead, careful not to disturb the flat Sendai electrodes. He stared at the deck in his lap, not really seeing it, seeing instead the shop window on Ninsei, the chromed shuriken burning with reflected neon... He closed his eyes. Found the ridged face of the power stud. And in the blood-lit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred fragmented mandala of visual information... A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky. Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler grey. Expanding--
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
Every year of her life, Laura thought, the Net had been growing more expansive and seamless. Computers did it. Computers melted other machines, fusing them together. Television-telephone-telex. Tape recorder-VCR-laser disk. Broadcast tower linked to microwave disk linked to satellite. Phone line, cable TV, fiber-optic cords hissing out words and pictures in torrents of pure light. All netted together in a web over the world, a global nervous system, an octopus of data. There'd been plenty of hype about it. It was easy to make it sound transcendently incredible... The Net was a lot like television, another former wonder of the age. The Net was a vast glass mirror. It reflected what it was shown. Mostly human banality.
As the final item in this little cyberpunk sampler, I offer Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime. Although this book is set in the same future world as Vinge's earlier book, The Peace War, it addresses a far more cosmic question--the next evolutionary step for the human race -- embedded in a crackling detective yarn. The narrator, an ex-cop, is a sort of Rip Van Winkle of the space age; he and a handful of others emerge from stasis bubbles to find the residues of an unimaginably high-tech infrastructure on an empty world. With the physical evidence blurred past recognition by the passage of millions of years, the question of the age is: Where did everyone else go? Some interpret the event as an epidemic, others as a war between nations or with invading aliens. But one of the other survivors speculates:
"We're going over to my office to get your reality affixed."
I stepped back. "Wait a minute. What if I don't want my reality affixed?"
"Sorry. It's mandatory after an emergency dry-cleaning for an illegal psychosis..."
It worried me. It worried me all the way up to the time Segretti was satisfied I'd eaten enough and put me on one of the slabs... Segretti touched something on the side of the slab and it glided back to the system and inserted my head in the hole.
The inside of the headhole was dark and pleasant-smelling, like a field after a light spring rain. The smell grew stronger with every breath I took and I was just starting to feel almost calm when I felt something soft close around my neck and panic kicked in like an anticonvulsant. Dark! And small! And close! And something had me by the neck and that smell, that smell, smothering me in pleasantness and I had to get out, get out --
Then the system was injecting the local anesthetic and before I could even register that my eyes were partway out of their sockets, the connections had reached my optic nerves and it was no longer dark and small and close... I had a sense of being somewhere, in some sort of location, and I thought of looking around, even though I didn't really have anything to look with. As soon as the idea occurred to me, the colors came up...
Suddenly, and yet somehow not abruptly, I had an orientation; the colors were rising, or I was falling, or both. Like veils drawn upward as I descended, the colors were lifting and something else was coming into focus around me.
Here we are, Segretti said.
Here was the edge of a broad field bounded by a low, flimsy wire fence; a roughly made sign on a post in front of me said WATCH THIS SPACE.
"We were on the exponential track... By 2200, all but the blind could see that something fantastic lay in our immediate future. We had practical immortality. We had the beginnings of interstellar travel. We had networks that effectively increased human intelligence -- with bigger increases coming... And intelligence is the basis of all progress. My guess is that by mid-century, any goal -- any goal you could state objectively without internal contradictions -- could be achieved. And what would life be like fifty years after that? There would still be goals, and there would still be striving, but not what we could understand.
"To call that time 'The Extinction' is absurb. It was a Singularity, a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied. And those new models are beyond our intelligence... Mankind simply graduated, and you and I and the others missed graduation night."
Computers now share the human environment. Most obviously they exhibit rudimentary intelligence. They also have been equipped with arms and grippers and legs, and in this form they have begun to act physically on the world around them and modify it. Inevitably, they affect the sense of human identity. Is the mind a machine--and a relatively simple one at that, once the trick of programming with neurons is understood? Is the claim of humanity to uniqueness disappearing along with the claim of each human to a separate identity shaped by a local habitation and a name? Is the idea of what it is to be human disappearing, along with so many other ideas, through the modern skylight?Disappearing Through the Skylight is so wide-ranging that it defies summarization here. Hardison explains and critiques everything from modern poetry to experiments in artificial reality with an insight and authority that most of us would be delighted to be able to apply to a single discipline. The book's theme is not computers, but computers are found in every part of the book, because computers are rapidly becoming an integral part of our culture (and hence, "disappearing"). Hardison's analysis of the current research into artificial intelligence is fascinating, and his speculations on the evolution of silicon life are startling. Buy this book.
In its fearless exploration of inner and outer worlds, modern culture has evidently reached a turning point--a kind of phase transition from one set of values to another. Crossing the barrier that separates the phases is another kind of disappearance. The nature of that barrier is nicely characterized in a phrase developed by science in connection with the search for extraterrestrial life: "horizon of invisibility."
A horizon of invisibility cuts across the geography of modern culture. Those who have passed through it cannot put their experience into familiar words and images because the languages they have inherited are inadequate to the new worlds they inhabit. They therefore express themselves in metaphors, paradoxes, contradictions, and abstractions rather than languages that "mean" in the traditional way--in assertions that are apparently incoherent or collages using fragments of the old to create enigmatic symbols of the new. The most obvious case in point is modern physics, which confronts so many paradoxes that physicists like Paul Dirac and Werner Heisenberg have concluded that traditional languages are, for better or worse, simply unable to represent the world that science has forced on them. In "Quantum Mechanics and a Talk with Einstein," Heisenberg remarks, "I assume that the mathematical scheme works, but no link with the traditional language has been established so far." The same comment might be made about the relation between the twentieth-century languages of Cubism, collage, Dada, and concrete poetry and the visual and verbal languages that preceded them.