THE HEART OF A NEW MACHINE

...Meanwhile HAL, the mad computer, has been cured of his antisocial tendencies by a Freudian psychiatrist...

...Voice-recognition "devices" for computers are progressing to a useful stage, as are voice synthesizers that will allow computers to speak, sounding not like the Cylons on "Battlestar Galactica," but like regular folks...

...Meanwhile, the pure-logic side of computers appeals to every person who has developed the mind at the expense of the heart...

...Double-edged Disks Waiting for adulthood to fall under the computer's spell won't be necessary for the next generation, however...

...Computers obviously are valuable to many companies, and as time passes and computers improve, will become more so...

...The nerds, in other words, are the ones shaping the computers available to the average person, and they are shaping them in their own image the image of people for whom the personal side of life has often been harsh, and to whom computers, as companions, are a way out...

...Gregg Easterbrook is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...M. chips and logic gates, but to find a substitute for the human world that overwhelms them...

...When management-school graduates move into the business world, they soon discover a bewildering array of emotional, unpredictable, and just plain illogical forces that their textbooks said they could assume away for the sake of a flawless model...

...We are children highly skilled in talking, but often with no one to talk to...

...While expensive "mainframe" computers and long-term research tend to be in the hands of large corporate teams, it is the nerds, often working alone, who specialize in bringing applied computer technology to the consumer market...

...Unless, of course, you're a magazine editor, whose life's work is deleting sentences from paragraphs...

...Kids can ask computers dumb questions without being tittered at...

...Obviously, on this scale, the most expensive computer finishes way behind a Labrador...

...Powerful small computers can be programmed to behave in whatever way pleases their owners, and as computer power expands, and computers learn to speak, it will be possible to give computers "personality traits," or at least the illusion of them...

...the kindly robot Robbie nearly stole the show in Forbidden Planet...

...Computers, perhaps, have some appeal here as the first "clean" industrial technology (users don't have to see the smokestacks of the generating stations that provide the computers' power) and because of their ability to expand the mind in a way reminiscent, minus the physical peril, of drugs...

...This has already happened in fiction...

...students are taught to think in terms of models and logic, to admire detached analysis and brainpower more than experience and to toss out any earthly complications that interrupt the flow of theory...

...Mostly they nag about the obvious, like the voiceboxes in new Datsuns that announce when the car's door is open...

...A preview of that culture already exists, in the group now derided as "computer nerds...

...they have worthwhile applications...

...Computers, unlike people, are wholly controllable and predictable...

...A photo trick made it appear, a la the old Patty Duke show, that there were three George Plimptons in the same room engaged in earnest conversation with themselves about the virtues of various game cartridges...

...Not feeling so good...

...Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac-Man, Defender, Pitfall, Galaxian, Frogger—all those that have really made money—are played alone...

...Everyone is guilty of this at some point—of longing for a fantasy, or a convenience, rather than accepting the less perfect but ultimately more rewarding presence of a person's true nature...

...In computers the skills of school—how to study and think—are the skills of success...

...While this illusion of human interaction is still a limited one, owing to communication through the keyboard and the need to master each machine's program commands, this is about to change...

...By computerizing everything in reach the modern business manager can see his logical faculties rewarded and can put off confrontation with the intractable, illogical problems that may be what really need his attention...

...Video game sales didn't take off until the groupplay orientation was eliminated and games were designed as man-versus-machine...

...Yet non-nerds, regular folks who would consider themselves emotionally well-adjusted, comprise the bulk of the computer-buying market...

...A computer could be programmed to show interest in some subjects but not others...

...In this environment a talking computer, with some rudimentary awareness of its user's personal condition, which always pays attention, could be a blessing...

...People are extremely resistant to such tampering...

...or testy or anxious to move on to the next subject...

...It reflects on the present enthusiasm for an "information industry," because a society based on compiling statistics and analyzing reports would make all life like school...

...And it isn't just the novelty...

...There are no bittersweet lessons in the realm of computers, just cause and effect...

...Men and women, for one, are notoriously fickle...

...Once video games are complex enough to engage the adult mind, computers will be all the more attractive as an alternative to companions...

...It will never find you boring, never forget to call, never ask a favor...

...Computers are a realm in which the mind prevails, where the intellectual faculties my generation has cultivated at such effort and expense can actually be employed...

...But some is due to the ways in which computers can be seen as more desirable than people...

...With no Woodstock to retreat to, computers that can be programmed to give at least the illusion of understanding will have to do...

...God's voice is so soft, even the faithful have trouble hearing it...

...But let's be realistic...

...yet we fear everything we say is ignored or misunderstood...

...Already, small computers can create a facsimile of human interaction via the question-and-answer...

...The reason relates, in part, to our educational system...

...It's all in the scene at a video-game arcade...

...Once owners can talk to their computers directly and receive an original response, the illusion of human interaction will be nearly complete...

...They can go over the same material as many times as necessary, without the computer becoming tired...

...People are the same, happiest in the company of family and friends, although it's sometimes harder to detect since people don't display their emotions in the exaggerated style practiced by dogs...

...Mind-altering drugs promised what Colin Wilson called "value experiences," the illusion that some meaningful event, connecting the drug-taker with a larger and affectionate whole, had occurred within the taker's own brain...

...Computers can offer the appearance of life—the talking, the joking, the interest in what's up—without any of the emotional or spiritual complications...

...But it's a safe bet that many computers are being bought for businesses that don't really need them or can't justify the cost, and that management-school graduates are to blame...

...peep show where customers slink in, slink out, and try not to be noticed while taking anonymous pleasures...

...In general, as educational opportunities have expanded, placing college and even graduate school within reach of the many rather than the few, increasing numbers of people have acquired a preference for making life as much like school as possible...

...to speak in the desired tones of voice...

...Each of these has drawbacks...

...They provide the illusion of human interaction...

...If we could eavesdrop on a poet and poetess strolling through a tropical paradise, for every exclamation of lasting beauty we would hear a hundred comments on the order of "Hey, get a load of these coconuts...

...A home computer with aural sensors, for instance, could be programmed to ignore commotion during daylight hours, but if it hears tossing and turning between 2 a.m...

...Dozens of players (mostly teenagers, who should be out petting or playing softball) hunched over joysticks, fully absorbed in private action...

...None of this requires artificial intelligence, just lots of memory capacity, fast processing, and a skilled programmer...

...But to want companionship and to find it have been (historically speaking) two different matters...

...Why is everyone nuts about the computer...

...Computers have no feelings, so they can be insulted or mistreated without guilt...

...to deliver flattery...

...Computer nerds are the kids who looked funny and didn't fit in during high school, who lost themselves in calculus and physics as an escape, and who came into their glory with the computer revolution...

...Books are silent...

...In computers logic is absolute, unchallengeable...

...Almost anyone who has done well at any level of the now-large educational system, and been lauded by parents or teachers for doing so, is in great danger of mistaking the mental world for the real world...

...The more people who are around, the happier the dog is...

...Some of this traces, of course, to the quality of scriptwriting and to reliance on characters so wooden that mechanical men look real by comparison...

...to discuss certain things at certain times of day...

...A dog's emotions, though highly simplified compared to ours, are nonetheless real...

...no chance circumstances or inconvenient emotional factors intrude...

...The counter-culture was rejected and misunderstood by the mainstream...

...The Fido 5200 For the lonely and the overly intellectual of this generation and others to follow, computers could be the main agents of comfort and consolation...

...Conventional games like Monopoly and Risk simply can't be played by a single person and the only play-alone conventional game, Solitaire, has become a cultural synonym for desperation...

...And it reflects on the appeal of computers...

...to religion, where they can reach for communication with something greater...

...No longer is just the math-whiz faction losing itself in computers, now it's everyone, and feelings about other people, rather than love of the machines, are behind it...

...Yet there is something they can never be, regardless of the level of technological advance...

...Terminal Loneliness A common failing of friendship, and a central failing of romance, is that we try to mold others to fit the image we seek, instead of experiencing them as they are...

...This reflects the tremendous urge of people in my generation to become lawyers, not just because practicing law is financially attractive, but because it's very much like school—writing term papers (briefs) based on library work, being quizzed by professors (judges) on recall of obscure facts, and pretending to care about convoluted theories...

...Modern management schools are not all that different from philosophy departments...

...This has nothing to do with the prospect of artificial intelligence and whether computers can be made to "think...

...Ensconced in dens and basements all over the country, their stares fixed on computer terminals, men and women of all ages and backgrounds are seeking not to master R.A...

...The next wave of video games will advance this condition from teenagers and college kids to adults...

...It is often observed that intellectual prodigies are slow to mature emotionally, because they dedicate themselves to abstract pursuits and are angered, rather than intrigued, by the concrete world and its compromises...

...These emotions are amplified by numbers...

...They have no rights, so they can be switched off should they grow tiresome...

...Nearly all small computers also have amusement value...

...The bulk of daily conversation consists of simple, flat statements like, "what do you want," "wait a second," "I'm over here," "it's pretty good...

...Where is the lasting fascination of watching sentences deleted from paragraphs...

...The most revealing ad, however, was a Plimpton-Mattel commercial run this Christmas...

...Sometime in the 1980s "direct access" computers that respond to spoken commands and speak back should become a reality...

...And they suggest why many of us might come to view computers as companions of choice...

...For writers, accountants, small-business managers, and those who grapple with any kind of inventory, the personal computer or word processor is a gift from on high...

...Advertising the solitary aspects of computers presents a delicate problem, as does advertising one-portion frozen meals and other products that serve the lonely market...

...To them, computers have become a necessity—a way to show that academic skills are the real world, by going to a place where only brainpower matters...

...Many of their effects on children will be welcome...

...But by the same token that computers do not make painful social judgments about children, they can teach nothing about social interaction— about the unpredictable, emotional forces that are essential to life and take so much longer to understand than algebra or European history...

...If the reply is "No, couldn't sleep a wink," the computer might move to, "Really...

...A dog really cares...

...But the way computer game advertisers have already solved the problem indicates how computer-companion advertisers will solve it in the near future...

...the evil robot Lucifer, with his droll wit, had all the good lines in "Galactica...

...For a while, drugs looked like an answer...

...We feel that words are powerful and that somewhere must be the words that will make it right...

...The first such adult-oriented video game, Atari's Star Raiders, is already on the market, with other slower, more subtle games on the way...

...Soon computers will become a great deal like people— perhaps, to some tastes, an improvement on the real thing...

...Computers can give solace to some people, and are even a little bit like people...

...Sensible people swore off drugs, but remained receptive to other developments...

...In Arthur Clarke's new best seller, 2010: Odyssey Two, sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssev, Dave, the metamorphized star-baby-astronaut, returns in ghost-like form...

...digital watches were novelties too, but they ran their course while interest in computers keeps building and building...

...For my generation, the one turning 30, this pain can be particularly acute...

...The most celebrated computer nerd, Steve Wozniak, created the Apple I; others have fostered important advances in small computers and video games...

...In a day when both parents are working and forever racing off to some vital-sounding meeting, sparing only the occasional "quality time" for their children, computers at least can offer quantity time...

...Computers are increasingly a part of the lives of children, as, given their technological importance, they inevitably must be...

...Peter McWilliams, author of the hot-selling The Personal Computer Book, got his start by writing about transcendental meditation...

...Ditto for the doctor with a computer at home, the literature professor, the student, and many others...

...to books, where they can imagine communication with the author...

...A direct approach obviously cannot be used ("NOW...

...As the addicts and the basket cases of the sixties began to add up, we all learned what a crock that was...

...Computers make excellent learning tools in some areas because they are nonjudgmental (that is, not like people...

...today's legal computers will arrange citations for briefs and run Corpus Juris Secundum in the wink of an eye...

...Some "talking" computers are already on the market, but they can only repeat programmed phrases, and the user cannot address them in any meaningful way...

...David Sudnow, author of Pilgrim in the Microworld, was a sociology teacher at Berkeley during the free-speech days...

...At the end of 2010, Dave departs for some other-worldly higher plane to await some unspecified great event that will happen near the end of time...

...It's where the computer fits in our quest for companionship, and our recurring bad dream of loneliness...

...to pets...

...The lawyer may be well-served by a small legal computer at the office...

...It couldn't possibly provide true companionship, or the emotional heights experienced by lovers, friends, parents, and offspring...

...All of which is to say, most of what passes between human beings could easily be programmed into a computer...

...Owing to a smaller family, the child of the future may not have the experience of brothers or sisters, either...

...Asking questions of a computer, for instance, is reasonably similar to asking questions of another person—better, maybe, because the computer answers exactly what is asked, doesn't grumble, and doesn't mouth off...

...A commercial for Atari's 5200 has a single young man, alone, matched against the machine in a featureless enclosure...

...All things considered this is not half bad...

...What matters is not what computers do, but how they do it...

...Where will his social skills come from...

...Imagine how much more attractive it will be when the computer illusion of human interaction is refined enough to pass for the real thing at its lower levels...

...Speaking computers could be made to greet their users in the morning by saying, "What's the weather like out there...

...Among people who aren't emotionally involved, conversation is usually pure routine—"what time do you need time," "I'll have the fish," "turn left three degrees...

...Working with a computer, all movement and dancing words, is reasonably similar to working with another person—but easier, because it's less emotionally demanding, safer, and you certainly don't have to look your best...

...And so the search is always on for a new companion, or at least a new replacement for companionship...

...In nearly all movie and television science fiction, it's been noted, the computers and the robots have far more personality than the living characters...

...On the other hand, he won't learn anything about getting along with his peers, about handling pressure, about camaraderie and coordinated action...

...These are more than fine points of the conventions of sci-fi scriptwriting: they reflect on how, today, we are beginning to relate to our electronic companions...

...The user can ask his small computer questions, give it orders, make it flash and meep, and cause graphic displays to appear in a sophisticated update of the Etch-A-Sketch...

...It's only natural...

...A sales presentation may be quite well-done, for instance, and still not work, even though it "should...

...SOFTWARE FOR LOSERS...

...This sheds light on part of the business community's hunger for computers...

...In contrast, say, to beer commercials, like "Welcome to Miller Time," which shows hale friends in hearty communion, video game advertisements rely on grim manversusmachine confrontations...

...the operator can even tell his computer secrets by putting personal information into the memory...

...Jumping off key words in the user's reply, the computer would consult its memory for an appropriate follow-up remark...

...The computer is an ethereal world that welcomes creativity—not exactly what Timothy Leary had in mind, but better than nothing...

...Computers are safer than drugs or drink...

...when you're away he misses you and when you're present he feels joy...

...The kid who plays computer games rather than real games like football won't get laughed at by the other kids if he's too small or slow, won't get hurt, and won't come home all muddy (so lots of middle-class moms may laud this as a positive development...

...The context was entirely self-centered, as if, through the computer, you could enjoy the company of a group consisting solely of you...

...The prevailing air is anonymity, not too different from the Times Square...

...Imitating human speech, and human interaction, will not require "thinking," just a sophisticated program of situation-cognizance and a good library of comments to make in given situations...

...When the video game industry started, its first products were conceived as moving versions of the traditional game arrangement—two people would play against each other, only through the medium of a machine instead of on a board...

...Early videogames such as Pong encouraged two or more people to participate...

...How many times can you see your overdrawn checkbook converted into a sine wave before the thrill wears off...

...We acquired, through childhood in the affluent turmoil of the sixties, an especially sharp knowledge of where we are, but few clues as to where we belong...

...Again, this has nothing to do with artificial intelligence, merely with chip capacity...

...It's a relief, and more than a little flattering, to finally find an area of life that reveres the brains we always thought we had...

...If this sounds like a Big Brother nightmare, think about it from the lonely person's perspective...

...But computers aren't...

...A computer's reactions aren't real, merely realistic...

...The computer would only be acting out stage directions, of course, but acting them in a very convincing and convenient way...

...Pets and booze, on the other hand, are far too difficult to shake...

...Mattel Intellivision's advertisements offer George Plimpton declaring, in his Duchy of Grand Fenwick accent, that his games are intellectually superior...

...Moments of lyrical expression, or deep emotional contact, are rare even in the most intimate love affairs...

...it will never turn on you, and it will never insist on talking about what it wants to talk about or doing what it wants to do...

...But what happens when people start going straight to computers for their companionship, bypassing the danger of hurt but also the hope of transport...

...But it could keep that mundane chatter—the background noise of human relations—going at all times, providing an illusion of companionship...

...With the great college expansion having taught so many to love the abstract and scoff at the real, even those who don't have unusual IQs or artistic gifts may slide into arrested emotional development...

...Powerful new game-players like the Atari 5200 make possible cartridges that aren't just spinandshoot, but that involve strategy, contemplation, and changing circumstances...

...Some are supposed to be toys (video games) and others have enough playful qualities to serve as toys...

...It is not our urgent need for bar graphs, but our aching hearts, that is drawing computers into many American lives...

...they're smarter than dogs or parakeets...

...And the compelling power of computers will become much greater...

...While those who substitute computers for people today may do so as a response to some failure or hurt, children of generations to come may go straight to computers for companionship, never really taking their chances with people at all...

...Similar events are taking place in government, the military, and other fields of life...

...Computer games circumvent this problem by providing both the means to play alone and the illusion of someone to play with—by meeping, blinking, changing, and making moves that at least appear spontaneous...

...Seekers of companionship have turned to others like themselves...

...You can't fail to get along with a computer...

...But sales took off only when computer games were redesigned so people could play alone...

...Perhaps oddly, even the dropouts of the sixties are making their peace with computers...

...C3PO was more intriguing and less predictable than Luke Skywalker...

...or"Sleep well last night...

...Maybe for a lost soul, badly hurt by the world and its unreliable occupants, computers are a haven we should not begrudge...

...So modern managers are more and more willing to retreat to the realms where "should" is the only factor—computers...

...My speculation, however, is that the hippie heart responds to computers mainly in emotional ways...

...and 5 a.m., to assume its owner hasn't slept well and greet him at daybreak with, "What's the matter, something on your mind...

...Computer firms, Susan Chace reported recently in The Wall Street Journal, are enjoying substantial sales to counter-culture types...

...Pong, the first video game, matched two or four players, as did almost all of Atari's early games, like Combat (two tanks) and Indy 500 (two race cars...

...Computers have many kinds of appeal, primarily, of course, practical appeal...

...The business manager, too, may need a computer at work, but when he brings one into his home— where there is no payroll to manage—there must be some other explanation...

...More specifically the personal computer, the smaller machine that's designed to fulfill an individual's informationprocessing needs, but which is already fulfilling emotional needs as well...

...No one talks to anyone else—there's so much bleeping and blasting going on, talking is impossible anyway— and no one pays any attention to what others are doing...

...It isn't just the practical value...

...But when he buys another computer for his home, something else is afoot...

...Most important, since they are not living and have no expectations, we incur no obligations to them...

...Molding others in your own image seldom works, however, or at least not for long...

...Ours is a society where increasingly thousands— if not millions—of people live alone, fearing their neighbors, and with no social ties to family or church...

...If you spend the first 25 years of life in school, being constantly reminded by generous, self-sacrificing parents that school is the only hope of a better tomorrow, when you get to tomorrow you'd like it to be as familiar as possible, and what's familiar is school...

...Computers are already helping rekindle the national interest in science and mathematics that helped make the country strong and prosperous but waned with the unleashing of more "relevant" curriculum...

...Now there is one, the computer...

...Anyone who has used a good computer has sensed this secret allure...

...if talking back to these machines made a difference, all you'd want to say would be, "Shut up...

...Consider, for instance, that perhaps 90 percent of the regular communication between people—even two close people, like husband and wife—is mundane...

...The addition of sensors (once they are perfected) may enable coming computers to know how you slept, or what the weather is out there...

...to the bottle...

...Programming at this level is still a challenge today, but by the end of the 1980s, it will be a parlor trick...

...Today's computers, even with their keyboardaccess and restricted programs, already provide some illusion of companionship (note how words like "delightful" and "cute" are applied to the new round of "user-friendly" machines such as Apple's Lisa, which flashes messages on her screen...

...The computer program is, by nature, the reflected image of the programmer's desires...

...Computer game manufacturers finally realized that their market appeal lay not in colors and motion, but in the fact that their computers could substitute for an opponent...

...to while away the intervening hours, he selects as his companion, you guessed it, HAL the computer...

...although computers are fabulous for some uses, many people who buy them don't really need them...

...In fact, computers crave it...