“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave”
Kubric didn’t predict much correctly about the year 2001. But he got one thing right: computers would not always do what we told them to.
A guy just yelled “FUCK,” smacked his Dell laptop, and stormed out of Deering library.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.”
How many times has your computer failed to do what you asked it to do? They’re not diabolical. They don’t plot against us. But, sometimes, they just don’t do what you ask them to.
Think about the way that kid yelled and cursed at his computer. The way people depend on computers but hate them at the same time. If their computers were their girlfriends, I’d say the relationship was extremely unhealthy.
We’ve all been Dave. We’ve all dealt with HAL. This is the future. Hello.
When these human/computer misunderstandings occur, people say, “I don’t understand computers.” But that’s not really the problem. The problem is, computers don’t understand us.
This isn’t too surprising:
Think about what a cursor is. The cursor vaguely represents a pointing finger. Essentially, you’re able to talk to your computer by pointing at things and saying “do that.” Try communicating with other people using only your pointer finger for a day and see how often you get what you want.
Of course, we also have our keyboards. But we don’t use our keyboards to communicate with our computer, per se. We use it for shortcuts to trigger commands, of course, but these are functions accessible from menu items. When we use keyboard to trigger commands, we use them as a mouse replacement. Shortcuts are more of a convenience than an upgrade.
In the old days, the days before my generation started using computers, people communicated with machines entirely through their keyboards. Typing out commands and hitting enter. Sure, the average DOS or UNIX user only knew a few commands. But someone who mastered these commands could do extremely complicated, multi-step interactions with single ‘sentences.’
Sure, computers weren’t speaking our language. These power users had to learn the computer’s language, and that complexity prevented most people from learning how to use a computer.
But these power-users were doing something interesting: they were using language with a computer.They were giving real orders in unambiguous terms. They were doing more than point and saying “do.”
Today, some people still use these commands even on modern computers.
And that brings me to the story of the ancient wizards.
I worked with James Kyle at a lab in UCLA. He runs the technical side of a brain-imaging lab, and he’s been working with computers for a long time. He’s been working on UNIX before UNIX meant OS X. And he told me about duels.
Back then, there were hacker duels. Before hackers were a problem (or, before the evening news knew what hackers were and how to exploit a fear of them), hackers got together in clubs, wired their computers together through routers, and did battle.
A hacker would try to retrieve a file from the opponent’s computer, and simultaneously defend the file on his/her (but probably his) own computer. And they did this before mice, before graphical user interfaces. Keyboard only.
These people did extremely complex operations extremely quickly. They engaged in a dialog with their computers. They weren’t doing word processing or graphic design or making music. They said something, the computer responded, and so on. They couldn’t do what they were doing without terminal. They couldn’t dick around in a graphical interface, finding the right commands, entering keyboard shortcuts. Sometimes they wrote short programs inline. It was that fast.
They did magic. It was easy for them. They spoke the forgotten language.
Of course, only nerds learned how to do this. The majority of humans didn’t want to learn how to talk to computers like this. So Microsoft invented Windows, and the rest is history.
A mouse that clicked. It was easy for people to learn. But much less powerful. We sacrificed a lot of power for ease of use. And our punishment was the ambiguity that drives us insane.
Nobody wants to go back to command-line. A lot of programmers use terminal for a lot of things, but that’s about it.
If we want to go back to the power the old wizards had, we need computers to learn our language instead of the other way around. But that’s hard to do. It’s crucial, but hard to do.
My point here is, the next revolution in computing isn’t processor speed, memory, or any of that. It’ll all get bigger and faster and cheaper and smaller in all the right ways, but that’s not the revolution.
The revolution is how we talk. Real power comes from how we communicate with our computers. If we can describe to our machines what we want them to do, we could have a healthy, working relationship.
Anyone will be able to write programs. Anyone will be able to use computers with more or less the same skill. Anyone could do any task on a computer.
If we can use the magic of our natural language, we could all be wizards. Because no one will have to learn to understand computers if they learn to understand us.
