When did the technological menace that stalks popular culture shift from being carbon-based to entirely silicon? When did we evolve the perception that fictional computers could receive human-type personalities? When we reviewed Ray Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines, eight and half years ago, we felt that artificial intelligence would be the foundations of a new era of virtual worlds, their actual function and purpose as yet unclear. It was a somewhat misguided idea. Instead, we have learnt to become ever more emotionally attached to our machines, a development that Kurzweil perhaps didn't bargain for in his original analysis.

Stephen Fry made an excellent point late last year, writing about how this state of affairs was essentially kick-started by Apple. At the heart of the iPhone, Fry wrote, is 'the fundamental understanding that is Steve Jobs and Jony Ive’s (Apple's Chief Designer) great contribution to digital (and therefore cultural) life in our time – that human beings, willy-nilly, forge relationships even with inanimate objects and that those relationships, being human, take on all the colours of emotion: it is in our DNA for this to be the case.'

How could this be overlooked for so long? Proponents of 'true' artificial intelligence were once rigorously focused on eking out logic and clarity in human-computer interaction (the foundations of the Turing Test - see the halting conversation with Eliza, recorded in things 6). As a result, we fill in the blanks for ourselves, assigning personality traits to the inanimate and dumb, extrapolating a relationship from the tiny flashes of coincidence that define and extend our bonding with an object - the files apparently withheld out of spite, for example, or blaming a slow connection on some inherent machine stupidity.

Supporting this imposition of a hidden agenda has been half a century or so of fictional computer personalities, running in tandem with computer history. However, there has always been a dark side to this anthropomorphic feast, as the supercomputer turned psychopath and monster. In early science fiction, the 'alien' element had been robotic, from The Day the Earth Stood Still to Forbidden Planet, where the character of Robby the Robot comes to epitomise the mid-50s view of what a robot would look like and what it would be able to do. This was the era of rampant futurism, when a robot in every home seemed a very real possibility. Ultimately, such optimism evaporated in the face of insurmountable technical obstacles, to be replaced by robots as a science fiction trope and a hobbyist's preserve, two spheres that have been forever kept apart by practicality and cost.

As computing power increased, the idea that a villain - or at least a malevolent force - need not be a living entity started to propagate in speculative fiction. What was the first evil computer, that transitional cultural fossil? The list of computers in fiction shows that by the mid-1950s, it was the data-sorting and management ability of computers that led to their eventual demonisation. As a character says in Isaac Asimov's The Evitable Conflict (1950): 'The Machines are not super-brains in Sunday supplement sense,—although they are so pictured in the Sunday supplements. It is merely that in their own particular province of collecting and analyzing a nearly infinite number of data and relationships thereof, in nearly infinitesimal time, they have progressed beyond the possibility of detailed human control'.

The same year, Kurt Vonnegut wrote EPIPAC, the tale of a computer becoming sentient, emotionally attached and ultimately suicidal, while Colossus, a 1966 novel, featured computers hell-bent on world security at the expense of human life. Evil machines were extrapolations of evil government, systems that sought efficiency at the expense of freedom and personal expression. The book also became a film, Colossus: The Forbin Project (video, arriving at around the same time as the screen treatment of Arthur C.Clarke's 2001 (expanded from his story The Sentinel through the addition, we think, of the Hal plot element).

Clark retained the theme of misapplied self-preservation through HAL's murderous activities, focusing on a relatively small scale - a space mission - rather than an entire city or planet. This is a fairly arbitrary dating, but sometime during the 1970s the term 'supercomputer' came into usage, apparently coined by Seymour Cray, the founder of Cray Research. Cray's products were a public relations triumph; giant, almost architectonic devices that used moody lighting, shiny materials and faceted forms reminiscent of post-modernist/metabolist architecture or ancient Mayan temples - they were mysterious objects to be worshipped. Dubbed 'supercomputers', Cray's products immediately caught the public attention, thanks to high profile, media-friendly applications like the creation of effects for The Last Starfighter by Digital Productions.

Being 'super' humanised the computer, ascribing it powers that many were quick to anthropomorphosise, even deify. Cray founded his company in 1972. Kubrick's 2001 dates from a few years before, with the character of HAL evolving from NASA's use of computers for spaceship control, developed since the Gemini Program (video). From there it became de rigeur to have a computer 'character' aboard a space ship, from HAL 9000 in 2001 (voiced by Douglas Rain with all the quiet precision of the sociopath), Mother in Alien, through to Icarus in Sunshine, even Slave in Blake's 7 and Bomb 20 in Dark Star. The computer had stopped being an inanimate 'thing' and become a sentient being, to be romanticised, feared and mistrusted.

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Other things and related links. Visit the HP Museum, or Vintage Computer, or the IBM Archives. There's also the Pioneers of Soviet Computing and the frankly amazing DigiBarn Computer Museum, with its vast collection of machinery and associated print and ephemera. These 1995 screenshots of AlphaWord show you around an early 3D world, a virtual place that is now as lost as any of the real lost civilisations or cities around the world.

A vast pulp gallery / Hal's Legacy: 2001's computer as dream and reality, a 1997 book by David Stork that has its own, lovingly preserved, _enhanced_ web site / a collection of speculative fiction tropes / the B9 Robot Builders' Club / A New Zero, free online war game crammed into less than half a megabyte (via RPS).

The Repository of Records, a weblog / secret messages, an idea via stephanie's weblog / slow muse, a weblog / postcards for sale, amongst other things / photographs by John Davies of Rachel Whiteread's House, a now iconic emblem of lost Britain / on the virtual proliferation of watermelons.

Labels: computers, technology

posted by things at 21:00 / 5 comments