1. Alice and the Assault on Reality (Part 1 of 12)
25 years ago — sometime before Neo met Morpheus — John Mulholland followed Alice down the rabbit-hole to see what the fantastical tales and riddles of her Wonderland could teach us about our new and emerging digital wonderland.
Today the arrival of powerful new artificial intelligence tools, multiplying at a pace, is becoming harder and harder to process.
Suddenly, AI is everywhere all at once.
Parodying the twelve chapters from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, these 25-year-old adventures in ‘Alice and the Assault on Reality’ seem more poignant now than ever — I hope you find value in them too.
Chapter One — Down the Rabbit-Hole
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversation in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?’ [1]
Once upon a time, there was only one way to tell a story.
Well, that is not quite true. There were always lots of ways to tell a story. It could be told with laughter or with tears. It could be told in a sacred whisper or with a profane roar. It could be as old as the hills, or as fresh as a daisy.
There were a million ways for a storyteller and their listeners to make a story happen. But a story was always a voice; someone saying the words; someone listening to them. That was one way to tell a story.
Now, it’s more complicated.
To begin, I must introduce you to a quick-witted, determined, and thoroughly modern hero, who knows a good deal about moving through a land of wonders wild and new, and in friendly chats with birds and beasts we half believe are true: Alice, a character in children’s literature who, like Christopher Robin and Pooh, will remain forever young [2].
In this curious tale, Alice and her adventures provide a play with spacetime that presents the reader with a parallel Wonderland. The spaces between the two Wonderlands are there to add depth, and to provide a contribution from you, the reader.
We understand that doubling the length of a fish multiplies its weight at least eight times. We know that suspension cables break after a certain length because they cannot support their own weight.
However, we are almost clueless about the fractal nature of the digital world and how it will change the shape of our reality. Yet the effect will be no less substantial than if we changed the force of gravity.
The current generation of designers finds themselves faced with what amounts to a new world — a world of information; but we, the generation now being trained will see that new world dissolve.
There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, ‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!’ (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. [3]
Sherry Turkle argues in Life on the Screen that the computer screen is where we project ourselves into our own dreams, dreams where we imagine ourselves as producer, director, and star [4].
Computer screens may have been the location of fantasies, but not only are screens morphing beyond the desktop, but technology and its rapid advance is threatening to tear apart our closely-knit web of reality and turn it into nonsense.
Some say that we are learning the techniques of communication at the expense of the depth of learning — others say that new technologies will enable us to rewrite the rule book altogether.
“Clocks brought more than the ability to measure time precisely; they made time into something ‘divisible’ and abstract.
Time was no longer what it took to get a job done. Time was no longer tied to the movement of the sun or the moon or to the changing of a season. Time was what it took for hands to move on a mechanism.
With digital timekeeping devices, our notion of time is once again being touched by technical changes. Time is made more abstract still. Time is no longer a process; time is information.” [5]
In 1984, Sherry Turkle illustrated how technology catalyzes changes, not only in what we do but in how we think. It changes people’s awareness of themselves, of one another, and of their relationship with the world.
The new machines that stand behind the flashing digital signal challenge our notions, not only of time and distance but of mind.
Once upon a time, the computer had a clear identity as a calculating machine. This image suggested that no matter how complicated a computer might seem, what happened inside it could be mechanically unpacked.
These computational ideas were presented as stories of how the world worked. They provided a unifying picture and analyzed complicated things by breaking them down into simpler parts. But the lessons of computing today have little to do with calculation and rules; instead, they are about simulation, navigation, and interaction.
As the processing power of computers increased, it became possible to use that power to build user interfaces that hid the raw machine from its user.
These new opaque interfaces — most specifically, the Mac — suggested that the search for depth and mechanisms was futile and that it was more realistic to explore the world of shifting surfaces.
The power of the Mac was in how its attractive simulations and screen icons helped organize unambiguous access to programs and data; insert a floppy disk and its icon automatically appears on the desktop so you can simply click on it to access its contents.
Culturally the Mac served as a carrier for these ideas, but the new opaque interfaces represent more than just a technical change. They pointed to a new kind of experience in which we do not so much command machines, as enter into conversations with them. We were invited to interact with technology in the same way as we interact with each other.
These experiences have come to dominate the field; no longer associated only with Macs, they are universal in personal computing [6]. We are moving towards a culture of simulation in which we are increasingly comfortable with substituting representations of reality for the real.
It was all very well to say ‘Drink me,’ but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry.
‘No, I’ll look first,’ she said, ‘and see whether it’s marked “poison” or not’; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked ‘poison,’ it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.
However, this bottle was not marked ‘poison,’ so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off. [7]
25 years ago, I theorized that our relationship with technology was much like the time Alice found a little bottle with the words “Drink me” printed on a paper label — and that like Alice, our future with technology may not be marked “poison” but we are as clueless as she was about how it will shape the nature of our reality.
The subject is enormous, and what I have written is too short cover it in detail, but I have touched on many aspects of the problem. Each aspect has been simplified, but together they add up to a picture that gives some indication of the vastness and complexity of our future with technology.
Next: Chapter Two — The Pool of Tears
References
[1] The quotation is from Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Macmillan & Co., 1995), pp.2–3.
[2] Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Macmillan & Co., 1995); Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–98). The Reverend Dodgson — he was ordained in 1861 — translated his first two names into Latin as Carolus Ludovicus, inverted their order, and then retranslated them back into English as Lewis Carroll. This is one example of the inventiveness of the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
There was also a sequel: Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There was published in 1871, also with John Tenniel’s illustrations. Adults and children were captivated by both books and have continued to be ever since. For the first time, children’s stories were sheer fun and wit, without the moralizing element that Victorian writers so often felt compelled to include.
[3] The quotation is from Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Macmillan & Co., 1995), p.2.
[4] Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996)
[5] Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), pp.2–3. See also Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1934), particularly the discussion of time in “The Monastery and the Clock,’ pp.12–18.
[6] Microsoft Windows was announced on 10 November 1983, and shipped on 20 November 1985.
[7] The quotation is from Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Macmillan & Co., 1995), pp.4–5.
