3. Alice and the Assault on Reality (Part 3 of 12)
You have landed right in the middle of John Mulholland’s parody of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. If you wish to start at the very beginning of their adventures together, you should click here to follow them down the rabbit-hole.
Chapter Three — A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale
They were indeed a queer-looking party that assembled on the bank — the birds with draggled feathers, the animals with their fur clinging close to them, and all dripping wet, cross, and uncomfortable.
The first question of course was, how to get dry again: They had a consultation about this, and after a few minutes it seemed quite natural to Alice to find herself talking familiarly with them, as if she had known them all her life. [13]
In a journal entry in 1832, Ralph Waldo Emerson reflected that “Dreams and beasts are two keys by which we are to find out the secrets of our nature… they are like comparative anatomy. They are our test objects.” [14]
Sigmund Freud would measure human rationale against the dream. Charles Darwin would insist we measure human nature against nature itself — the world of birds and beasts as our ancestors and kin.
If Emerson had lived at the end of the twentieth century, he would surely have seen the computer as a new test object. Like dreams and beasts, the computer erodes the boundaries.
It is a mind that is not yet a mind.
It is inanimate and interactive.
It is an object, ultimately a mechanism, but it behaves, interacts, and seems in a certain sense to know. It confronts us with an uneasy sense of kinship.
After all, we too behave, interact, and seem to know, and yet we are ultimately made up of matter and programmed DNA.
We think we can think; but can it think?
Can it have the capacity to feel?
Can it be ever said to be alive?
“I understand how the cat works about as much as I understand how the computer works, which is hardly at all. The difference is that by its behavior the cat creates a relationship with me, whereas by its blank façade, the computer rejects all possibility of a personal relationship.” [15]
One hundred years ago electric motors were large ‘stand-alone’ devices, constructed from machined parts or purchased and installed by trained mechanics. Over several decades the design and operation of electric motors became more standardized, their power requirements and internal mechanisms miniaturized and their manufacture and sale commoditized.
By 1918, the Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog offered a 5-pound Home Motor, suitable for various applications, for only US $8.75 — equivalent to about $85 or £55 today.
In those early days, the new Home Motor must have been the subject of excited discussions at work, in cafes, and around the dinner table, in much the same way that computers and the Internet are today.
Of course today the Home Motor is no longer the cultural icon it once was.
Indeed electric motors have become virtually invisible, embedded inside thousands of everyday products, from hair dryers and pencil sharpeners to dishwashers and toys. Hardly obsolete, the Home Motor has become a victim of its own success, ignored precisely because of its ubiquity. It has become a central — albeit invisible — fact of everyday life.
Can it be that, as the electric motor went so the Internet will follow? But more to the point: what will it take for the Internet to become so embedded in social and economic life, so central to everyday communications and commerce, that it becomes as invisible a feature of daily life as the electric motor?
We may have the answer to that question sooner than we think.
A virtually unknown technology is about to be deployed on the Internet. This technology could rapidly transform the Internet into a medium with genuine mass-market penetration. It will not only greatly expand the Internet’s role as a mass consumer medium, but will also change it into a powerful industrial force that will reshape market dynamics.
This miracle technology is known as ‘embedded systems’ — simply they are tiny crash-proof computers embedded or hardwired into larger products to handle their control functions [16].
Already used in a host of industrial and consumer products, from anti-lock brakes to video recorders and microwaves, the advantage of embedded systems is that because they are dedicated to the performance of a specific task or group of tasks, they can be optimized to deliver a level of speed, reliability, and cost that personal computer hardware and software manufacturers could never achieve.
In fact, 90% of the world’s microprocessors are not used in personal computers, but hidden inside everyday household or electrical products [17].
Embedded software now offers automated Internet connectivity with about one hundredth the memory that Windows and other personal computer operating systems require, at one-tenth the cost.
This sort of technology offers a vision of a truly universal Internet in which the common artifacts of daily life are all connected via cheap automated software in a global network — the embedded Internet.
This is where the Internet becomes real, as ubiquitous as the electric motor or the telephone, where all sorts of devices and systems are linked invisibly together.
‘What is a Caucus-race?’ said Alice; not that she wanted to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that somebody ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
‘Why,’ said the Dodo, ‘the best way to explain it is to do it.’ (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)
First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (‘the exact shape doesn’t matter,’ it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no ‘One, two, three, and away!’, but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. [18]
Next: Chapter Four — The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill
References
[13] The quotation is from Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Macmillan & Co., 1995), pp.29–30.
[14] The quotation is from a journal entry by Emerson in January 1832. The passage reads in full “Dreams and beasts are two keys by which we are to find out the secrets of our nature. All mystics use them. They are like comparative anatomy. They are our test objects.” See Joel Porte, ed., Emerson in His Journals (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1982), p.81.
[15] John Thackara, Italy’s New Dialectical Materialist (Blueprint, no.70, 1990). The quotation is from Eizo Manzini at the ICSID conference in Nagoya, where he compares the relationship he has with a black cat to the one he has with a computer, in the form of a black box.
[16] See John Rennie, The Solid-State Century (New York: Scientific American Inc., 1997); Robert W. Keyes, “The Future of the Transistor,” pp.46–56. For the past 50 years, transistors have grown ever smaller and less expensive. But how low can they go? Are there limits to how much more these devices can shrink before basic physics gets in the way? This year more than half a billion transistors will be manufactured every second.
[17] See John Rennie, The Solid-State Century (New York: Scientific American Inc., 1997); Brad Friedlander and Martyn Roetter, “The Future of the PC,’ pp.106–112. The computer will disperse into personal networks of savvy, doting appliances at both home and office, sharing data among themselves and with others.
[18] The quotation is from Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Macmillan & Co., 1995), pp.32–33.
