Computers Still Have a Lot to Learn, Author Says

If computers are now so incredibly tiny, so unbelievably fast and so mercifully inexpensive, why, you may wonder, are sales of these smart little machines currently in such a big, moronic slump?

Whatever happened to the microelectronics revolution that was supposedly going to transform our lives? Or at least bring us instantaneous electronic mail. And show each and every one of us each and every one of us through the wonder of video teleconferencing. Or if we didn’t want to see anybody, then these machines would fetch us newspapers--or books from any library in the world--and toss them right onto our television screens.

Is call forwarding all there is? How come our cars can tell us what to do but we can’t tell them?

“Computers are not smart enough yet for people,” author Howard Rheingold explains. “People think they’re stupid. It’s the computer that’s stupid.”

Or as he puts it in his new book, “Tools for Thought, the People & Ideas Behind the Next Computer Revolution” (Simon & Schuster: $17.95),” . . . the burden of communication should be on the machine. A computer that is difficult to use is a computer that’s too dumb to understand what you want.”

Revolution Is Sure to Come

Rheingold, owner and operator of more than a few of these idiotic machines and visitor to the most exotic research and development departments in Silicon Valley, has not given up on the computer revolution.

This day, over a lunch of hot chicken salad at a charming, decidedly low-tech bistro within walking distance of his San Francisco home, Rheingold is still very excited about the marvels sure to come. Living room walls, for instance, that will tell you “anything you want to know, simulate anything you want to see, connect you with any person or group of people you want to communicate with, and even help you find out what it is you want to know when you aren’t entirely sure.”

Rheingold is an enthusiast if there ever was one. But he’s sorry people were oversold on how soon all this would be arriving. And he’s distressed that the real visionaries behind the electronic age are still largely unknown--even among many of the hottest hackers in the computer industry.

So he’s written a book to remind people of the dreams and schemes (most of them still unaccomplished) of the industry’s original mavericks. And by these computerists he does not mean Apple’s Steve Jobs or Atari founder Nolan Bushnell. To Rheingold, they’re more popularizers than pioneers.

When Rheingold, who has written on science and technology for Esquire, Playboy and Psychology Today as well as co-authored several books on computers and creativity, talks about innovators, he means little-known cult figures such as Doug Engelbart, the creator of word processing, co-inventor of the “mouse” and an early proponent of the notion that computers can be used for “augmentation” of human intellect as well as for automation or labor-saving purposes. Or Ted Nelson, the gadfly inventor whose ideas are typically marketed by others and who once suggested that computers should have been named Oogabooga Boxes--”that way we could get the fear out in the open and laugh at it.”

On the work of Engelbart, Nelson and others he considers worth consideration, Rheingold writes: “If the predictions of some of the people in this book continue to be accurate, our whole environment will suddenly take on a kind of intelligence of its own sometime between now and the turn of the century.

“Fifteen years from now there will be a microchip in your telephone receiver with more computing power than all the technology the Defense Department can buy today. All the written knowledge in the world will be one of the items to be found in every schoolchild’s pocket.”

None of which has even begun to happen yet, by Rheingold’s calculations. Most of the world is still living in the electronic equivalent of the horse-and-buggy days, he says.

Like the First Cars

He sees the most powerful of today’s computers not unlike the first automobiles, the ones that had those hand cranks in front that relatively few Americans were willing to purchase. Computers are similarly still too much trouble for most people, Rheingold observes, and at this point it’s easier for most people to jump on a horse or ride a bike, technologically speaking.

The analogy is a broad one: “Computer enthusiasts speak their own language, they fiddle endlessly with their computers, they do all this mysterious stuff and they claim it has great utility, that it’s going to change the world,” the author says. “Back in the days of the first automobiles, people thought that these people who spoke their own language and wore special costumes and knew how to repair their cars were just a passing phase. There were no Model Ts, no standardization, no roads. Like computers, every automobile had a different way of operating. There weren’t real tires. There wasn’t a highway system.”

And just as it’s currently difficult to estimate the eventual impact of computers on society, Rheingold notes, it was virtually impossible to predict back when there were just a few cars such eventual developments as suburbs, drive-in movies, fast foods, service stations, oil refineries or a system of roads that can get a person anywhere.

Amplifying Mentality

That’s why people like Rheingold still think we’re in for enormous changes when computers finally get smart enough for us. And they’re betting that the profound differences will come not in the predictable labor-saving applications of the computer (automation), but in the fuzzier, often indirect area of augmentation (how the computer can be used to amplify the powers of the mind, just as levers and pulleys amplify the power of muscles).

Sometimes augmentation is achieved incidentally through automation. As Rheingold explains, being able to do things faster may foster both quantitative and qualitative change. He cites the process of speed that turns a sequence of still pictures into a film: “There’s a point, like 24 frames a second, where it comes alive for you.”

Electronic spread sheets and word processing are, in Rheingold’s view, “real crude” examples of augmentation powers of the computer in that they allow large numbers of variables to be moved around and played with in ways that weren’t feasible with mere adding machines and typewriters. With the computer, he says, people have the luxury of considering cutting and trying things that they might never have considered before.

“What’s the difference between a human being who lives in Manhattan and knows how to take a bus or check out a book from the library and an inhabitant in the New Guinea highlands who wouldn’t survive 10 minutes in Manhattan but knows how to find his way though the jungle?” he asks rhetorically. “Both of these people are equipped with the same hardware in their brains. The software is different. They’ve augmented their intellects by using these tools their cultures have developed.”

But when it comes to comparing the software inside the human brain with that being invented outside, Rheingold is the first to admit computers have fallen pitifully short, even with the some of the simplest assignments.

“People have a lot of misconceptions about computers as giant brains,” he says. “My 9-month-old daughter can do something no computer in the world can do. And believe me, the Defense Department is working on it. She can recognize my face when she sees me. A lot of people think computers are smarter than we are. In many ways they’re not. The potential is there and people can get excited about it, but potential is only potential. Computers are still not smart enough for people. That’s the bottom line.”

But as more and more bottom lines go electronic, that could change--relatively overnight, given the centuries behind today’s evolution.

As Rheingold muses, “Say there’s a million 16-year-olds who really understand this stuff. . . .”