The Interface: Slouching Toward the Future
or
Guess Who'S Coming to Dinner?

As a culture, we have been blazing this Interface trail from the very beginning. Tool maker par excellence, we seized the day with ingenious implements, extending our influence over a Nature "red in tooth and claw" -- to borrow from Tennyson.

The human race with its tool-making proclivities has been constructing an "artificial environment" to protect itself from Nature's indifference from the very first whimper. Any cry for a return to some idyllic pastoral scene of bucolic innocence and cosmic harmony fails to comprehend that, short of the apocryphal Garden of Eden, the evolution of human life has largely been a violent struggle with the natural elements and each other. Or as Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century English philosopher, so succinctly phrased it: [In a state of nature] "No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Harmony with Nature, which is not congruent with culture, is neither desirable nor possible. The very essence of man, the tool maker, is the birth of the "artificial", that is, that which didn't exist before in Nature. Whether this constitutes cosmic hubris or cosmic creation is moot, but the cultural journey is exceptionally, perhaps quintessentially, a "real" series of accomplishments in the "artificial". Sentimental longing for some idealized pastoral existence is the mark of intellectual bankruptcy, slinking toward not Bethlehem but extinction. Human transcendence is not conditioned on rejection of technology!

By means of our tools and machines we can, if we choose, end the ancient struggle for food, clothing, and shelter -- not to mention health care. From the hand-held implements of our forebears to the encompassing technology of computerized cars, aircraft and space vehicles, we have literally extended the human sensorium, creating, as it were, a new, evolutionary path.

While there are a number of factors involved in the evolution of human societies, the one factor which tends to dominate the process is technological innovation. Marshall McLuhan, among others, demonstrated how technologies foster new human environments. Historically, technological breakthroughs, such as the invention of the wheel, the smelting of metallic ores, the printing press, the steam engine, electrical and nuclear power, have all ultimately transformed society, dramatically affecting the manner in which society organizes and perceives itself.

Once again such a worldwide social revolution is in progress and the technology most responsible for its origins and continuance is the advent of the computer, especially the versatile microcomputer. While most of the Industrial Revolution technologies expanded man's muscle power, the introduction of the computer has enlarged the province of the human mind, making it possible not only for one person to sift through literal mountains of data, but it has also extended our ability to control and increase the efficiency of our older and latest technological tools.

The artificial environment, that powerful human construct against the vicissitudes of Nature, is now perched at a fractal point of history. The Interface between us and our technical creations is at that stage of intimacy that rightfully concerns (and sometimes frightens) us, for we can no longer beg the question of design. Our computerized conveyance, like a magic carpet, is ready to go, quickly, efficiently, even fatally -- but where are we going?

Everything that we stand for is being exponentially magnified by the hidden designs, by the unspoken values, behind the Interface. And, like the portrait of Dorian Gray, we have stashed the reflection of our selves away in the attic, hoping that it really isn't so! But it is becoming increasingly difficult to disguise the evidence from the world audience.

Our global communications network reaches out and touches most of us daily. Tiananmen Square, Chernobyl, Gangs of Eight and the more pedestrian revelations of Donahue, Cavett and Dr. Ruth make it very difficult to hide information from the world audience.

But what is so radical about the introduction of the computer into this complex social fabric is both its incredible facility to enhance each individual's access to information and its ability to interact not only with humans but with other computers and electrical equipment! While television and radio (at present) are vehicles for the dissemination of selected information, the computer permits individual dialogue with others.

Computer bulletin boards, for example, permit people from all over the "plugged in" world to exchange information on every imaginable subject with an intimacy of communication that, in certain respects, more than rivals the telephone -- and, if desired, provides a hardcopy record.

This intimacy afforded by computers is only just beginning. As Mitchell M. Waldrop, in speaking about user reaction to home computers, comments in his book Manmade Minds: The Promise of Artificial Intelligence:

"Users began to feel -- unconsciously, perhaps, but intensely -- that this new machine wasn't just a machine. Tap a key and it would respond. Give it a command and it would act. Learn its secrets and it would perform astonishing feats. Many a late-night hacker (and many a daytime business user as well) was captivated by an exhilarating sense of power, control, and, yes, intimacy with the computer. He began to glimpse the vision of a new kind of computer that would be more than a tool -- that would be an assistant, an adviser, a tutor, and even a friend. As MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle writes in The Second Self, the computer is in fact the first psychological machine: 'A new mind that is not yet a mind,' she calls it, 'a new object, betwixt and between, equally shrouded in superstition as well as science.'"[1]

And getting around they surely are. We are so accustomed to them that we no longer notice their existence. The general conception of a robot is either one of a clanking, metal monster or the one-armed, waldo contraptions which are used in heavy industry and on automobile assembly lines. However, the average home today is filled with "smart" robotic devices. From the morning coffee pot to the microwave oven, the washer/dryer, the dishwasher, the television/VCR, to the car that will take you to work, the computerized robot is a world traveller and extremely ubiquitous.

One of the world's leading roboticists, Hans Moravec, has suggested that man is in the process of disappearing into the machines. "We are," he has stated, "very near the time when virtually no essential human function, physical or mental, will lack an artificial counterpart. The embodiment of this convergence of cultural developments will be the intelligent robot, a machine that can think and act as a human."[2]

Our relationship with these computerized robots becomes even more revealing when we consider the numerous ones which we attach to ourselves daily: hearing aids, artificial hearts, livers, limbs, pacemakers, and an increasing panoply of biosensors to monitor our bodily activities. In fact, we are modifying our bodies with so many computerized robotics that many of us could be considered to be in the initial stages of cyborg growth. (A "cyborg" is a human modified by robotic technology and is short for "cybernetic organism".) The TV character who starred in The Six Million Dollar Man was essentially a cyborg. While most of us are only the "couple hundred dollar" version, it is only a matter of time before many of us will become more expensive cyborgs.

This symbiosis between man and machine has become so close, that for a vast array of activities, "pulling the plug" would be the equivalent of social suicide. For example, could the Census Bureau, the Eastern Power Grid, Chase Manhattan Bank, America's Strategic Air Command, or even a commercial airline pilot survive without computerized robotics? Could a physician monitoring a patient's vital signs, the stock market monitoring financial trading, military pilots flying their sophisticated equipment? The truth of the matter is that the human race is now in a binding partnership with its technology -- a marriage that will not easily be put asunder!

We must begin the difficult task of seeing ourselves in a world which we have already made but fear to recognize. The robots are not only coming, they are here! Technological man (cybernetic man) is here, and, if there is an enemy, in the famous words of Pogo, "It is us."

The advent of the microcomputer, that most democratizing twentieth-century tool invented largely outside the transnational corporate hegemony (IBM initially decided it was a poor investment), has provided the average person an interactive hookup to a new world consciousness -- what Marshall McLuhan termed the "electronic consciousness". While passive acceptance has been the hallmark of the "silent majority", the accelerating technosphere of "plugged in" individuals with heretofore unparalleled access to data is rapidly eroding cultural institutions which are intolerant of diverse opinions.

Marvin Cetron, president of Forecasting International, Inc., and Owen Davies, formerly senior editor at Omni, in their recent book Crystal Globe argue persuasively that one of the major trends now changing the world is a belief in diversity. And diversity is being expanded and augmented by computerized telecommunications which is fomenting worldwide an unparalleled exchange of ideas. Mental enhancements, like the computer, have replaced the club as the dominant tool -- and the computer and its interactive accessories, like domestic animals, don't care about its owner's gender, race, creed, or financial status. The personal computer (PC) is destined to play a major role in the future of a diverse individualism and in the direction which our roboticized world culture is heading. Intelligence-enhancing computers coupled with robotic appliances are already on their way to creating an intimate technology which will assist, and some cases, enable individuals to reach a self-realization beyond anything previously imagined.

In order to understand this important transformation and the technical evolution of the human species, it behooves us to examine the path that brought us to this "transcendental juncture". While both the Industrial Revolution and the rise of science promoted the development of mechanical, robotic devices which simulated semi-intelligent behavior, the idea of artificial creatures resembling humans has a long history.

In the West, literature and art, not restricted by the practical constraints of science, led the way in dreaming about such constructs as golems, homunculi, automatons, and robots. Religious injunctions against graven images and creating artificial creatures, however, impeded actual development. St. Thomas supposedly destroyed an automaton constructed by Albertus Magnus because he thought it could only be the work of the devil. The idea of robots replacing people seemed sacrilegious to many. (Interestingly, the Japanese, who have more robots than any other nation, have no similar historical repugnance to android-like creations.)

Nevertheless, the fascination in Western culture with such images persisted. In 1817, the German writer, E.T.A. Hoffman, portrayed a dancing automaton in his story, "The Sandman", which later formed the basis for the ballet Coppelia. And Mary Shelley, in 1818, took the Promethean theme even further with Frankenstein, which ushered in not only a new literary genre (the oxymoronic "science fiction") but also new images of humanity's destiny. The scientist, whether mad or sane, was the creator of a brave new world, a radical future in which knowledge and mechanical power were intimately joined.

Slowly, it began to be apparent that society possessed tools of such extreme power that foresight in their use became imperative, if disaster and social upheaval were to be contained. It hardly seems coincidental then, in retrospect, that science fiction (SF) was born at about the same time as modern science. SF became a medium to examine ideas, to extrapolate change, and to caution people about unwise uses of their tools.

Like the introduction of the computer into the United States, many initially saw grave perils associated with technology. But technology, like fire, is neither good nor evil of itself. In fact, science and technology can be very valuable socially. SF early on reflected these technical advances which were giving a new power to tools and machines and a new dimension to concepts of time and space. H.G. Wells and Jules Verne tantalized readers with fabulous machines which would, like the present day Starship Enterprise, take men where none had gone before.

David Brin has called SF writers "the little literary cabal [who form] the 'R&D Division' of the 'Department of Myths and Legends' of the new culture. We are the scouts, the ones who explore the edges, who point out dangers that may lurk, not just on the horizon but perhaps some distances beyond it. We warn of possible mistakes and create chilling scenarios to make them mythically believable. And in so doing, we hope to prevent them from coming true."[3] As Albert Einstein once noted, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."

And as our technology has grown ever more sophisticated and daring, our speculative literature has, of necessity, established a dialogue with science. Some of our most complex and compelling contemporary works, such as those by Vonnegut, Burroughs, Barth, Pynchon, Beckett, McElroy, Silverberg, Gibson, Sterling, Brin, and Barthelme, are united by at least two features. Each of them focuses on some aspect of the recent explosion in communications and computer technologies, either concerning themselves with robots, cybernauts, or computers directly, or they confront the deeper implications of the mechanization of man on some metaphorical level.

"But how," asks Marvin Minsky, renowned artificial intelligence (AI) expert, "can anyone predict where science and technology will take us? Although many scientists and technologists have tried to do this, isn't it curious," he continues, "that the most successful attempts were those of science fiction writers?"[4]

The noted scientist, Murray Gell-Mann (as well as many other distinguished scientists), agree with Minsky. When Gell-Mann was invited to a secret, high-level government meeting at which the participants were to predict what big scientific discoveries were in the offing in the next two decades, he suggested that the government had brought in the wrong people. "The people you need here," he said, "are the science fiction writers. They are skilled in telling you what will be discovered in the next 20 years."[5]

And what they are telling us, loud and clear, is that computer-driven robots will be in our future. Not just industrial robots (there are already tens of thousands of those), but domestic robots, too (there are already millions of those!). And, yes, they will soon do windows. And they will do other satisfying chores that will leave their owners immensely gratified. The robots are not only coming, they are here!

No doubt there will be many of us who will feel uneasy about this brave new world of relating to intelligent machines. Psychologically, the most difficult problem may well be adjusting to the idea that robots are not only tools but also social entities which serve in the capacity as counselors, servants, agents, tutors, friends, and even lovers!

With almost numbing rapidity, science has unveiled a reality that has reduced the five senses to highly unreliable witnesses. The microscopic, the infrared, the ultrasonic (to mention but a few) all bear testimony to forces which can only be monitored with the aid of tools and machines. And while the computer, our artificial colleague, is being more heavily relied upon to project much of our future technical landscapes through a technique known as "scientific visualization", utilizing computer graphics and virtual reality simulations, the human imagination will continue to be one of our best places to make mistakes -- and correct them.

And what many of our best imaginations have proposed is that we are about to embark upon the ultimate technical Interface: the immersion of the physical with the artificial. We have already spawned in virtual reality a computerized technology that enables us to participate in an abstract space, or a "reality" where the physical machine and the physical viewer do not exist.

Many SF stories have cautioned us about an unthinking attitude concerning our technical wizardry, about the traditional reversal of the master-servant relationship, a possible, but avoidable, outcome between man and his computerized robotic technology.

In 1968, Stanley Kubrick and SF grandmaster, Arthur C. Clarke, presented the milestone 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which HAL, the omnipresent computer, does its best to conceal the fact that it is in charge. In a 1970 movie, the defense computer, Colossus, takes over the world. And in the movie Demon Seed (1973), the computer has the effrontery to impregnate a woman. While such brash actions on the part of a computer/robot seem like Hollywood glitz to many people, Marvin Minsky has himself expressed reservations concerning the potential of giant computer systems with complex programs, the work of numerous modifications and historical accretions, to behave normally. Referring to what he calls the "HAL scenario", he comments that:

"The first AI systems of large capability will have many layers of poorly understood control-structure, and obscurely encoded goal-structure. If it cannot edit its high-level intentions, it may not be smart enough to be useful, but if it can, how can the designers anticipate the machine it evolves into? In a word, I would expect the first self-improving AI machines to become "psychotic" in many ways, and it may take many generations to "stabilize" them. The problem could become serious if economic incentives to use early unreliable systems are large -- unfortunately there are too many ways a dumb system with a huge data base can be very useful."[6]

While these forays into fictive robotics might seem to have no relationship to so-called "reality", the significance is that "reality" is singularly affected by these cultural dreams. The generations are joined to one another through time by our common stock of shared thoughts, works, writings, creations, and images (including movies and TV).

It is important to understand that present day research in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, to pick just two major fields in this endeavor, share at least one common goal: a life form more capable than man! Whether this takes the shape of robots or modified humans (cyborgs) is somewhat immaterial. The point to grasp is that humans have a built-in "biology barrier" which inhibits their ability to deal with the more elastic boundaries of technology.

Robots, as opposed to humans, can work in almost any environment: extremely hot, cold, radioactive, without oxygen, without food -- even without pay! Robots can be outfitted with multipurpose limbs which can grip with varying pressures, or magnetically, or with suction devices. Visually, they can be equipped not only with normal human sight, but with the additional ones of infrared, ultraviolet, and other ranges outside the human spectrum. Because robots can be fitted with computerized brains, they can perform tasks that require a degree of accuracy that far exceeds human capabilities.

In designing high-speed aircraft and space vehicles, engineers are replacing as many human functions as possible (in some cases all) because of the unreliability of human parts under the severe stress of G-forces, temperature changes, and the need for instantaneous reactions to incoming information. Many of today's technological products are devised to assist man in maximizing or extending his potential and in overcoming his "biology barrier".

Increasingly, living and non-living systems are being linked together in an intimate synthesis. For example, biosensors, which are microprocessors containing living enzymes, are already being inserted into humans as part of artificial organs. Combining the research of genetics and computer electronics, prototype computers, known as molecular computers, already exist. They are part silicon and part life forms! While we are becoming partly robotic (that is, cyborgs), our robots are becoming partly alive (and imbued with our ethics!). Compared to computer-robots, humans are evolving slowly. The Interface now between us and our technical assistants is so intimate that it is difficult to tell where one leaves off and the other begins. We must begin to meet our Interface at least half way in the modern technosphere, for it is in this artificial environment, which has been accreting all along, that our future society will act out its dramas of discovery and survival.

And once we begin to love our robots, as we do our PCs and other electronic gadgetry, it won't be long until the distinction between hardware/software and life begins to blur. Kerry Joels, author of The Space Shuttle Operator's Manual, says, "We are trying to make these machines into super-extensions of ourselves, which is what all machines are... The computer is the idea that you can extend yourself mentally, and robotics is the idea that you can extend yourself both mentally and physically -- and your machine can now become your superbeing."[7]

But are humans ready to become superbeings? That humans, not technology, are at the heart of the problem has become a pervasive theme of the emerging 21st century. We now have at our disposal a sophisticated arsenal of "smart technologies" that can augment our musculature and brain, that can provide material abundance and a pleasurable and healthy sojourn on the "blue planet", but we persist in an economic program that ruthlessly and mindlessly is destroying the global spaceship and its inhabitants.

Anthony Wiener, formerly of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the late Herman Kahn, formerly of the Rand Corporation, are men we cannot expect to be technological Cassandras or even anti-establishment, yet both have warned, in their book The Year 2000, that: "Practically all the major technological changes since the beginning of industrialization have resulted in unforeseen consequences... Our very power over nature threatens to become itself a source of power that is out of control... Choices are posed that are too large, too complex, too important and comprehensive to be safely left to fallible human beings." [8]

If not fallible human beings, then who or what? A minority of voices, but a growing number, suggest that a man-machine symbiosis (cyborg) is the answer. Frank Herbert, best known as the author of Dune, in his book, Destination: Void (1965), posits that machine intelligence married to human intelligence leads to survival in the future. Whether we have planned it this way or not, because of our "biology barrier," we are disappearing into our machines. We are becoming roboticized and our robots are becoming, hopefully, humanized.

Technology has made possible the modification of human beings to the point that their relationship to people of the past may be analogous to our present relationship to the apes. As we meld into the Interface, consummating a mutuality of animate and inanimate, we are embarking on a destiny that has been ours all along. Nothing has been more decisively and characteristically human than creating tools to perpetuate human welfare, than creating a controllable artificial environment to assure our existence, than peering, as far as we might, into "the undiscover'd country from whose bourn/No traveler returns."

While we have gone to the moon and sent robots to explore our solar system, the greatest journey still resides within us. In creating our "artificial world", our cocoon against Nature, we still have to answer the question, "What will we be?" As Ray Bradbury so poetically phrases the challenge:

"If God knew what He was doing, then Man is the Essence of God. If man, in turn, halfway knows what he is doing, then Machines are the Essence of Man. God. Man. Machine. A strange, but certainly not an unholy Trinity.

"God clones Himself in Man. Man clones himself in machines. Machines, if properly built, can carry our most fragile dreams through a million light-years of travel without breakage. Such machines, and the Shuttle with them, are the armor of our Life Force.

"Design a light-year crest to hang over the door or print on flags and banners. On it stamp God first as symbol. Then emblazon Man upon His metaphorical breast. Finally, print cogs and wheels and radioelectronic fires upon Man's heart. There's your aegis, your crest: The Trinity.

"With it we shall wrestle gravity, capture light, shrink Time, measure Space, and survive, man within machine within God." [9]

1. Mitchell M. Waldrop, Man-Made Minds. (New York: Walker, 1987), p.149.

2. Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p.2.

3. David Brin, "Metephorical Drive - Or Why We're Such Good Liars", Mindscapes, ed. George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), p.74.

4. K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation. (New York: Anchor Press/Double Day, 1986), v.

5. Lewis M. Branscomb, "Information: The Ultimate Frontier." Science 12 Ja 1979, p. 143.

6. Grant Fjermedal, The Tomorrow Makers. (New York: MacMillan, 1986), p.188.

7. Joseph Wood Krutch, "Must Technology and Humanity Conflict?" Advancing Technology: Its Impact on Society, ed. by Donald P. Lauda and Robert D. Ryan (Dubuque, Iowa: Brown, 1971), p.463.

8. Herman Kahn, Anthony Wiener, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-three Years. (New York: MacMillan, 1967)

9. Ray Bradbury, "Beyond Eden," OMNI, 7 Ap 1980, p.116.