When you open a dictionary, to look up a word, it defines it in terms of other words. Usually you don't have to learn all the words in the definition too.
How did you learn your first words? You didn't use a dictionary. Language acquisition is a difficult process, and humans are very adept at it. In the 1960s and 1970s we thought that we would be able to teach computers to do the same, but we failed to instruct them all that well so far. It proved to be a much harder problem than anybody had anticipated.
So the computer seems no match for the written and spoken word. But there are some curious little niches where the computer excels.
Imagine a soft cube, with four solar panels, one clockwinder, and a display, all mounted between the toughest known glass. This cube is a computer, and it's about to be airdropped onto an uncontacted tribe in Papua New Guinea.
We don't know what the tribe is going to do with it. They might try to smash it, or throw it in the fire. But if they do, the cube will react. Impacts are sensed, and the cube will respond as though it's an animal in pain. Fire will send it into hysterics. Gentle spinning, on the other hand, will make the cube react with pleasure. The greatest pleasure noises will be reserved for new exposure to sunlight, and winding of the clockwork mechanism.
The screen is a touchscreen. You can interact with it. The language of the tribe is unknown, but the screen will have a simple user interface using the best research into outsider reactions to technology. It will be possible to see the views of cameras mounted in the centres of each solar panel, projected onto the main screen. They'll have simple zoom controls. There will also be pre-recorded videos of people smiling and sending greetings, and of other scenes of the world. It will be possible to record video.
There will be an interface that links it with the latest weather results, so it will be able to predict the weather for the tribe. There will be cartoons that show simple stories. It will play music. It will be possible to set a countdown timer which goes off with a soft alarm, or a short jingle.
The cube will not be alone, to prevent the object from being fetishised. Several will be dropped, in groups at intervals. If the experiment is a success, further cubes will be dropped on further tribes.
Imagine a book, with tough Tyvek pages and close-stitched pages. The book is going to be dropped on the tribe, before the cube computers. It's a history of the world, written specially for the purpose by Bill Bryson, and translated into Icelandic. You're probably not Icelandic. (If you are, congratulations!) That means that you can't read this history of the world, and since the tribe isn't Icelandic either, neither can they. Tyvek is pretty indestructible, so they won't even be able to repurpose the book for any purpose.
Several more books are dropped on the tribe, all by Bryson, in further languages. They still don't understand any of them.
Somebody comes up with the idea of dropping an illustrated picture book instead. But it turns out to be exceedingly difficult to make even a picture that conveys complex information in a culturally independent way. The best attempts at this have been the Arecibo message, and the Pioneer plaque, but these were intended for advanced aliens who would understand, for example, that the Arecibo message could be rendered two dimensionally by factoring the length into two primes—23 and 73, if my Esperanto is up to scratch.
The tribal books are useless, but the tribal computer is easy to interact with. The tribe members may be scared of it and throw it out, but at least it's possible to interact with it. The words on the computer—the procedures, functions, programs, subroutines, or algorithms—are executable.
That's practically magic compared to the words in the book. The executable word is a truly astonishing thing. Yet the level of wonder that the tribe would display at the cubes compared to the books is almost entirely lost on us!
Human languages are spoken and written relative to all human culture. They are embodied by human actions. Programming languages, in contrast, are executed on specific hardware, and embodied by their devices.
To define a new text to the tribe would require either the Champollion act of giving a key that maps from our language to theirs, or to build up the assocations again from scratch, like you would teach a language to a toddler.
To define a word on a computer, an executable word, requires only giving it the resources of the computer, which is usually a powered Von Neumann architecture. The computer must have the right hardware, both in terms of the instruction set of the processor and the devices that are intended to enable the interaction with the device. But the computer ships with its own culture. It is self-contained, and self-defining.
Perhaps one day somebody will experiment with air dropping computers onto a Papua New Guinean tribe, but it's unlikely to pass an ethics board. But, in a way, science has airdropped these devices from the very properties of the universe onto us. We didn't know, before Turing's work, that such devices were universal, nor the extent of their capabilities. We're still not entirely sure what the extent of their capabilities are: there are many unsolved problems in computer science.
So perhaps we should be thinking about what kind of computers we should drop onto ourselves, to restore our wonder. In the 1990s, a popular science magazine in the United Kingdom, Focus, ran a very small, perhaps an eighth of a page sized, infobox about a new engineering advance. Scientists at a large company, perhaps Sony, had decided that instead of being cold and metallic, the robots of the future should be cute and tactile, like these ones.
One of the robots was a small cube, much like the ones intended for the tribes, except that it was pink at the bottom, with a wavy line separating it from an orange top. The bottom half was dimpled a bit like an antique golf ball, and the top side had a fin on it. One of the sides had a camera which looked like an eye in it, and possibly the hidden side had one too. The photo does not appear to be available on the web, and the volumes of the magazines were too copious to find the original.
Perhaps we're so intoxicated with keyboards and monitors that we forget that we can attach a multitude of devices to a computer. We may even forget that without such devices, a computer is useless. What good is a book when it's not being read? What good is a computer when it's hooked to literally no device? Touch screens are the first substantial change in interaction with a computer for half a century.
Performance is often cited as a primary concern of computer hardware and software developers alike. But performance can only be harnessed by imagination: faster computers only do new things when we imagine that they can.
