Introspection; Technology and Identity

After reading Virtual Worlds: Rewiring Your Emotional Future and Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines, it is difficult not to review some things I've seen over the past 20 years. It may be no mistake that an old friend from DeVry and I connected recently after 20 years, or that the ads for DeVry that I see on cable late at night offer a degree in Game Design/Programming (whatever) - which is what I wanted to do 20 years ago. Maybe it is no mistake that my path has taken me into multilingual and multicultural environments, even formally so, forcing me to learn languages I condemned in secondary school. Maybe it is no mistake that I write more than program computers these days. So better to get it out, write it, and move on. That is what this is.

As I explained to someone not too long ago - after 20 years of telling computers what to do, it gets old. If I had spent that time on a child, they would be out of the house by now and hopefully wouldn't need to be bailed out very often. It gives one pause. I invested a lot of time in 'programming myself', as one Uncle would put it. And another aspect of it is that I have lost patience with people who want explanations on how simple things work... but then, after 20 years of programming myself my idea of simple is probably not as simple. It might help if people paid, but everyone wants something for nothing - and I am no different.

In September of 1988, I turned 17 while at DeVry. I'd started at age 16, and wasn't impressed much with college classes - it wasn't challenging. So I went out and got a job writing software... and that quickly became more important than classes because it was more challenging. I recall going to the interview on a Friday - my father was visiting me and had rented a minivan, so he took me to the interview. It took 15 minutes - I was hired in an ugly 80s style white and black plaid sportcoat I'd picked up for $40 at Target. The briefcase, empty but for 2 copies of my resume and a pen, cost $15 as I recall. And my manager was wearing jeans with holes in them. I was asked if I knew C - so I bluffed and said that I did. That weekend, at a computer station in DeVry, I learned C with a borrowed Borland compiler. On Monday, I could not only spell C - I could make it do my bidding.

That was my introduction to corporate computing. Nothing was impossible with a computer - indeed, in many ways nothing is impossible with a computer. I always played with artificial intelligence - I had my own little Eliza program on the Vic-20 when I was 12 - but when I was 20, my father gave me the most appropriate gift he ever had given me.

He gave me a copy of The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics - I still have it. The inscription:

To Taran, from Pop. 6/27/90. With Love & Best Wishes

That simple inscription is probably the most noteworthy communication my father gave me. It was his blessing, his acknowledgment that I had an identity separate from him which he recognized. A small burden was off a young man's shoulders - my father had cast a deep shadow. His knowledge of electromechanical devices was amazing, and to earn any respect at anything from him was never a negotiation. So now I had this identity that I had fought tooth and nail for, and suddenly I decided artificial intelligence was a waste of time. The Turing Test was senseless. There are plenty of humans to talk to, there are plenty of humans thinking in human ways - why on earth would we want something which was just like us? This haunted me over the last 20 years.

I read a lot. I always have; my father never borrowed my books since the rare fiction I read wasn't something he liked - and he often accused me of reading too many textbooks. Why did I read so much? I suppose it started in a quest for answers. That evolved into a quest for questions - which lead to more questions, which lead to more questions. The more I read, the less sense the world made - and this remains true, but it teaches a humility. When one finds those questions that no one has answered yet - or answered well - it is the edge of the world. Beyond There Be Monsters, but not because of the void... it is the quality of that void. A question lead to from an angle of Physics may answer questions in other things, such as Biology or computer science. But all the while, the quest was for marrying technology to the rest of the world in ways that would make it better.

When I got invited to CARDICIS in St. Lucia, I thought it was a mistake. In some ways, I still think the organizers made a mistake in inviting me, but it was a beautiful mistake if it was. Technology had finally evolved where people could communicate with each other very quickly through the internet, and the human issues became more apparent. Language is a large factor of that, and what I learned from many language experts at that meeting was that language and culture cannot be separated. What I would later piece together is that technology, language and culture cannot be separated. They are all different aspects of the same thing - who we are. Or maybe just who I am, in this long trek to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

So what do I think now? I don't really know what to think. I think both Talbott and Myers have found a new direction for me to explore and consider. Some idiot somewhere is likely to say that this is a new 'science' or 'paradigm', but what it really is... is coming full circle. In the last 20 years, I have seen technology lurch us toward each other as unmistakably as Benjamin Franklin's postal system. It has given us the capacity to communicate in ways that are stunning with implications that go beyond marketing hype and media darlings. But technology is a sardonic master, and it thrusts us at the mirror... and then we realize we're the ones banging ourselves against the mirror, trying to get through it as if it were a window. How odd.

So here we are. I'll do what I must to pay the bills, and in that way my former identity can be a curse. I don't want to sling code. I want to connect worlds - I always have wanted to do that... but now that my understanding of these worlds has changed, and the worlds themselves have changed... it leads me to one of the big questions at the edge, where There Be Monsters... and I'd have it no other way.