Terminal Compromise, Winn Schwartau [sight word books txt] 📗

>gious preaching. He had bought into the beliefs of Steven Jobs,

the young charismatic founder and spiritual guiding force behind

Apple Computer.

Pierre had heard it before, especially after Max had had a few.

His view of a future world with everyone sitting in front of a

picture tube playing with numbers and more numbers . . .and then

a thought hit him.

“Max . . .Max . . .” Pierre was trying to break into another one

of Max’s Apple pitches.

“Yeah . . .oh yeah, sorry Amigo. What’s that you say?” Max

sipped deeply on a long neck Long Star beer.

“These computers you play with . . .”

“Not play, work with. Work with!” He pointed emphatically at

nothing in particular.

“OK, work with. Can these computers play, er, work with music?”

Max looked quizzically at Pierre. “Music, sure. You just program

it in and out it comes. In fact, the Apple II is the ideal

computer to play music. You can add a synthesizer chip

and . . .”

“What if I don’t know anything about computers?”

“Well, that makes it a little harder, but why doncha let me

show you what I mean.” Max smiled wide. This was what he loved,

playing with computers and talking to people about them. The

subject was still a mystery to the majority of people in 1980.

Pierre winced. He realized that if he took up Max on his offer he

would be subjected to endless hours of computer war stories and

technical esoterica he couldn’t care less about. That may be the

price though, he thought. I can always stop.

Over the following months they became fast friends as Pierre

tutored under Max’s guiding hand. Pierre found that the Apple

had the ability to handle large amounts of data. With the new

program called Visi-Calc, he made large charts of his music and

their numbers and examined their relationships.

As Pierre learned more about applying computers to his studies in

musical theory, his questions of Max and demands of the Apple

became increasingly complex. One night after several beers and a

couple of joints Pierre asked Max what he thought was a simple

question.

“How can we program the Apple so that it knows what each piece of

data means?” he inquired innocently.

“You can’t do that, man.” Max snorted. “Computers, yes even

Apples are stupid. They’re just a tool. A shovel doesn’t know

what kind of dirt it’s digging, just that it’s digging.” He

laughed out loud at the thought of a smart shovel.

Pierre found the analogy worth a prolonged fit of giggles through

which he managed to ask, “but what if you told the computer what

it meant and it learned from there. On its own. Can’t a com-

puter learn?”

Max was seriously stoned. “Sure I guess so. Sure. In theory it

could learn to do your job or mine. I remember a story I read by

John Garth. It was called Giles Goat Boy. Yeah, Giles Goat Boy,

what a title. Essentially it’s about this Goat, musta been a

real smart goat cause he talked and thunk and acted like a kid.”

They both roared at the double entendre of kid. That was worth

another joint.

“At any rate,” Max tried to control his spasmodic chuckles.

“At any rate, there were these two computers who competed for

control of the world and this kid, I mean,” laughing too hard to

breath, “I mean this goat named Giles went on search of these

computers to tell them they weren’t doing a very good job.”

“So, what has that got to do with an Apple learning,” Pierre said

wiping the tears from his eyes.

“Not a damn thing!” They entered another spasm of laughter. “No

really. Most people either think, or like to think that a com-

puter can think. But they can’t, at least not like you and me. ”

Max had calmed down.

“So?” Pierre thought there might still be a point to this conver-

sation.

“So, in theory, yeah, but probably not for a while. 10 years or

so.”

“In theory, what?” Pierre asked. He was lost.

“In theory a machine could think.”

“Oh.” Pierre was disappointed.

“But, you might be able to emulate thinking. H’mmmm.” Max re-

treated into mental oblivion as Abbey Road played in the back-

ground. Anything from Apple records was required listening by

Max.

“Emulate. Emulate? What’s that? Hey, Max. What’s emulate?

Hey Max, c’mon back to Earth. Emulate what?”

Max jolted back to reality. “Oh, copy. You know, act like.

Emulate. Don’t they teach you emulation during sex education in

France?” They both thought that that was the funniest thing

ever said, in any language for all of written and pre-history.

The substance of the evening’s conversation went downhill from

there.

A few days later Max came by Pierre’s loft. “I been thinking.”

“Scary thought. About what?” Pierre didn’t look up from his

Apple.

“About emulating thought. You know what we were talking about

the other night.”

“I can’t remember this morning much less getting shit faced with

you the other night.”

“You were going on and on about machines thinking. Remember?”

“Yes,” Pierre lied.

“Well, I’ve been thinking about it.” Max had a remarkable ability

to recover from an evening of illicit recreation. He could

actually grasp the germ of a stoned idea and let a straight mind

deal with it the following day. “And, I maybe got a way to do

what you want.”

“What do I want?” Pierre tried to remember.

“You want to be able to label all of your music so that to all

appearances each piece of music knows about every other piece of

music. Right?”

“Kinda, yeah, but you said that was impossible . . .” Pierre

trailed off.

“In the true sense, yes. Remember emulation though? Naw, you

were too stoned. Here’s the basic idea.” Max ran over to the

fridge, grabbed a beer and leapt into a bean bag chair. “We

assign a value to every piece of music. For example, in music

we might assign a value to each note. Like, what note it is, the

length of the note, the attack and decay are the raw data.

That’s just a number. But the groupings of the notes are what’s

important. The groupings. Get it?”

Pierre was intrigued. He nodded. Maybe Max did understand after

all. Pierre leaned forward with anticipation and listened intent-

ly, unlike in one ear out the other treatment he normally gave

Max’s sermons.

“So what we do is program the Apple to recognize patterns of

notes; groupings, in any size. We do it in pictures instead of

words. Maybe a bar, maybe a scale, maybe even an entire symphony

orchestra. All 80 pieces at once!” Max’s enthusiasm was conta-

gious. “As the data is put in the computer, you decide what you

want to call each grouping. You name it anything you want. Then

we could have the computer look for similar groupings and label

them. They could all be put on a curve, some graphic of some

kind, and then show how they differ and by how much. Over time,

the computer could learn to recognize rock’n’roll from Opera

from radio jingles to Elevator Music. It’s all in the patterns.

Isn’t that what you want?” Max beamed while speaking excitedly.

He knew he had something here.

Max and Pierre worked together and decided to switch from the

Apple II computer to the new IBM PC for technical reasons beyond

Pierre’s understanding. As they labored, Max realized that if he

got his “engine” to run, then it would be useful for hundreds of

other people who needed to relate data to each other but who

didn’t know much about computers.

In late 1982 Max’s engine came to life on its own. Pierre was

programming in pictures and in pure English. He was getting back

some incredible results. He was finding that many of the popu-

lar rock guitarists were playing lead riffs that had a genealogy

which sprang from Indian polyphonic sitar strains.

He found curious relationships between American Indian rhythms

and Baltic sea farer’s music. All the while, as Pierre searched

the reaches of the musical unknown, Max convinced himself that

everyone else in the world would want his graphical engine, too.

Through a series of contacts within his Big Eight company, Max

was put in touch with Hambrecht Quist, the famed Venture Capital

firm that assisted such high tech startups as Apple, Lotus and

other shining stars in the early days of the computer industry.

Max was looking for an investor to finance the marketing of his

engine that would change the world. His didactic and circumlocu-

tous preaching didn’t get him far. While everyone was polite at

his presentations, afterwards they had little idea of what he was

talking about.

“The Smart Engine permits anyone to cross-relate individual or

matrices of data with an underlying attribute structure that is

defined by the user. It’s like creating a third dimension. Data

is conventionally viewed in a two dimensional viewing field,