To be sure, Electric Language is a scholarly book, written principally for an academic audience. Yet the flashes of insight that sparkle on many pages of this book make it worth the effort of plowing through the passages on Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, and Heidegger. Of course, the ancients had little interesting of lasting value to say, and Heidegger's ideas can never be pinned down to an exact time and place, but it's good that someone at least gives these poor souls a respectful nod of the head.

Articulating Thoughts Many of Us Might Have Passed Through Our Minds Already

It's uncanny how the author of this book puts into words ideas that many of us have been thinking about already. Heim serves as a "perceptive fish, " taking time to examine closely the water we've all been swimming through unknowingly: "When we speak of word processing, we are speaking of a true phenomenon of our time, in the sense of something appearing with a certain historical uniqueness. But while such eventful things are phenomenal or striking in their appearance, the essential nature of such a phenomenon may not thrust itself upon us as easily as the recognition of it as an unprecedented appearance."

If we don't take the time to think about these things today, tomorrow we'll be so attuned to the benefits of word processing that we won't even be able to remember the world before them. We have a narrow window of opportunity to think these thoughts. While the future rushes at us with increasing speed, the past, too, is receding from us at an equivalent speed.

One of the concepts Heim examines is the idea that word processors facilitate the "external representation of thought." Those of us who can type quickly can "dump" our ideas onto a computer screen, and then play with the ideas on screen, rather than in our minds. Word processing beckons the tentative, preformed idea to emerge from the recesses of the mind. Embryonic notions, barely formed at all, feel bold enough to take up residence on your computer screen. Word processing, from a psychodynamic viewpoint, is an interesting study in " emboldening" technology.

Likewise, the emergence of typography in the 15th century went one step further as an "emboldening" technology: "One of Ong's most striking studies concerns the connection between the ascendancy of typography and the inauguration of modern logic." p. 63

Heim's remarks about Plato remind me of an anecdote I heard as an undergraduate student of philosophy. Apparently many of the ancient Greeks genuinely believed that reading diminished a person's mental capacity. Some early Greek educators went so far as to ban reading in schools.

Why were these great sages so mistaken in their view? Well, in the oral tradition of the early Greeks the capacity to listen and remember was far more important than the capacity to read. Recall, the greatest minds of ancient times took great pride in being able to recite The Odyssey from memory. From their frame of mind, reading diminished one's capacity to memorize, and "to memorize is to learn."

The fallacy of this reasoning is that reading promotes understanding, and understanding is a higher form of knowledge than rote memorization. True, when the printed word was introduced into the Greek classroom, the students in those classrooms had little incentive to engage in rote memorization. But their diminished capacity to perform rote memorization was far overshadowed by their increased capacity to understand.

What is language?

To think about the nature of word processing is to think about the nature of language. Heim chomps into some interesting ideas when he looks at the linguistic angle of word processing: "The chaos of details and of possibilities becomes manifest through language as language reduces chaos by ordering things in predictable relationships. Language, then, has power -- not solely in the control over things wielded by the users of language, but also and especially in the structural power language exerts over its users." p. 77-78.

Taking Michael Heim's train of thought a few steps further, if language is a tool, then all literate human beings belong to a user group: the "Human Language Users Group." It follows then that the your own local computer user group is a special interest group within that larger user group. No matter that the larger user group has no formal newsletter or membership roster. Anyone who reads or writes is given automatic membership privileges in that group.

Heim develops the concept that word processors give us the power to physically rearrange our thoughts on a computer screen: "The encoding of letters in the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) computer code not only permitted the transmission of natural-language at electronic speed; encoding natural language on computers makes possible a new approach to language as directly manipulable in new ways." p. 82.

So just as high-speed computers can use computer programs to perform great feats of number crunching (read: numerical manipulations), so too can human minds use word processors to perform unique new feats of "combinatorial concept collaging." (My words.)

The Psychic Framework of Word Processing

One of the most tantalizing chapters in Electric Language is chapter four, "The Psychic Framework of Word Processing." Here the author plunges into the heart of the mind. In discussing the nature of human thought, Heim quotes from a passage in Hubert Dreyfus's 1979 book, What Computers Can't Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence. "There is no doubt some temptation to suppose that since the brain is a physical thing and can be metaphorically described as 'processing information,' there must be an information processing level, a sort of flow chart of its operations, in which its information-processing activity can be described."

This sort of thinking leads one to reflect on the hierarchies of the brain operating system. Is there an equivalent of DOS in the mind -- an upper level information manager which can be called upon to per form information storage and retrieval tasks? And naturally this question leads to the question of the megabyte size of human memory's long term storage capacity and how much less expensive it is to add metaphorical SIMM's to your mind than it is to add physical SIMM's to your desktop computer system.

How Word Processing is Transforming Our Mental Habits

Just as human beings have habits of the body, so do they too have habits of the mind. Word processors help develop a creative habit -- a habit of regularly engaging in creative expression for fun and profit. Heim goes back to Aristotle to understand the nature of human habit: "Habit in the Aristotelian sense, is a proclivity for acting along the lines of certain potentials already developed through training and repeated practice."

The real beauty of Heim' s analysis is that he combines and synthesizes Aristotelian thinking with ideas expressed by some of the early pioneers in word processing development.

Gelernter identifies the bases of the mind's mechanisms as emotions and memory. By emotion, Gelernter means a way by which the organism can capture and characterise its current state. The commonly known emotions of fear and hunger are obvious examples of this but Gelernter expands this to include very fine-grained feelings that blur the lines between the distinct feelings that are commonly viewed as emotions. He shows how a composite feeling of contentment and anticipation on a boat trip can be viewed as a distinct emotion, for example. With this ability to finely characterize a situation by an emotion,the organism can identify similar situations that it met in the past. It can then select its actions based on the success or failure of actions in past similar situations. His view of the mind is similar to the common engineering techniques of case-based and memory-based reasoning.

However Gelernter expands on these common models by showing how his views on emotions link to poetry as an example of a higher human faculty that is commony thought to be unexplainable at the functional level. Gelernter identifies that the method for matching of situations by emotional memory may by either loosely of tightly focussed. Tight foucus is conventional reasoning in which details are important. Loose focus allows apparently disparate situations to be matched based only on the structure of the connections in the consitituent emotions. This type of reaosning is what Gerlernter states as the source of creativity. It is what allows a poet to find common ground with his reader as Gelernter demonstrates with his comparison of his idea to T.S. Eliot's 'objective correlative.' Gelernter shows his ideas with examples from the English Romantic poets and from apparently inexplicable passages from the Bible which can be explained as examples of loosely focussed emotional connectivity.

A book which has references to AI, the Bible, English Romantic poets and more is of course interesting. Rdferences in the book to authors as diverse as marvin Misnky. Shelley, Byron and the author of Geneisis must makw this a unique book.

This book is worth reading.

Which is correct, such as it is. Any object, even an artificial one, that possesses a human body and human emotions is by definition human.
However, there is no guarantee that human intelligence is the only possible one. If ETI exists, we have no idea what form it has. It may be that emotion is not necessary for intelligence and could even be a limiting force. There may be beings in the universe that would consider humans to be primitive dreamers forever locked in fantasy. Furthermore, some marine mammals may be intelligent and it is only human arrogance that prevents observation of that fact.
Even if you strongly disagree with the conclusions of the author, this is a book you must read if you are interested in the AI problem. As is clear from the comments above, I disagree and yet found it so interesting that I read it twice. AI is a synthesis of religion, psycology, philosophy, mythology and computer science. Anything that contributes to healthy debate of these issues is to be welcomed.

Published in Mathematics and Computer Education, reprinted with permission.

My mother used to talk about how wonderful the World's Fair had been.

One of the cruel things about intergenerational relations is how impossible it is to communicate important things about social change. I _want_ to tell my kids about Kennedy, about Vietnam, about the McCarthy era. I hear myself talking and I know it sounds just as boring as it was to me hearing my folks talking about Roosevelt, or the Depression, or the World's Fair.

This book is fascinating and moving and it has important things to say. Gelernter is trying, with honesty and intelligence, to explore the question "What was it really like for our folks?" How can anyone _really_ know? Nobody can, but for a time as recent as 1939 it's well worth trying.

I did go to the, was it 1963, New York World's Fair. My mother said I just _had_ to, even though everybody said it was a pale shadow of the 1939 fair. I remember an IBM exhibit done by Charles Eames, featuring twelve movie screens and simultaneous shots from twelve viewpoints of, say, two train cars coupling (one closeup, one aerial, one of the dispatchers board) while the narrator said something stupid and shallow about data and information. I remember that the Coca-Cola pavilion smelled of Coke. It wasn't like 1939.

About once a chapter something pulls you up short. Sometimes it's a trivial detail ("those tractor trains at the Bronx Zoo whose horns played "Boys and Girls Together" were from the Fair.") Other times it's not so trivial.

William Manchester tried something like this in "The Glory and the Dream." Let's see, was it David Halberstam who recently wrote "The Fifties?" Gelernter's book is more readable, and more profound.

David Gelernter takes you on a tour of that fair, including the various national and corporate exibits and pavilions, many were absolutely amazing, even by today's standards. Several are described in intricate detail, and being in the 1930's electro-mechanical control systems were the rule, some being very complex. Gelernter also portrays some typical hypothetical people visiting the fair and what they did. How people dressed back then, and also the underlying societal feelings, are covered, the war in Europe being on everyones mind.

This is a very well written and comprehensive account of this most famous of fairs, I immensely enjoyed it, and Gelernter covers that last few hours of the Fair with poignancy as it closed in 1940. This account makes me wish I could travel back in time and see it myself, a wistful longing not to be.

The book, first published in 1991 by Oxford University Press,
must be read in the context of its day to be fully appreciated.
At that time, in the pre-web world, there was a great deal of
discussion devoted to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the
Fifth Generation Project driven by the Japanese. If Gelertner
had limited his offering to only those topics this book could
be left in the pile of such books from that era without loss.
Luckily, Gelertner gave us more.

While there is much of the book relegated to the AI ideas of
that time, there are also insightful and practical observations
that have a more lasting appeal. For example, Gelertner delves
into the question "What is a program? What does 'software' mean?"
Such questions are explored in some detail and other observations
are made in the discussions. "Managing complexity must be
your goal... we can call it the pursuit of 'topsite'. Topsite--
the understanding of the big picture--is the essential goal of
every software builder. It's also the most precious intellectual
commodity known to man."

We've all heard talk about someone who "sees the big picture."
That, according to Gelertner, is "topsight": having perspective,
clarity, and a sense of proportion. Why is this important? If
we want to have machines (programs) help us see and understand
our world (in a "Mirror" of our world), we'll need to teach
these machines how to make sense of the information. Minimally,
they'll need to be able to sift through the volumes of data
and find that data which is "interesting." The very best programs
will be able to find those interesting things and present
them in a compelling way. All of this demands "topsight."

To drive this ideal, Gelertner and his colleagues created
"Linda" which serves as the basis for the
machinery of such a Mirror World system. The idea is simple:
create a Space where information (called a Tuple)
can be put, taken, or simply read or examined. Many programs
put information in the space. Other programs notice items
in the Space, take them, and perform some processing, and
put a different item back into the space in its stead.

This part of the book, the very practical nuts-and-bolts
part, is alive and well today and in active use. While
Gelertner's system Linda may not have achieved widespread
acceptance, the same idea in another form is quietly
thriving: JavaSpaces. The same notions described by
Gelertner to support his Mirror World now serves as the
heart of many commercial applications.

Gelertner has a lot to say. Yes, some of it now appears
dated and some of the ideas he touts have been
discredited. But, nobody said predicting the future was
easy business!

My recommendation is thus: forgive Gelertner the detours he
takes (that we all took) and find within the book all those
things which have inspired--and will continue to inspire.
There are ample enough thoughts within those pages to make
the time invested in a careful reading well worthwhile.

We're never quite prepared for the future when it arrives. Exponential technology curves yield thousand-fold gains in capacity and speed, but humans can't imagine thousand-fold improvements. One solution: remove the limits completely. For example, assume that infinite bandwidth and data storage capacity are available to everyone for free. What would this enable us to do? Explore the new applications -- the new ways of organizing work, communication, commerce, thought, and art -- that would become possible. Then work back from that vision of the future, to find the paths that will take us in that direction.

Example 1: Put video cameras everywhere, and record every moment. -- Remember, infinite and free storage and bandwidth! Why throw anything away? -- Use that real-time data to build a virtual model of your city - a mirror world. Then have your software agents roam through all those data/video streams and flag - or respond to - events that might impact your neighborhood or your decisions. The value is in the filtering!

Example 2: Any human with a PC and a net connection can become a television broadcaster. The TV broadcasting infrastructure becomes obsolete, just as the telephone companies' infrastructure does in the Stupid Network vision With millions of producers creating and broadcasting content streams into infospace -- and all prior broadcasts stored for viewing as well -- a highly selective "TV Guide" will be a key to survival in the post-literate society.

Higly recommended reading for visionaries, product planners and science fiction writers. END

But his thesis is not so absurd. He builds his argument by looking at some examples of beautiful design, such as the Apple desktop, the Turing machine, and a 1930s Emerson radio. In the case of Apple, continuities between the artist and scientist are obvious. The original Mac programmers were so proud of their work that, like artists, they signed their names on the case molding. The Mac embodies Gelernter's definition of machine beauty-power married to simplicity.

Paradoxically, because the Mac is so easy to use, so elegantly designed, it is still seen as less powerful, less serious, not the sort of thing appropriate to the corporate world. "Cute" is the word that greeted the first Mac; mockery followed the imac, with its candy-colors, translucent plastic, and rounded corners; shock and disgust arose over the imacs with Flower Power and Blue Dalmatian patterns on their cases. The tangerine iBook was compared to a Barbie purse. Put simply, elegance is considered effeminate. The tech reporters are so ignorant on these matters, on the importance of the aesthetic, on anything beyond the utilitarian, that Apple's innovations are giving them a collective coronary. Variety is, apparently, too much for them.

Gelernter argues persuasively that Apple's desktop interface is an example of beauty winning in the end. The Mac's graphical interface is on practically everyone's screen, having been stolen by Microsoft and grafted onto the ubiquitous Windows. I would add that the imacs, which arrived after this book was published, have been tremendously popular and have spawned numerous imitators, not just in computers, but in a rainbow of translucent, candy-colored appliances and consumer electronics.

But beauty doesn't always win. If by winning, Gelernter means the creation of superior technology, then he is correct. An approach which is merely mechanical, focusing on technique alone, will not produce excellence. But if by winning, he means chosen by the public, that isn't always true. No culture that makes money the arbiter of every decision is going to produce a Chartres cathedral or to revere it. It's lucky to produce a VCR that records what it is supposed to. A democratic culture is more likely to produce mediocrity. Americans in general are seen, and see themselves, as consumers, not as purveyors of beauty. As long as they are guided by the standard that cheaper is better, they will produce neither a product nor a service that can be considered excellent.

Machine beauty, a simple elegance that resonates in its
observer, is the subject of the work. But, how might one
sense this? Gelernter offers this: "You might experience
something resembling machine beauty, even if you are no
scientist or engineer, when you drive a nail into a
board with one clean, graceful hammer stroke." Precisely!

"Deep beauty, 'resonant beauty' in which many types of
loveliness reinforce one another, is a principal topic
of this book" according to the author. He then explores
the following two claims: (1) "...machine beauty is
the driving force behind technology and science", and
(2) "... machine beauty bothers us. We act as a society
as if our goal were not to nurture or celebrate it but
to stamp it out."

Gelernter, a computer scientist and sometimes artist,
applies his many observations to the sad state of today's
computer software. "The hell with mathematics; let's
teach of our programmers about beauty" he exclaims!

There are long running comparisons between the WinTel
PC and Apple Macintosh in the work. It isn't a "sales
pitch" for one or the other; just a set of observations
on how the emphasis (or deemphasis) of beauty and
elegance drove both efforts.

The work is easy to read yet fully researched. A "Notes"
section appears at the end of the 144 pages of prose to
provide all of the references to the other works Gelernter
drew upon. I thought the effort made to keep the meat of
the book uncluttered was well worthwhile.

This book is an excellent companion to Gelernter other
work "Mirror Worlds". Read Mirror Worlds first and then
eat this for dessert--you won't be disappointed.