Dynabook, forty years on

At some point last week I remembered Alan Kay's celebrated phrase "the best way to predict the future is to invent it". So this morning I've been thinking about the Dynabook, the way in which Alan Kay went about inventing the future, and reading his original paper on the subject, A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages, published in 1972. It fizzes with originality. Even today it feels fresh and lively - in 1972 it was something quite extraordinary. It is nothing less than a full-fledged vision for the devices we have today.

Kay was working at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the early 70s, in the extraordinary time when that centre invented most of the computing technologies we rely on today - windowing systems, the graphical user interface, bitmapped displays, laser printers, local networking and so on. Kay was one of the originators of object-oriented programming and invented the Smalltalk language with which software on many of the Xerox computers was built. 

So Kay's article was informed by the absolute cutting edge of technology. He envisions a small portable computer, the size of a notebook (12" by 9", 30cm by 22cm), weighing no more than 4lb (1.8 kg), with plenty of onboard storage, a print-quality LCD screen, and a keyboard that could either be part of the hardware or virtual. The device would allow the user to read documents, and have ready networked access to libraries for downloading books. It would be cheap enough and easy enough to use that most people (adults and children) would have their own device and take it everywhere with them. In other words, it's what we have today in our tablet computers and small laptops, and various articles have been written comparing the Dynabook concept to the Apple iPad or to netbooks. 

The differences are interesting, however. Kay's driver in the article is not really technology, but education. He begins by bemoaning the poor use of technology within education, observing that most educational machines have not worked well, and saying that his goal in the article is to "discuss some aspects of the learning process which we feel can be augmented through technological media". He then progresses to have a case study of two nine-year old children using their Dynabooks to play a video game. It doesn't do what they want, so they revise it on the spot - because it turns out that the Dynabook is not just a passive device but can be programmed at will. The children research the physics of the game using the library function and then reprogram it so that it works more realistically. 

Kay proceeds to introduce a considerable amount of learning theory - Montessori, Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, Seymour Papert - and argues that "computers are an almost ideal medium for the expression of a children's epistemology". Only then does he introduce the hardware design that has proved so influential. In passing, he discusses issues like copyright and advertising on such devices. But it is clear that his goal is education - he argues near the end that "We do feel that the pedagogical merits of teaching algorithmic thinking, having easy editing etc. (all wrapped up in an environment which can go anywhere and can belong to anybody), are undeniable."

He admits near the end of the article that a certain amount of it is "speculation and fantasy", but he knew well that most of what he envisaged was either technologically possible in 1972 or would become so over the next few years. In that respect, it's amazing it took us so long. The tech community has long taken the Dynabook as a template, of course. I well remember as an undergraduate in Cambridge, c1990, being told by some computing entrepreneur (I forget who) that the Dynabook had not been possible until that moment, but now he was going to produce it. And every time a portable device arrives it's compared to the Dynabook at some point. But it really does feel like we have the hardware in place now. 

So did Alan Kay invent the future? Well, yes and no. Tablets and netbooks are certainly (fairly) cheap, very widespread (at least in rich countries), portable and easy to use. But what's very clearly missing is the active element, especially regarding programming. Tablets are used to surf the net, check and reply to emails and social media, watch video, listen to music, read books and magazines. Netbooks do many of the these things too - the reading and watching not quite so well, but with better keyboards they work better to create and edit documents. But both these device categories are passive in terms of the computing environment - you take things you're given. Apps for iPads and Android tablets aren't created on the tablets but on 'proper' computers with bigger screens and full keyboards. And while children might research their homework using a tablet, they're unlikely to be recreating a physical environment on one from scratch. 

The Dynabook was, and is, a revolutionary concept. But it's a revolution that's still unfinished.

Enveloping, the Singularity and conspiracy theories

Just back from a very interesting talk by Luciano Floridi, prof of the philosophy of information at the University of Hertfordshire. He was unable to come to our workshop The Difference That Makes a Difference 2011, but David Chapman and I have been reading his work quite a bit, so it was good to get to meet him. Luciano's title was "Enveloping the World: Understanding the Constraining Success of Smart Technologies", and he mostly talked about the interaction between technologies, especially those which might be seen as smart or even artificially intelligent, and their environment. He used the very helpful concept of enveloping from robotics, where a technology is situated within a constraining environment which has been tailored to make the robot work most efficiently; and he argued that the world as a whole has become tailored to enable us to interact smoothly with our supposedly smart technologies

One of the questions Luciano was asked afterwards concerned the 'Singularity' - Ray Kurzweil's theory that  ICTs are becoming progressively more 'intelligent', taken as a whole (i.e. if you look at the whole network) and that at some point in the future, they will pass a point where they reach real intelligence, and surpass that of humanity - whereupon they'll be in charge and there will be no turning back. It sounds like science fiction, but surprisingly large numbers of people in the tech community, especially in Silicon Valley, believe some version of it. It's essentially a secular form of millenarianism or the Rapture - the idea that Christ will return in glory, will judge the righteous and the unrighteous, and take the righteous with him to heaven. 

Personally I think it's bunkum. But as with the Rapture (which I also think is bunkum) it could potentially be dangerous bunkum, if believed by enough people and built into their worldviews. From time to time, American presidential candidates arise who are said to believe that the battle of Armageddon really will take place on the plains of Meggido - in modern-day Israel - and thereafter Christ will return, and that it's their job to help bring that about. Electing someone to high office who really believed that and really acted to make it happen is a pretty grim scenario. Likewise, if people designing the technologies through which so many people live their lives really believe they're working towards a complete transformation of the world into one led by AI, then they may act in ways to bring that out, which could be more hostile to humanity than the fairly benign process of mutual adaptation that Luciano described.

But it leaves with the question as to why people believe these things. I listened this morning to a podcast of Thinking Allowed, where Jovan Byford (from Social Sciences here at the OU) discussed his new book Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Introduction. The presenter, Laurie Taylor, observed that many people in the States actually preferred to believe that J.F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA instead of by a madman, because it fitted better with their worldview of stability and control. Likewise, I wonder whether the Singularity gets its believers because it fits with the worldview that technology changes everything, and all humans can do is respond. 

Technology changes society, and society changes technology. But over time, they both change fundamental ideas, and these ideas in turn change both society and technology. The Singularity is not a fundamental idea in that sense, but enough people believe it to be so, it might change our technologies in way that really do change society.

Mission and discipleship

Good quote here from a book entitled Untamed: reactivating a missional form of discipleship by Alan and Deborah Hirsch (Baker Books, 2010, p.29), quoted by the ever readable Kurt Willems:

You simply cannot be a disciple without being a missionary – a sent one. For way too long discipleship has been limited to issues relating to our own personal morality and worked out in the context of the four walls of the church with its privatized religion. In doing this, we have severely neglected our biblical mandate to go and “make disciples.” We have narrowed the gospel message to just being about us. Please hear us: we don’t want to neglect issues of personal morality. To strive for holiness and maturity in our own personal lives is extremely important, but it is only half the picture; the other half is our God-given responsibility to the world around us. The fact is that you can’t be a disciple without being a missionary: no mission, no discipleship. It’s as simple as that.

As some of the comment on Kurt's blog makes clear, 'mission' here refers to action in the world of all sorts, not (just) evangelism. It fits well with so many things I've been thinking about recently, but especially the hymn The Summons by John Bell and Graham Maule that we sang at our church on Sunday, which begins:

Will you come and follow me if I but call your name?
Will you go where you don't know and never be the same?
Will you let my love be shown? Will you let my name be known,
Will you let my life be grown in you and you in me?

Christmas and myths

It's Olive the Other Reindeer time again, which reminds me of one of my favourite lines (said by a reindeer in a bar): "there is no Rudolf, that's just an urban myth". And that in turn makes me think about Christmas and myths.

There's a lot of myths around at Christmas. There's Santa, so bizarre a  story that we have to teach it to children, but is believed by no adults. There's Winterval, the belief fomented by the right wing press that the state is banning public mention of Christmas (pops up each year, almost always completely baseless). And then there's the nativity story...

It's hardly a new remark to observe that much of the popular version of the nativity, seen in countless school plays and cards, is non-biblical. The numbers of wise men aren't recorded, they weren't kings, and they certainly weren't called Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar. The stable didn't contain an ox and an ass (indeed, there was no stable - only a manger, which is to say an animal feeding-trough). There's no record of Mary going to Bethlehem on a donkey. We can't place it on 25th Dec, if only for those poor shepherds who would be most unwise to be on the cold hills around Bethlehem at night in winter.

There are problems with the biblical narrative, if we want to read it in modern terms. Virgins don't give birth, stars don't move around in the sky to hover over towns (though much effort has been spent to explain that one),  and while plenty of religious people might believe in angels, few shepherds have seen them appearing en masse.

But perhaps we might be best to take the biblical narrative on its own terms - as John Drane says in The McDonaldization of the Church, the best way with stories is to read them as stories and not worry too much about their factual accuracy. There are many different forms of text in the Bible, but to read them all as scientifically-grounded fact in the modernist style (whether to debunk them as a sceptic or to accept them wholesale as a fundamentalist) is unwise.

So back to myth, and the famous late-night conversation between JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis in 1931, where Tolkien outlined his conception of myth and its relation to the Christian story. It is said to have led directly to Lewis' conversion, and his subsequent work as a Christian apologist. He wrote in October 1931: "the story of Christ is simply a true myth; a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference, that it really happened, and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God's Myth where the others are men's myths".

The myths about the popular version of the nativity support important truths, whatever their authenticity (the stable shows us that Jesus came from the poor and down-trodden, not from the rich and powerful); and the scientifically-dubious aspects of the biblical story likewise have their own truths. The important thing is to look for the deeper meaning behind the details of the myths. As John Betjeman wrote:

And is it true ? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant, 

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

Bill meets networking

I'm not a big fan of alumni magazines - I generally find them smug and inward-looking. The Cambridge one is worse in these respects than many, but does sometimes have some good features. In the most recent issue there's a nice interview between the key people behind Acorn Computers (Hermann Hauser, Andy Hopper and Andy Harter), including this gem by Hauser:

“Acorn Computers at that time [c.1981] was the only company whose products all had a network connection. When Bill Gates came to see us he was desperate for us to adopt MS-DOS. We sat him down in front of the computer and explained we couldn’t take such a retrograde step because our operating system was a lot more sophisticated. Bill’s response was ‘What’s a network?’”

Much might have been different if Bill G had never found out the answer!

Information and the Eucharist

Yesterday at a meeting of the Society & Information Research Group, I said that I was wary of sharing this blog with work colleagues because I tended to write about non-work topics, especially religion, on it. So I was pleased this morning to hear a podcast of In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 making a clear link between my religious concerns and my research on the nature of information.

Apparently John Wyclif, 14th century church reformer (Master of Balliol College and friend of John of Gaunt, so not exactly a wild radical) argued thus about the Eucharist. He didn't hold to the doctrine of transubstantiation, that when the priest blesses the bread and wine during the Mass, they are literally transformed into the body & blood of Christ. Rather, he argued that the bread (say) remains bread, but simultaneously also becomes the body of Christ. This is the same view that Martin Luther came to hold two centuries later.

His argument was to draw a contrast with the written Bible. It's written on parchment with ink (this is pre-Gutenberg). The thing that matters are the words on the page, but that doesn't stop the parchment and ink from existing. In other words, Wyclif drew a contrast between the information in a book (and the Eucharist) and the medium within which that information exists. And that's a story all about information, and the changing understanding of information - in fact it's a lot like the argument Juanita Foster-Jones makes about books and libraries in Perspectives on Information.

So from the Eucharist to the nature of information in one jump!

Taking the Bible seriously, not taking it literally: notes from an evening with Jack Spong

By good fortune, we were in my parents’ town of Milngavie, on the edge of Glasgow, the same week that Bishop Jack Spong, retired Episcopal bishop of Newark, New Jersey in the USA was giving a talk in a local church. Spong is the author of many books on topics such as the Bible, sexuality, gender, and the future of the church. The talk we heard was entitled “The New Testament – where does fact stop and myth begin?”.

Spong’s argument is that while the New Testament is the foundation of our Christian faith, it is both impossible and greatly unwise to take it literally. (He extends this argument to the Old Testament in his writing). As a way of elucidating this argument, Spong went through the history of the authorship of the New Testament, on the way showing its internal conflicts and issues that must be reconciled. Some of this history may be entirely familiar to you, some of it very surprising. Some of Spong’s account of the history is the accepted consensus of most Biblical scholars, others are his own view of what is most likely to be the case.

First, dates. Most of us know that Jesus was not born in 0 AD. He is generally thought to have been born in 4 BC, and to have died in perhaps 30 AD. These are important for establishing the distance from the events described in the gospels to when they were written down. As Spong observed, there was an ‘oral period’ of at least twenty years in the early church from which no written accounts survive, during which (as far as we know) the life and teachings of Jesus were passed on solely by word of mouth.

The first texts in the New Testament to be written were the epistles. There are fourteen that have been traditionally attributed to Paul. The current consensus, by Spong’s account, is that only seven of these were written by Paul: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1+2 Corinthians, Romans, Philemon and Philippians. These were probably written between 51 AD and 64 AD (the usual date for Paul’s death in Rome) – so around twenty years passed after Jesus’ death and resurrection before we have any Christian texts.

Of the remaining ‘Pauline’ letters, three were probably written by his immediate disciples in the decade after his death (2 Thessalonians, Colossians and Ephesians) – they are rooted in Paul’s ideas but not in his writing style or vocabulary. Three further ‘pastoral’ letters (1+2 Timothy and Titus) were written around 80-100 AD, by which time Paul was uncontroversial, a revered elder statesman (by contrast, in his lifetime he was a highly polarising figure). Lastly we have Hebrews, which hardly anyone would attribute to Paul – it is very different from his work.

Paul was not writing Scripture. He was a travelling preacher and builder of church communities, who wrote letters to those communities to encourage them, argue with them, and give them moral teaching. As Spong observed in his talk, the author of 2 Timothy 3:16 (not Paul), who wrote that “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (NIV) could not have been referring to the Pauline letters, let alone the gospels (hardly written at that time). The only scripture at the time was the Hebrew Bible, that we Christians call the Old Testament. Paul’s letters, and the whole of what we now have as the New Testament, were designated as Scripture much later.

So what did Paul actually say about Jesus?

1.    He was born of a woman, in the normal way – there is no mention of a virgin birth.

2.    Paul makes no mention of his miracles, nor of his teaching.

3.    There is little mention of Christ’s passion – there is only one (fairly brief but important) account of the Last Supper, nothing about details such as Gethsemane, Judas, Pilate, his burial. All Paul tells us is that Jesus died on a cross.

4.    There is likewise little detail on the resurrection, only that Jesus was “raised on the third day” (note the passive voice – not that Jesus rose up, rather that he was raised by God). However Paul lists all the different groups to whom Jesus appeared after his resurrection, beginning with Cephas (Peter) and ending with himself. As Paul was probably not converted until around three years after the resurrection, this suggests he did not seen the resurrection as being one of the physical body.

After Paul’s death, the gospels began to appear. The first of these to be written, as is well known, was Mark – this was probably written around 70-72 AD, perhaps 40 years after the events it portrays. This presents a very stripped-down version of the gospel story. If we read it on its own (and it’s likely that the early Christian communities would have had access to only one gospel) we see no miraculous birth, no story of the risen Christ appearing to anyone. What we see is are a lot of miracles, many of which bear parallels to Old Testament miracle stories, but which serve here principally as a symbol for Jesus bringing in the Kingdom of God. We also have here the first written account of Jesus’ baptism, teaching and death. The authorship of Mark, like all the gospels, is unknown.

The second gospel to be written was Matthew (around 82-85 AD). He copied large parts of Mark, almost word-for-word, as well as adding material from a source he shared in common with Luke (known to scholars as Q, from the German Quelle, source), and from further sources. The virgin birth is first written about in Matthew, and much of the birth story is justified by reference to prophecy, exemplifying the very Jewish nature of this gospel. Like Mark, some sections (such as the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness) bear close parallels to the Old Testament. It’s worth noting that the Sermon on the Mount only appears in Matthew, although some of the individual passages also appear in Luke.

The third gospel was Luke, written around 88-93 AD. He copied about half the text of Mark into his gospel (though both he and Matthew added and edited Mark’s text). Like Matthew, he presents a genealogy of Jesus, although the two are contradictory – surely a problem if the New Testament as a whole is to be taken literally? Some of the most popular parables are only to be found in Luke (such as the Good Samaritan, and the story of Dives and Lazarus). Again we see borrowing of Old Testament themes – Luke’s version of Jesus’ ascension is closely related to the ascension of Elijah (2 Kings 2).

Finally in the gospels we come to John (known simply as ‘the fourth gospel’ by some scholars, as its authorship is so uncertain). This was probably written around 95-100 AD. Notably, this followed the expulsion of the earliest Christians from the synagogues, leading to a changed relationship between Christians and Jews, and a stronger understanding of Christianity as something both different from Judaism which took forward the Jewish covenant but in a new way. For example, John often has Jesus use the phrase “I AM”, directly paralleling God’s phrase “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14) when talking to Moses from the burning bush. However, John’s way of writing is much more mystical than the other three gospels. Instead of presenting a birth narrative, he describes a Jesus who is the Logos (a Greek philosophical concept), eternally present with God. He does not use Jesus’ parables – instead he takes seven signs (miracles), and links seven discourses between Jesus and others to the signs. In Spong’s view, the crucial verse of this gospel, and of the whole New Testament, is John 10:10 – “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (NIV).

This kind of critical analysis of the Bible may seem uncomfortable to some, for whom the Bible is the inerrant Word of God. I do not present it here to challenge anyone’s faith. For myself, it increases my faith. God is too complex to be fixed into a simple set of words, whether in English translation or the Greek/Hebrew original. We have a Bible, our greatest treasure and the foundation of our faith – but we must read it with care, with our eyes and brains and souls open, looking beyond the immediate words to the meaning behind them.