This blog has been going, I think, around 23 years and finally the time has come to retire it. My interests have changed and I’m no longer spending my spare time making projects with old computers, Raspberry Pis and BBC micro:bits, or indeed building my own breadboard computer.
Instead I’m now focused on writing and making my short story podcast Listen with Other. Head to https://listenwithother.co.uk to see what I’m up to now.
I will try to archive and mothball this site but I’m switching web host so it may go offline for a while, and may reappear at a different URL.
I may even start another blog, a more general purpose one, less tech-y, more artsy and bookish.
I finally watched K9 and Company. And I have questions.
If you’re unfamiliar with it, K9 and Company was a single 50 minute TV show made in 1981, a spin-off from Doctor Who that was intended to be a series, making companion Sarah Jane Smith, played by Elisabeth Sladen, into the lead character, fighting evil with K9, the robot dog companion she’d never worked with in Doctor Who itself. The series was never made, although a similar concept was eventually to resurface many years later in 2007 on the CBBC channel as The Sarah Jane Adventures.
I’d been aware of the programme, mainly because it’s possibly best known for having one of the worst title sequences ever made, much derided and parodied. But the show itself… I wasn’t prepared for it. It was nothing like I expected. I can see why a series was never commissioned, but not for any of the reasons I might have assumed. It left me utterly discombobulated, needing to watch it again. And write this. (It contains spoilers, so if you’ve not seen it, go and watch it before reading this).
I’ll skip over the music, because I don’t want to go there, and also skip over just how bad the titles are, but I want to talk about tone. A lot of my astonishment with K9 and Company is about tone.
From the titles you’d assume this is going to be a bit of a crazy, kooky knock-about adventure, perhaps a little bit cosy. Sarah Jane drives around in her soft-top Mini Metro, getting into scrapes, jogging in Pineapple-era dancewear, knocking back the odd glass of white wine outside a pub whilst filing copy on her portable typewriter (let’s hope it’s not a Sam Smiths pub with technology like that) and solving mysteries with K9, her plastic pal who’s fun to be with.
Then the show starts. And tonally, we are not in Croydon anymore. We’re not even in Doctor Who, it’s like we’re in something more like a 1970s ATV Thriller, or an episode of Tales of the Unexpected. Sarah Jane has pitched up in her Aunt Lavinia’s massive country house in the Cotswolds. VT interiors, grown-ups talking in grown-up ways in drawing rooms. Juno Baker looks like she has pampas grass in her front garden. The pace is slow. The whole thing feels a bit dated even for 1981, and it certainly does not feel like a show made for children.
Things seem to be getting back on track when Colin Jeavons appears, playing the gardener. I love Colin Jeavons, and I feel like he was a staple of children’s film and TV when I was growing up, or grown-up programmes that appealed to kids like me, usually cast as small-time villains.
The unboxing of K9 by Sarah Jane and her aunt’s ward Brendan also feels more appropriate. The very existence of a character being a ward seems to give us some kind of link into the long history of wintertime children’s TV adaptations of classic stories.
However, the mystery as it unfolds takes us, for me at least, somewhere utterly unexpected. Aunt Lavinia has disappeared after writing a letter to the local newspaper about witchcraft being practised in the area. Sarah Jane, Brendan and K9 uncover a plot, of course, but not some cosy scheme. Oh no. It’s a full-blown Hammer / folk horror satanic cult, comprising all the local dignitaries, who hold rituals by night, in masks in scenes that literally appear to be straight out of Hot Fuzz. If that’s not scary enough, they then kidnap Brendan and decide to make him a human sacrifice.
So, who on earth was this aimed at? Let’s look at the evidence:
The titles look like a low-end kids’ show. The programme itself is filmed and paced like a late 70s adult drama. Its main plot concerned a satanic cult and human sacrifice. And it was broadcast to millions on BBC1 at 5.45pm on Monday 28th Dec 1981, then repeated a year later on BBC2 on Christmas Eve 1982 at 5.40pm. Very mixed messages, possibly even so much so that it’s a bit on the nose even for someone like me from the ‘haunted generation.’
The other reason for my discombobulation is that, although I’ve heard of it, I don’t remember watching it at the time. Which is very odd. I was the right age for it in 1981, I was (and am) a fan of Doctor Who in general, and Sarah Jane Smith in particular. How could I have missed both showings? I was in the habit at the time of circling programmes I wanted to watch in biro in the Christmas double-length Radio Times, how could it have eluded me? We may even have, just, had a VCR then, but could a schedule clash, or just tea-time have been the reason? Or is there some sinister reason where I had amazing adventures in time and space just after seeing it, causing me to have my memory erased before being dumped back into North Somerset on Christmas day 1982? Is that why there is strange satanic incantations (ok, Latin body text) on the web site of one of the locations?
There is another possibility. One of my older brothers was friends with Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who created K9 for ‘The Invisible Enemy’ Doctor Who story in 1977. I’m away from home right now and can’t check Bob Baker’s autobiography, which my brother worked on, but I wonder if there was some beef over Bob & Dave not being involved in K9 and Company and I was encouraged not to watch it? Or maybe it’s just that my holographic memory circuits are failing, mistress…
The thoughtful and very watchable reviews of the Humane AI pin and the Rabbit R1 AI assistant devices by Marques Brownlee have been doing the rounds (see below). His Rabbit R1 review is especially interesting towards the end where he talks about how shipping barely functional products has been normalised. You can kind of see how tech companies pulled this trick with devices where software and firmware can be updated ‘tomorrow’ to add new functionality, though it’s harder to see how that worked with the Tesla Cybertruck, which is, and always will be, a rusty brick, but anyway.
What really strikes me about these AI assistant devices, though, is not just how far behind smartphones they are, it’s that I don’t think they can EVER compete with phones. There, I’m sticking my neck out. I think they are either a doomed class of device, or they will morph into something much more phone-like.
Both the Humane AI pin and Rabbit R1 devices require these things:
an internet connection to cloud AI services
a user interface involving voice recognition
a speaker or Bluetooth headphone connection
some kind of display
a rechargeable battery
a camera
Phones already have all of these things. They have all of these things that work far better than anything in either device. They also have apps which allow you to access all kinds of services now and in the future. The Rabbit AI is going to have ‘Large Activity Models’ to watch how you use other apps and services and mimic it? Well, I mean, EUWWWW, but even if you’re deranged enough to think this is a good idea, there’s nothing to stop Apple or Google or someone else adding that functionality to a phone.
For those AI assistants to find a niche, there has to be something paradigm-shifting about the form factor and / or UI. Maybe the Humane AI pin’s projector and gestures comes close, but I still don’t see how it’s easier than using a phone. So even if more services are added, and if the woeful battery life of these devices is improved, I still don’t see them finding a niche alongside your phone, let alone replacing them.
I’m probably wrong. Ping this back to me in 5 years when everyone has abandoned phones and has a little gizmo with an annoying personality stapled to their shoulder.
From time to time, I’ve posted snippets from Ted Nelson’s 1974 book(s) Computer Lib / Dream Machines on various social networks but, now it’s fifty years old, it seems like a good moment to pull together some of the eye-catching quotations and reflect on the book(s) a little.
Who is Ted Nelson, and why does a fifty-year-old book on computing matter today? Ted Nelson is probably best-known as the man behind Xanadu, a wildly ambitious hypertext system he first described in the 1960s and has been tinkering with ever since. In a 1995 article, Wired magazine called it ‘the longest-running vapourware project in the history of computing.’ As far as I know, almost thirty years later, it still hasn’t shipped (although Ted Nelson is still alive.)
Computer Lib / Dream Machines is, even by the standards of its age, an odd book. Self-published by Nelson in 1974, its appearance is shambolic but oddly charming, like a samizdat political pamphlet or fanzine. Its hand-drawn headlines, type-written text at odd angles is reminiscent of early editions of the British satirical magazine Private Eye. It is, in fact, two books in one. Which book you started reading depending on which way you picked it up, as they were printed back to back. Computer Lib is more of a political or social manifesto, a treatise on what computing had become whereas Dream Machines looks ahead to what computing could become, focusing on computers as machines for manipulating and creating visual arts and writing.
Both books are fascinating, partly as a snapshot of computing history immediately before the microcomputer revolution (which Nelson saw coming), but also because so much of it still seems relevant today. Much of what he says about the social impact of computing is relevant to today’s AI mania, and he even explicitly discusses AI, then in its infancy, in ways that I think we would do well to be mindful of.
Here’s Ted on ‘cybercrud’ – using computing as a ‘smoke and mirrors’ term to hide ulterior motives. Replace ‘computer’ or ‘cyber’ with ‘AI’ as you read it:
CYBERCRUD.
A number of people have gotten mad at me for coining the term “cybercrud,” which I define as “putting things over on people using computers.”
But as long as it goes on we’ll need the word. At every corner of our society, people are issuing pronouncements and making other people do things and saying it’s because of the computer. The function of cybercrud is thus to confuse, intimidate or pressure. We have all got to get wise to this if it is going to be curtailed.
Cybercrud lakes numerous forms. All of them, however, share the patina of “science” that computers have for the layman.
1a) COMPUTER AS MAGIC WORD
The most delicate, and seemingly innocent, technique is the practice of naming things so as spuriously to suggest that they involve computers. Thus there ls a manufacturer of pot-pipes with “Data” in its name, and apparently a pornography house with a “Cyber-”
…
2) WHITE LIES: THE COMPUTER MADE ME DO IT
Next come all the leetle white Lies about how such-and-such is the computer’s fault and not your decision. Thus the computer is made a General Scapegoat at the same time it’s covering up for what somebody wants to do anyway.
“It has to be this way.”
“There’s nothing we can do; this is all handled by computer.”
“The computer will not allow this.”
“The computer won’t let us.”
The translation is, of course, THE STINKY LOUSY PROGRAM DOES NOT PERMIT IT. Which means in turn: WE DO NOT CHOOSE TO PROVIDE, IN OUR PROGRAMS AND EQUIPMENT, ANY ALTERNATIVES.
Now, it is often the case that good and sufficient reason exist for the way things are done. But it is also often the case that companies and the public are inconvenienced, or worse, by decisions the computer people make and then hide with their claim of technical necessity.
(Computer Lib, p8)
Sometimes the stand-out anecdotes are just sweet. This story about children interacting with computing resonates with me deeply:
I know a high-school boy (not a computer expert) who programmed a computer to type out a love story, using the BASIC “print” command, the only one he knew. He could not bring himself to write the love story on paper.
The best example I can think of, though, look place at the kids’ booth at a computer conference. One of the more withdrawn girls was sitting at an off-line video terminal, idly typing things onto the screen. When she had gone a sentence remained. It said:
I love you all. but at a distance.
|—————————————————|
(Computer Lib, p9)
This next idea is also intriguing – that computers need not have been named after humans who carried out mathematical operations. They could have been called something else:
THE ALL-PURPOSE MACHINE
Computers are COMPLETELY GENERAL, with no fixed purpose or style of operation. In spite of this, the strange myth has evolved that computers are somehow “mathematical.” Actually von Neumann, who got the general idea about as soon as anybody (1940s), called the computer THE ALL-PURPOSE MACHINE. (Indeed, the first backer of computers after World War II was a maker of multi-lightbulb signs. It is an interesting possibility that if he had not been killed in an airplane crash, computers would have been seen first as text-handling and picture-making machines, and only later developed for mathematics and business.)
We would call it the All-Purpose Machine here, except that for historical reasons it has been slapped with the other name.
But that doesn’t mean it has a fixed way of operating. On the contrary, COMPUTERS HAVE NO NATURE AND NO CHARACTER, save that which has been put into them by whoever is creating the program for a particular purpose. Computers are, unlike any other piece of equipment, perfectly BLANK. And that is how we have projected on it so many different faces.
(Computer Lib, p10)
Perhaps we would do well to remember that AI systems, even generative AI systems, are also perfectly BLANK until trained – by humans.
Nelson offers this ‘helpful comparison’:
A HELPFUL COMPARISON.
It helps sometimes to compare computers with typewriters.
Both handle information according to somebody’s own viewpoint
Nervous Question: “Can a Computer Write a Poem?”
Helpful Parallel: “Can a Typewriter Write a Poem?”
(Sure. Your poem.)
“Can’t Computers Only Behave Mechanistically?”
“Can’t Typewriters Only Behave Mechanistically?”
(Yes, but carrying out your intent.)
“Aren’t Computers Completely Impersonal?”
“Aren’t Typewriters Completely Impersonal?”
(Well, it’s not like handwriting, but it’s still what you say.)
(Computer Lib, p10)
What might a helpful comparison for AI look like?
Nervous Question: “Can AI Write a Poem?”
Helpful Parallel: “Can a computer Write a Poem?”
(Sure. A poem trained on poetry written by the programmer or other internet-connected humans.)
Nervous Question: “Can’t AI Only Behave Mechanistically?”
Helpful Parallel: “Can’t Computers Only Behave Mechanistically?”
(Yes, but carrying out the designer’s intent.)
Nervous Question: “Isn’t AI Completely Impersonal?”
Helpful Parallel: “Aren’t Computers Completely Impersonal?”
(Well, it’s not your thoughts, but it’s still what other humans might say.)
In Dream Machines Nelson tackles AI head on. I think this stands up pretty well for something written fifty years ago.
THE GOD-BUILDERS!
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE… sort of
“Artificial Intelligence” is at once the sexiest and most ominous term in the world. It chills and impresses at the same time. In principle it means the simulation of processes of mind, by any means at all; but it generally turn out to be some form or another of computer simulation.
Actually, “artificial intelligence” has generally become an all-inclusive term for systems that amaze, astound, mystify, and do not operate according to principles which can be easily explained. In a way, “artificial Intelligence” is an ever-receding frontier: as technique become well-worked out and understood, their appearance of intelligence, to the sophisticated, continually recedes. It’s like the ocean: however much you take out of it, it still stretched on — as limitless as before.
Unfortunately laymen are so impressed by computers in general that they easily suppose computers can do anything Involving information. And public understanding is not fostered by certain types of stupid demonstration. One year I heard from numerous people about how “they’d seen on TV about how computers write TV scripts”- what had actually been shown was a hokey enactment of how the computer could randomly decide whether the Bad Man get shot or the Good Guy gets shot — both outcomes dutifully enacted by guys in cowboy outfits. Duh.
(Dream Machines, p12)
Computers don’t actually think.
You just think they think.
(We think).
(Dream Machines, p12)
Thinking about AI was not new in 1974, but the field was about to enter one of its ‘winters’ where innovation stalled, which makes Nelson’s timeline of AI past, present and future fascinating to read today. Can someone tell me, are we at ‘sexy unknown’ or ‘El Beyondo’ now?
Just as early 1970s computing magazines like People’s Computer Company / Dr Dobb’s Journal are full of things that are unexpectedly relevant today, Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib / Dream Machines is full of nuggets that make me wonder what the world would have been like if he’d been more listened-to, and indeed more successful.
In a similar vein, of paths not taken, I commend this 2013 video, imagining what a talk on the future of programming given in 1973 might have looked like:
Has Computer Lib / Dream Machines really aged well? Well, no. There’s plenty of sexism in there. There’s language that we would not tolerate today, although its context justifies at least reading it today, if not re-posting it. But I guarantee that if you have any interest in the social impact of digital technology, or just its history especially in the creative arts, if you scroll through it, you will find something to surprise or interest you. There’s a lot on cathode ray tubes, for example. CRTs are now obsolete technology, but I read Ted Nelson with a tinge of regret at what we’ve lost: light pens and vector graphics, purer than any blocky, pixellated bitmap rendition of a geometric shape.
1971 Ladybird book on computers (left) and a diagram from Computer Lib (1974) that reminded me of it.
This Christmas and New Year I was going to delete this blog, or archive it and start again. I was going to finish writing one of my many unfinished novels. I did neither, but I did write a short story for New Year.
It’s no longer ‘New Year’ but here we go, a silly story I wrote to amuse myself, like the Christmas one I wrote in 2014.
A couple escape from London to the country after New Year’s Eve to celebrate a badly-timed birthday, and are haunted by a ghost of birthday past.
I’ve not tested the ePub or mobi formats on an eBook reader, only my laptop so let me know if they don’t work.
Many thanks to Ray Newman for graciously allowing me to use his photographs of the Stanton Drew stone circle in North Somerset. I wonder if one day the Common Market will ever return there? (Adge Cutler joke for the kids, there.)
