Back on the tenth, I read a somewhat unusual essay by
Jaron Lanier seemingly railing against
AI.
The premise of the essay seemed to be that we can’t program artificial
intelligences that are actually intelligent, so using them requires that we act
as stupidly as the software. Lanier is quite negative about the whole thing,
and seemingly feels the entire concept is hopeless and debasing.
This seemed pretty odd to me, since Lanier’s the guy who really
pushed virtual reality — and what’s a virtual world without computers
that enforce the illusion?
Yesterday I accidentally resumed the thread, and found a variety of writing
that clarified what Lanier was really complaining
about — General Magic’s ‘intelligent agents’,
programmed with a language called Telescript.
The first hint was in David Bennahum’s
MEME, issue two (01995), which is actually about cloud storage:
A company much maligned for its over-hyped “intelligent agents”,
General Magic, has created a programming
language called Telescript at an estimated R&D
cost of $300,000,000. Telescript is designed to allow mobile software
(i.e. intelligent agents) to share both disk space
and processing power over decentralized networks (Oh, yeah, you won’t find
much talk about that on their site right now. They are very wary of
over-hyping their technology). A little too far of its time, Telescript lies
temporarily dormant.
Eventually I came to the 01994 Wired article
about General Magic and the Telescript software:
Jim White, the wizard who had
developed the standard x.400 networking protocol, envisioned a network which
was not merely a pipeline for messages, but a platform of its own — a
seething system where every message was literally a computer program that
executed itself as it went out on the Net. Each message would be a software
agent, a sort of digital servant performing a task for the person who sent it
out. Sounds scary, and actually it is. But if you could control the agents
you’d have something terrifically powerful.
“At that time (01990), we weren’t thinking in terms of agents,
we weren’t thinking in terms of making the network into a platform,” says
Bill Atkinson. “When Jim first
brought up agents, I had in my mind knowledge-navigator
types — anthropomorphic, obsequious little sci-fi agents. But then I realized
that he wasn’t talking about these human personalities so much as traveling
programs that can take my will with them.”
The system is called Telescript, and it’s the most interesting part of
General Magic technology. In previous network
architectures, a message was like a letter zipped down a chute — nothing
happened to it between the time it was sent and the time it was received. But
in Telescript, the network isn’t a system of chutes but a sort of beehive,
with the messages actively poking around and doing things. The closest thing
to it is Postscript, which changed the way printers worked by substituting
rigid output from a computer application to a vibrant page description
language that allows for the open-ended capabilities that come from computer
programming. Marc Porat, with typical flourish,
has described Telescript as “machinery that gives people the magical ability
to project their desires into cyberspace; that ties together networks of all
sorts into one seamless, invisible, central nervous system…”
…
“It’s the enabling piece,” explains Bill. “The real simple kind of example is
instead of calling up Dow Jones every morning and saying, ‘How’s Apple stock,
is it over a hundred yet?’ I’ll send an agent out. I don’t even have to know
what an agent is, I just fill out a little form and this agent goes out and
lives at Dow Jones, and six months later, a card drops in my pocket that
says, ‘Apple stock just broke a hundred.’”
“The beauty of Telescript,” says
Andy Hertzfeld, “is that now,
instead of just having a device to program, we now have the entire Cloud out
there, where a single program can go and travel to many different sources of
information and create sort of a virtual service. No one had conceived that
before. The example Jim White uses now is a date-arranging service where a
software agent goes to the flower store and orders flowers and then goes to
the ticket shop and gets the tickets for the show, and everything is
communicated to both parties.”
This helped immensely. It explained the jab at the
‘“Wired-style” community’, and explained more of
what the ‘intelligent agent’ concept was actually about. I still don’t really
understand why Lanier was so vehement — I agree that software is often
simplistic and we have to struggle with it to accomplish things, but I fail to
see how that invalidates the concept of machine assistants. Despite what he
says, we have gotten better at it over time. Will we ever create a program
that’s smarter than its creators?
Possibly, and its reality will be virtual.
