{"id":5118,"date":"2025-12-30T22:26:44","date_gmt":"2025-12-30T22:26:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/?page_id=5118"},"modified":"2026-04-07T01:04:37","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T01:04:37","slug":"learning-what-computers-couldnt-do","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/true-life\/1985-1989\/learning-what-computers-couldnt-do\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning what computers couldn’t do"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had become completely fascinated with computer technology.<\/strong> My first access was to Commodore 64s in the college’s tiny computer lab behind the lecture room. I began learning Basic from typing in code from magazine articles, and later on started writing my own little programs to do things like fill the screen will random graphical characters. The random function fascinated me; the concept of (relative) randomness was offered as an everyday function of a deterministic programming language. I started to see a video monitor as display surface for imagery that could be made by a computer in real-time, and I wondered if a computer system could over-reach the expectations of its creators using calculations alone.<\/p>\n

Programming helped me understand something of the mechanics of the computer: it had the ability to calculate and manipulate information, it had memory, and it had ways to receive information (mostly via its keyboard) and to display information (on its video monitor).<\/p>\n

I wanted to know how the Commodore 64’s 6502 CPU and memory worked, and how the information that I saw onscreen was represented and managed internally. Luckily, the college library had a computer program and book called “The Visible 6502” which I studied for a couple of weeks to learn about processor registers, program counters, how calculations were done, and how data was managed. It helped me feel a lot more confident about the science and engineering behind that little consumer-grade microcomputer, how events were transformed into information, and vice-versa.<\/p>\n

Later on, I’d teach myself about binary and hexidecimal numbers, to better appreciate how calculations were done in a system that counted by twos instead of tens. It was all introductory computer science stuff; a new language for me and a new model for representing things. I felt like the computer might actually become my creative medium in some way. It seemed like an almost limitless internal landscape to explore, and I really wanted to master it.<\/p>\n

Another aspect that fascinated me was Artificial Intelligence and the simulation of cognition in computer systems. Humans need to connect and to feel seen and heard, and any computer program that could simulate that (aka “fake it”) caught my interest as well.<\/p>\n

By reading magazine articles and inexpensive primer books from Radio Shack, I’d learned about the Eliza program<\/a> created by computer scientist Joseph Weisenbaum<\/a>. Eliza was an early version of artificial intelligence that responded to\u00a0 human prompts using patterns modelled after Rogerian psychtherapy. In effect, Eliza would parse a text query to create a pattern that would form the most believable, realistic response. The computer program had no awareness or experience – it was just performing logical operations like “if… then”.\u00a0 Wesenbum’s model would turn a question around on its asker, using forms like “Why do you think that…” to precede a segment of the original prompts, and switching pronouns from “my” to “your”, etc. It was basically a trick to side-step the absence of real analysis and understanding.<\/p>\n

In a magazine, I found a simple version for the C-64, written in Basic. Back in those days, you’d type in the code from an article in the magazine, which forced you to do your own debugging from inevitable typing errors. Once I saw all the data statements containing parts of phrases, and read the decisions that the program made in order to determine which responses to use, the mystique disappeared and I saw Eliza as the predetermined logic tree that it was. Eliza was a simulation practically as limited as my pocket calculator, and I wondered if its use of language was the novelty that caused us to project our expectations of intelligence onto it. Like a really good magic trick or carnival attraction, it was providing a fantasy that we were wired to believe.<\/p>\n

It stimulated my belief that people want to project life and humanity onto unreal, synthetically-generated personae, like a carnival automaton that tells your fortune, or an AI that answers your questions. I saw that the audience and their expectations were part of the whole loop between object and observer: their perceptions and their projections actually “completed” the piece.<\/p>\n

Looking back on these ideas forty years later, I think that some of my cynicism and scrutiny might have been inspired by watching my mother’s blank stares during our uncomfortable visits with her in hospital, particularly when she lived at Riverview. Mum was medicated a lot of the time while there, and usually didn’t respond to us very much. I always wondered how cognizant she really was behind her tremoring, vegged-out appearance. Combining that with a suspicion that a lot of truths are hidden behind facades “for our benefit”, my wary mind learned to try to look beneath any surface and behind every mask for answers to human behaviour.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, humans are subjective and complex, and cannot be reversed-engineered like a program or electrical circuit. I also didn’t know much of my mother’s mental health history, so she remained a mystery. I never knew much of what was in her mind while she was in Riverview; I could only observe her behaviour. At least Eliza would try to talk back to me, and ironically, allowing that pretense with a simple AI sometimes provided little moments of satisfaction.<\/p>\n

\"image_pdf\"<\/a>\"image_print\"<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had become completely fascinated with computer technology. My first access was to Commodore 64s in the college’s tiny computer lab behind the lecture room. I began learning Basic from typing in code from magazine articles, and later on started writing my own little programs to do things like fill the screen will random graphical … Continue reading Learning what computers couldn’t do<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":1743,"menu_order":671,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-5118","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5118"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5171,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5118\/revisions\/5171"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}