The Way the Future Was - Part 4

This is the final posting from the report of the 1984 Mensa Conference at Cambridge, by Paul Johnson, and written up for "Thinks!", the Channel Island Mensa Magazine edited by Ken Webb, with assistant editor being myself.

This week the ZX Spectrum is 30 years old. Back in 1984, it was newly released, barely 2 years old. The successor to Sir Clive Sinclair's ZX81, introduced colour "high resolution" graphics and sound, and an extended version of Sinclair Basic. It sold for an impressively low £125 for the basic model with 16 kilobytes of RAM, or £175 for the 48k model!

The world of 1984 had a lot of optimism in the ability of technology to solve problems, but matters often didn't turn out quite as expected. We do have computers that are "able to speak and understand commands" - but they are not perhaps where the Mensa bunch thought they might be, in the home, like Robbie the Robert. Instead, they are to be found in the voice recognition systems at the end of a telephone, which gives you options, and asks you to speak clearly. That voice recognition would turn out to be one of the most irritating advances in technology was not foreseen!

I remember reading, in the late 1970s, a copy of Andrei Amalrik's book "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?". It seemed solid, and yet it ended so abruptly. This is something that the Cambridge conference didn't contemplate at all, that internal strains might see its demise. And no one pretty well could see the rise of militant Islam back in 1984.

They are also remarkably optimistic about famine, which "will be much reduced". Sadly this is not the case. The situation today is just as bad as in 1984, not least because corrupt dictatorships or civil wars across Africa mean that aid cannot get through, or get siphoned off. Some does get to its destination, but countries which were rich in producing their own crops - like Zimbabwe - have seen a decline under dictatorships where land is a prize to be stolen and handed out, the spoils of victory, to people who often can't farm or know how to farm well.

Lastly, I have not found anyone else to use the word "mensating" for Members of mensa getting together. It is, however, a word to be found in the Mandingo language. I've not been able to find out what it means, but this sentence:

Maninka, Meninka, Mandingo MNI Katuko Alla ye dunya kannu nyinyama, an'ading wulu kiliring di, mensating mo-o-mo men lata ala, ate tinyala barri a si
balu abadarbag sotto.

is the Mandingo version of:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

MENSA AT CAMBRIDGE
Report by Paul Johnson

4th August

During the morning we were shown the results of the poll taken the afternoon we arrived. It consists of two groups, one of the 110 mensans at the conference, one of 500 randomly chosen telephone subscribers. In general mensans were significantly more optimistic about the rate of technological progress and the kind of world it will produce.

In the afternoon we split into five groups. Four of these looked at the Horsemen of the Apocalypse; Death, War, Famine and Pestilence. The fifth looked at computers and artificial intelligence. After two hours of discussion each group reported its findings. They were generally optimistic.

Computers and special purpose robots will replace the servants of the last century, and be able to speak and understand commands.

Wars will not be nuclear. The superpowers will try to build defenses against the opposition weapons and attack by meddling in third world politics.

The plagues of today will be conquered, but will be replaced by others. There was a suggestion that the Eastern Block countries are developing diseases aimed at certain areas of the population and that AIDS might be one such.

Famine will be much reduced if not eradicated through education and birth control, It was pointed out that if you feed five hundred starving people for ten years, you get one thousand starving people.

That evening "Whoops Apocalypse" was shown, The black humour on the suggestion by Chris Lee of "war by accident" was funny and sobering at the same time.  Afterwards I discovered a disco in the College Pub, which was broken up by the management at 1.30 am.

That was Mensa at Cambridge, 1984. I found it an intensely stimulating experience. In this report I have only been able to record the lectures and social events. The rest of the time, taken by informal discussion with other delegates and "mensating" in the truest sense of the word, was the most important part of Mensa at Cambridge. The Old Hall had the motto "Floreat Domus" painted on the walls. We say "Floreat Mensa".

The Way the Future Was - Part 3

This is a third posting from the report of the 1984 Mensa Conference at Cambridge, by Paul Johnson, and written up for "Thinks!", the Channel Island Mensa Magazine edited by Ken Webb, with assistant editor being myself.

The biologist who gave the talk here was Brian Ford, who is still around today, with a string of fellowships and awards to his name; he also publishes on scientific issues for the general public and has been a populariser of science on TV for more than 40 years. He has a mischievous iconoclastic streak which led to him deliberately giving one of his books the longest and most complex title in English-language publishing history:

Nonscience and the Pseudotransmogrificationalific Egocentrified Reorientational Proclivities Inherently Intracorporated In Expertistical Cerebrointellectualised Redeploymentation with Special Reference to Quasi-Notional Fashionistic Normativity, The Indoctrinationalistic Methodological Modalities and Scalar Socio-Economic Promulgationary Improvementalisationalism Predelineated Positotaxically Toward Individualistified Mass-Acceptance Gratificationalistic Securipermanentalisationary Professionism, or How To Rule The World,

The point of the title was to poke fun at those who conceal their lack of real expertise by using long and complicated words, whilst making the serious point that more people are fooled by these so-called experts than really should be. The book is commonly referred to simply as Nonscience, which is itself a play on nonsense. (1)

It was not surprising perhaps, that he should clash with Clive Sinclair over Artificial Intelligence. The 1980s saw the rise of the dominant mythology of our day, which is still present today, that the human brain resembled a complex computer. A biologist would see the large gap between the complexity of biology, and the model so rapidly (and uncritically) seized upon by the home computer pioneers such as Clive Sinclair.

What is machine intelligence? The cleverest definition of "artificial intelligence" was devised by one of the cleverest computer scientists to have lived, Alan Turing. He suggested in 1951 a test which he called "The Imitation Game". It has the beautiful simplicity that one might expect from a mathematician, and it neatly does away with the appearance of the machine, which is irrelevant to the problem:

The first version of the game he explained involved no computer intelligence whatsoever. Imagine three rooms, each connected via computer screen and keyboard to the others. In one room sits a man, in the second a woman, and in the third sits a person - call him or her the "judge". The judge's job is to decide which of the two people talking to him through the computer is the man. The man will attempt to help the judge, offering whatever evidence he can (the computer terminals are used so that physical clues cannot be used) to prove his man-hood. The woman's job is to trick the judge, so she will attempt to deceive him, and counteract her opponent's claims, in hopes that the judge will erroneously identify her as the male.

What does any of this have to do with machine intelligence? Turing then proposed a modification of the game, in which instead of a man and a woman as contestants, there was a human, of either gender, and a computer at the other terminal. Now the judge's job is to decide which of the contestants is human, and which the machine. Turing proposed that if, under these conditions, a judge were less than 50% accurate, that is, if a judge is as likely to pick either human or computer, then the computer must be a passable simulation of a human being and hence, intelligent. The game has been recently modified so that there is only one contestant, and the judge's job is not to choose between two contestants, but simply to decide whether the single contestant is human or machine. (2)

Clive Sinclair in the 1970s and early 1980s was always dreaming of a better computer that would rival the human brain. This was, after all, the person who gave the world the Sinclair ZX81, which the advertising blurb stated could do "quite literally anything, from playing chess to running a power station"! In fact, as the Guardian notes, somewhat tongue in cheek, it was a hobby toy for games for boys:

Things really took off when the ZX became the Spectrum in 1982, and colour games such as Jet Set Willy became the second major activity in teenage bedrooms. (3)

It is strange to notice that he has now turned his back on computers, and uses  the telephone in preference to email. In an interview, he told the reporter how he doesn't use modern PCs. Is it really laziness, or perhaps a lingering jealously at the machines that drove his own valiant little Heath Robinson efforts out of existence?

And what computer does he now use himself?
"I don't use a computer at all. The company does."
"So you don't do email?"
"No. I've got people to do it for me."
"If friends and family want to communicate?"
"They can do that. We've got a computer in the front office, but I get someone to do it for me."
"That seems odd to me. Why is that?"
"Sheer laziness I think. I can't be bothered."
"Do you not know how to operate it?"
"I do know how to, but I don't."
"Sorry to press, but it seems the simplest thing in the world to do your own emails."
"Well I find them annoying. I'd much prefer someone would telephone me if they want to communicate. No, it's not sheer laziness - I just don't want to be distracted by the whole process. Nightmare."

---

MENSA AT CAMBRIDGE
Report by Paul Johnson

3rd August

The morning lecture was from Brian Ford, a microbiologist. He was concerned with futurology as much as with the staggering variety of living organisms. He did mention a very strong doubt that machines could ever rival their complexity, and showed slides of various microbes with primitive eyes and nervous systems to support this.

Sir Clive disputed this point of view, and I joined the lively argument over this after the lecture.

The afternoon was given over to Professor Ian Barron, head of INMOS, the government electronics firm. He talked of how Sir Clive's dream of a "meta-computer" might be brought about and went on to talk about the latest chip his company has produced. It is effectively a computer on a single chip, complete with communications to other similar "transputers", a small memory and a 32 bit architecture (current computers use 8 or 16 bits). It can handle several jobs at once, and if it went too slow, more chips could be hooked in and the jobs shared between the old and the new.

He also talked of the way these chips are designed. The usual way is to construct a circuitry which looks as if it should work, and then to test it exhaustively. At INMOS, mathematical languages are used to prove that
there are no bugs, a quicker and more reliable approach.

During the afternoon Victor Serebriakoff held a "Think-in"; an unstructured discussion on the broad subject of artificial intelligence. Discussion ranged over many topics, including the possibility that machines might be able to have souls.

That evening Sir Clive held what he euphemistically termed a "garden party" at his Cambridge house. It started off with a barbeque and buffet supper, and continued with the Kings College singers giving a very enjoyable concert, and a disco which broke up at about 1.30 a.m.


Links
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_J._Ford
(2) http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/turing.html
(3) http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/28/clive-sinclair-interview-simon-garfield

The Way the Future Was - Part 2

This is a second posting from the report of the 1984 Mensa Conference at Cambridge, by Paul Johnson, and written up for "Thinks!", the Channel Island Mensa Magazine edited by Ken Webb, with assistant editor being myself.

The film Terminator had come out in 1984, about a future society in which machines, programmed for war, and with artificial intelligence, had taken over the world. Chris Lee's Mensa talk on power politics shows just how much a part of the culture this thinking was.

In fact the scenario of machines making decisions too quickly for human beings to take control back has come to pass - but not in the field of the military. Rather, it is the clever computer programs, designed to make split-second decisions, that are undoubtedly one of the major factors in having a stock exchange that is so volatile.

In September 2011, Computerworld UK Magazine ran a feature on "Algorithmic stock trading rapidly replacing humans, warns government paper":

Algorithmic trading, including high frequency trading (HFT), is rapidly replacing human decision making, according to a government panel which warned that the right regulations need to be introduced to protect stock markets. Around one third of share trading in the UK is conducted by computers fulfilling commands based on complex algorithms, said the Foresight panel in a working paper published yesterday. Nevertheless, this proportion is significantly lower than in the US, where three-quarters of equity dealing is computer generated. (1)

The panel concluded that there was no direct evidence of causality, but that the programs could increase volatility and cause massive damage:

There was "no direct evidence" that the computer trading in itself increased volatility, it said, but in specific circumstances it was possible for a series of events with "undesired interactions and outcomes" to occur and cause massive damage. One such event is self-reinforcing feedback loops, whereby small changes, perhaps driven by data delays or news events, loop back on themselves and trigger a bigger change, which again loops back. Another event, normalisation of deviance, is more psychological: unexpected and risky events come to be seen as ever more normal until a stock market crash occurs.(1)

Of course, part of the credit crunch was bundling of "toxic debt", mortgages and loans that could not be repaid, and that was a human decision. But when the market began to panic, the computer systems, with built in programs, made the matter worse with a rapidity that would not have been as likely in 1984.

Sir John Butterfield's vision of future dangers in health care is interesting. He is partly right in his assessment of behavioural diseases, but quite why he puts "speed" - by which is clearly meant going fast, rather than drug use - is not clear.

Again the films of the 1980s may provide a clue. The film Cannonball Run (1981) and Cannonball Run 2 (1984) show that there speeding was considered the kind of sport you might do for fun and the adrenalin rush. The Road Traffic Regulation Act of 1984 shows that speed was high on the agenda. Outside of Top Gear, however, and the odd lunatic speeder - one was clocked in Jersey at over 100 mph - most people don't get a kick out of speeding; they are far more concerned about limiting the amount of petrol they use.

What he fails to spot, which would become an increasing issue, is obesity and obesity related diseases - heart, arteries and diabetes. These - rather than speeding - would be the major behavioural killers of our decade.

Sir John Butterfield, OBE, FRCP (1920-2000) was a leading British medical researcher, clinician and administrator. He was in fact a specialist in diabetes, although he clearly he did not spot that as an obesity related disease in 1984:

In the course of his studies of burns he noted that a significant number of patients with burns developed a form of temporary diabetes akin to steroid diabetes. His interest in diabetes began with this study and continued throughout his career. He is credited with pioneering automated chemistry to measure blood sugar. He also organized a large-scale epidemiological study of diabetes in Bedford.(2)

Mensa at Cambridge shows how difficult it is for even experts in the field to predict future trends, and perhaps only H.G. Wells has achieved anything like success in this field with The Land Ironclads (1903) which envisaged tanks in a World War I scenario and "The World Set Free" (1914) in which he predicted a kind of nuclear weaponry.

---

MENSA AT CAMBRIDGE
Report by Paul Johnson

2nd August

During the morning we heard Chris Lee give a very sobering talk on defence and power politics. He felt that war was becoming too technical, and that by 2020 the machines will make all the tactical decisions. The commander will have a flood of information and a button marked "ABORT". As an example he cited the case of H.M.S.Sheffield. By the time the captain realised he was under attack, the ships computers had sounded the alarms and fired radar chaff. Before anything else could be done the missile hit.

The wars themselves will be more likely to start by accident, with a border skirmish resulting from misunderstanding and escalating into a nuclear exchange. A full scale exchange would be unlikely. Instead a few cities would be destroyed and then peace talks start.

After the lecture I spent 1/4 of an hour trying out the Sinclair QL installed in the Erasmus Room. This room had been set up as a "Hospitality Suite" with free snacks and drink all day. After that I went punting with some friends. With seven of us in the boat there was very little freeboard. We borrowed a bottle of wine and some glasses from the Erasmus room and took turns trying to steer a straight course along the river. No one fell in, but I nearly lost the pole. Twenty minutes after setting off, the heavens opened, so we took hurried shelter under a bridge. Even then we got soaked. Fortunately we had not gone in period costume as planned.

After lunch we heard from Professor Sir John Butterfield on health care in the future. He is of the opinion that the big killers of the present day will grow even larger in the future. These are the behavioral diseases; smoking, drinking, drugs, speed in any form and gambling. Therefore the biggest growth will have to be in health education; teaching children why these occupations are dangerous.

Organisations such as ASH and the Anonymous societies are a start, but much more will be needed.

Instead of evening dinner, a barbeque was held behind the college pub. I spoke to Madsen Pirie who was very pleased with the press coverage we had received, especially articles in national papers and local television.

Links
(1) http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/networking/3302464/algorithmic-stock-trading-rapidly-replacing-humans-warns-government-paper/
(2) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2194391/pdf/tacca00004-0060.pdf

The Way the Future Was - Part 1

I will admit from the first that this title is a steal from the great science fiction writer Frederick Pohl, who in fact also has a blog with this title - it was also the title for his autobiography, which I have in paperback form. So credit where it is due, and here is a link to his blog.

http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/
http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/about/

However, this posting is isn't about science fiction, it is a report of the 1984 Mensa Conference at Cambridge, by Paul Johnson, and written up for "Thinks!", the Channel Island Mensa Magazine edited by Ken Webb, with assistant editor being myself.

In the early 1980s, the impact of the desktop PC was only starting to make inroads, with three main rivals - the IBM PC, the ACT Sirius, and the DEC Rainbow. The States of Jersey splashed out to get desktop computers on what was then quite a substantial number of managers desks, and of course, with the benefits of hindsight, the DEC Rainbow was not the way to go.

I was using a DEC PDP-11 Minicomputer, a machine the size of a small filing cabinet, and later on a Commodore 2000 (the business end of the Commodore range). Schools were using BBC Micros, and the small computer magazines were awash with a mass explosion of pcs, like the Orac (named after a computer in the TV show Blake's 7) and the Einstein. Father to these was Clive Sinclair with his ZX-81. Rather like the Cambrian explosion, there would be a mass extinction of all these models by the end of the decade.

Mensa at Cambridge looked to the year 2020, which is barely 8 years off. Amusingly, there was also a Medieval banquet! But how are the predictions doing?

Clive Sinclair is right about price, but that's about it.

Prestel (abbrev. from press telephone) was the brand name for the UK Post Office's Viewdata technology, an interactive videotex system developed during the late 1970s and commercially launched in 1979. It achieved a maximum of 90,000 subscribers in the UK and was eventually sold by BT in 1994.

The advent of the internet meant that centralised data stores, like Prestel or Compuserve, faded away and were replaced by a greater spread of data rather than centralisation. Home computers that teach and chat to the children were a staple of science fiction - Asimov has a short story called "The Fun they Had" in which a child wistfully imagines what it was like to be taught in classrooms. But it has turned out to be a pipe-dream, and while computer related educational resources are available - mostly often online - they are passive, written by human beings; there is no intelligent computer as educator.

Dr Madsen Pirie's guesses are also way out. Government, if anything, has become more intrusive and larger, rather than lessening and fading away. Most children are not taking degrees in their early teens, and people are not rocketing about. International travel has probably improved, but the security checks don't make it quite as easy as local commuting. But then who could have foreseen the rise of militant religious terrorism?

It's instructive to compare this with science fiction writer Robert Sheckley's "Prize of Peril" (1960), in which contestants compete in increasingly dangerous reality TV shows for the enjoyment of an audience which likes to watch people being put through what are exercises in sadism. Sheckley is extrapolating to make a point, but his view of human nature, jaundiced though it may be, produces a world much closer to our own than the utopian fantasies of Sinclair or Pirie.

Moulain was dark and intense, and chewed gum as he talked. "You'll do," he snapped. "But not for Hazard. You'll appear on Spills. It's a half-hour daytime show on Channel Three."
"Gee," said Raeder.
"Don't thank me. There's a thousand dollars if you win or place second, and a consolation prize of a hundred dollars if you lose. But that's not important."
"No, sir."
"Spills is a little show. The JBC network uses it as a testing ground. First and second-place winners on Spills move on to Emergency. The prizes are much bigger on Emergency."
"I know they are, sir."
"And if you do well on Emergency, there are the first-class thrill shows, like Hazard and Underwater Perils, with their nationwide coverage and enormous prizes. And then comes the really big time. How far you go is up to you."

I'm a Celebrity, anyone?

---

MENSA AT CAMBRIDGE
Report by Paul Johnson

A question that often arises about Mensa is "What do you do?" The answer is that "We Mensate". That is, we argue about any problem that takes our fancy. In the process, we exercise our minds and point out any holes in the thoughts of others. This is what Mensa at Cambridge is about. It was conceived five years ago by Professor Sir Clive Sinclair, Chairman of British Mensa, and has now become something of an institution.

In 1948, George Orwell looked ahead thirty six years in his book "1984", with a description of a totalitarian state. The date was not intended seriously; he merely transposed the last two digits of his own year. Despite this, Mensa at Cambridge also looked ahead thirty six years to 2020, with the general theme that we will have intelligent machines by then.

I am not writing about each lecture and discussion in detail. Transcripts will be available from International President Victor Serebriakoff, and further argument will no doubt appear in the British Mensa Journal. Instead this is a summary of the thoughts of each speaker, as well as a diary of the other events during the conference.

Although I am attempting to keep my own views out of this report, some of what is written stems from discussion with the speakers. As a result, coverage is uneven and reflects my personal interests more that the importance of the speakers' views.

31st July 1984

I arrived at Queens College, Cambridge at 1.50 p.m. Registration started at 2.00 p.m. with the signing up and the handing out of badges and room keys. The badges were holograms of an eye (symbolising Big Brother), with a tab stating the conference and the wearer's name.. We also had to fill in a questionnaire on our views of the future. After a cup of tea I went with three other delegates to hire costumes for the Medieval Banquet on 1st. August.

That evening,- an icebreaker party was thrown in the Queens College Old Hall, not that the ice needed breaking after the afternoons talking.

1st August

After breakfast, Sir Clive gave a lecture on the future of the computer. He estimated the number of synapses in the human brain at 10 to the 14th. Extrapolating the advances in computer technology since 1964, a computer of similar complexity in 2020 will cost the equivalent of £1,000.

He christened this device a "meta-computer". It will be-able to converse in English and will come to know intimately the family it "lives" with, teaching the children and advising on health, finance and law from a central Prestel style database.

Several members of the audience expressed fear about a computer educating the children and advising on health care but Sir Clive pointed out that the computer will do these jobs far better than a human can, and there will be no need for children to stop socialising because they no longer learn at school.

After an excellent buffet lunch, Dr Madsen Pirie described his predictions about life as a whole in 2020. He said that the broad economic trend on 2% growth per annum will continue and that "doomwatch" predictions are wrong. He then concentrated on trying to predict the society of 2020.

Family life will lessen; there will still be one house to one family but individual members will be more independent. Britain will have become a sub-contracting society, with firms of two to six people employing other firms to do specialised jobs.

For instance a car manufacturer will employ firms of researchers, designers, technicians, and eventually salesmen when launching a new car. Thus the employer-employee relationship we know today will fade away, to be replaced with clear contractual obligations up and down.

There will be a number of new sports, mostly connected with flying, children will be taking first degrees in their early teens thanks to the educational computers, and international travel will be as easy as local commuting.

The government will fade away as there ceases to be anything for it to govern. Local communities will look after their own affairs.

That evening the Medieval Feast was held in the Old Hall. Roughly half the delegates had hired period costume, giving a genuine atmosphere to the proceedings. Entertainment was provided by a quartet of close harmony singers. Sir Clive wore his scholar's robes, Victor Serebriakoff looked like Falstaff, and I went as court jester, complete with six inch nose and wry-necked fife (Distant Recorder) with which I made a complete fool of myself. We ate without forks, admired the serving wenches and got drunk on mead.