Web developer, writer
It’s 1983. I’m 11.
For my birthday, I got my first personal computer, the ZX Spectrum. It came with a 16K ROM (internal memory) and an additional 32K of RAM. It’s likely that my washing machine today has more computing power. It doesn’t matter. I remember myself diving into the booklet that came with the computer The Spectrum Book of Games, a book filled with typing games, programs in BASIC, formatted and ready to be typed into the spectrum, ready to go.
One of the games that captured my immediate attention was Smalltalk, an imitation of the computerized and spoken psychologist Eliza. I sat down and typed all the necessary code just to engage in tedious conversations like:
Gil: The sound of the mosquitoes at night disturbs me.
Eliza: Can you elaborate?
Gil: Yes, it’s hard to sleep because of the buzzing.
Eliza: Tell me more about the buzzing.
Etc.
Needless to say, the mosquito problem wasn’t solved by Eliza/Smalltalk.
Later on, one of the first games I got for the spectrum was The Hobbit, a text-based quest with graphics, an adventure game at the forefront of technology, that was very complex, too complex for the limited memory of my computer. A big surprise was the option to “talk to the computer”, which back then meant typing commands to get ahead in the game, in a simple, nearly natural language. I entered instructions into a primitive artificial intelligence engine, such as “put an olive in every barrel except the orange one”. I wasted my time on actions that followed questions and complex instructions like “ask Gandalf what time it is, then head east”. I was shocked.
The Hobbit, publisher: Granada
Smalltalk and The Hobbit gave me, as a child, the understanding and distinction between processing ability and consciousness.
Today, when I face a bot in a bank or at the airport, and try to communicate with the computer in a “natural language”, I often rely on those memories, leaning on them, and see just how little progress we’ve made in the past forty years.
This knowledge intuitively reinforces the insight I probably already had at the start of my computer/digital journey, an understanding that, for me, clarifies that software cannot truly develop consciousness, not really. In my view, software merely makes intelligent use of the consciousness of its creator.