Jef Raskin on Artificial Intelligence and All-In-One Software

Composite illustration of Jef Raskin and a Macintosh computer. Create with Stable Diffusion.

After discovering Don Crabb’s thoughts on AI, which I wrote about yesterday here, I did a little more digging in the Internet Archive. This turned up an incredible treasure trove of files collected by David Craig called Apple Lisa Document and Media Collection, which included a photocopy of Jef Raskin’s interview in the amazing book by Susan Lammers titled Programmers at Work, which can be checked out for reading on archive.org here or online at this website created by Lammers).

Jef Raskin, who wrote the user manual for the Apple II and founded the team that would go on to launch the Macintosh computer among other accomplishments, was an important figure in the first phase of the personal computer industry. Toward the end of his interview in Lammers’ book, she asks him about AI:

INTERVIEWER: What do you feel artificial-intelligence programs can contribute to society?

RASKIN: Artificial intelligence teaches us a lot about ourselves and about knowledge. Any reasonable artificial-intelligence program will not fit on a very inexpensive machine, at least not these days.

Real artificial intelligence is something like religion. People used to say that just above the sky were heaven and angels. Then you get a rocket ship out there, and now you know that’s not true. So they change their tune. As soon as you accomplish something, it is no longer artificial intelligence.

At one point, it was thought that chess-playing programs encompassed artificial intelligence. When I was a graduate student, you could get a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence by learning to program chess. Now you can buy a chess player for $29.95 and nobody calls it artificial intelligence. It’s just a little algorithm that plays chess.

First, there’s a problem of definition. Then it gets more complicated. People say that programs should understand natural language, but our utterances are too inexact for a computer, or anybody, to figure out what is meant to be done; that’s why we have programming languages. If anyone’s ever worked from a spec prepared in English, they know that you can’t write a program from it because it’s not exact. So if human beings can’t do it, there is almost no way we can expect to make a machine do that kind of thing. When you’re dealing with so-called artificial-intelligence programs, the computers have got to learn a vocabulary. Let’s say you have five commands and you want the machine to understand any possible English equivalent to them. But it won’t understand any English equivalent: One person might say, “Get employee number,” while an Englishman might say, “Would you be so kind as to locate the numerical designation for our employee.’ That’s exactly the complaint AI people are trying to solve.

A lot of the promise of artificial intelligence is misunderstood. What artificial intelligence has already taught us about the nature of languages is wonderful. So, do I think artificial intelligence is worthwhile? Absolutely. Do I think it’s going to turn out great products? A few. Do I think it’s going to fulfill the promise that you read about in the popular press? Not at all. Will I be putting a lot of money into artificial intelligence? Nope (qtd. in Lammers 243-244).
Lammers, Susan. “Jef Raskin.” Programmers at Work: Interviews with 19 Programmers Who Shaped the Computer Industry. Microsoft Press, 1989, pp. 227-245.

What he said has some resonance today. There seems to be the same kind of effect in computers that we see in other fields. For lack of a better phrase, it’s the “so, what have you done lately?” question. Once one hurdle is accomplished, its importance or significance gets erased by the passage of time and people’s attention. Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess? Great, what’s next? AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol at Go? Okay, what’s next? ChatGPT can do your homework? Super, what’s next? With each milestone, the preceding success seems diminished and becomes the $29.95 chess player that Raskin refers to above.

However, as AI’s capabilities increase, it seems to be edging further toward ubiquity. It’s already ever present in many aspects of our lives, such as business, finance, advertising, and photography, that we are not necessarily cognizant of or paying attention to. Now, it’s creeping into computer and smartphone operating systems (similar to Don Crabb’s observations that I wrote about yesterday) and some of the software that we use for daily productivity (email, word processing, and integrated development environments for programming). Perhaps its the eventual ubiquity of AI that will make it feel mundane instead of a radical technological development as imagined in the heady cyberpunk era represented most clearly by William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984).

But, there’s something else that Raskin talks about in his interview that has some relevance to AI. After he left Apple when Steve Jobs took over the Macintosh project, he founded Information Appliance, Inc. to build and market an add-on card for the Apple IIe called the SwyftCard. This card contained a ROM for an all-in-one piece of software that contained word processing, communication, calculation, printing, and programming capabilities. He explains:

Watch this. There is no disk in the drive, and I want to type a message, “Remember to bring home some milk.” How do you like that? I turn it on and start typing. No need for commands, no insert, no getting to the editor, I can just start typing.

Now I want to print the message and put it in my pocket, so I can use it later. I press a single key, and it prints. Isn’t that convenient . . . .

We can do calculations easily. Before, whenever I was using the word processor and wanted to do a calculation, I’d get out my pocket calculator and have to use a separate calculating program, or get up SideKick; on the Mac, you call up the calculator and paste it into your document. We also have telecommunications capability.

INTERVIEWER: All in the same program?

RASKIN: Sure. There is no difference between all the applications. What’s a word processor? You use it to generate text, move it around, change it if you make a mistake, and find things. What’s a telecommunications package? You use it to generate text, or receive text generated by someone else. Instead of it coming in from a keyboard or out from a printer, it comes in or out over a telephone line. And what’s a calculator? You use it to generate numbers, which are just text, and the answer should come back into your text. So, one day it dawned on me, if these applications do the same thing, why not have one little program that does them all?

INTERVIEWER: Well, what is this product you’ve developed to cover all of these features?

{Raskin holds up a simple card.]

RASKIN: It’s called a SwyftCard (qtd. in Lammers 233).
Lammers, Susan. “Jef Raskin.” Programmers at Work: Interviews with 19 Programmers Who Shaped the Computer Industry. Microsoft Press, 1989, pp. 227-245.

It seems to me that we’re heading toward a great collapsing of software into generative AI. As large language models learn more with increasing amounts of training data, they reveal new capabilities that emerge from the resulting trained models. Will we type and eventually talk to our computers to tell it what we want to accomplish without having to worry about having x, y, or z programs installed because the AI can do those things in an all-in-one fashion as the Nth degree of Raskin’s SwyftCard? Time, of course, will tell.

So Much Reading Left to Do

Outdoor sculpture of books (near the big brain) on the Kent State University Campus in Kent, Ohio.

I’m quickly approaching the midpoint of my sabbatical and there are still so many things remaining to read. And those things will likely lead to other things to read. And those things will lead to more things . . . ad infinitum. This is a problem that I’ve discussed with my friend Keith in Atlanta before. He lives this life of intertextual discovery in his retirement. As Burgess Meredith portraying Henry Bemis in an episode of The Twilight Zone, “there’s time enough at last.”

On Reading J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Books

I read J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books over the winter break. All of them: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1997), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005), and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007). I couldn’t stop there. Then, I read Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2001), Quidditch Through the Ages (2002), and of course, The Tales of Beedle the Bard (2008). Luckily, there were more stories to be read in the Pottermore Presents series: Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship, and Dangerous Hobbies (2016), Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Politics, and Pesky Poltergeists (2016), and Hogwarts: An Incomplete and Unreliable Guide (2016). There’s more to be read on Pottermore, I think, but I haven’t yet fully explored the site.

Why did I voraciously read all of these stories about Harry Potter and the magical world he inhabits in parallel to our muggle world? Rowling’s books and stories filled me with delight and joy! They transported me across time (I’m almost 40 years old), place (back to the United Kingdom), and imagination (the self-consistent fantastic elements of magic, magical creatures, and magical history).

Rowling guides readers to her magical world through Harry and his two closest friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. Then, the world widens through the development of Harry’s nemesis Draco Malfoy, and his widening circle of friends, including Luna Lovegood, Neville Longbottom, Fred and George Weasley, and Ginny Weasley. We discover more about Harry’s past through his godfather Sirius Black and his favorite defense against the dark arts teacher Professor Remus Lupin. We learn about different forms of evil from the controlling Delores Umbridge to the megalomaniacal Tom Marvolo Riddle/Lord Voldemort. We witness tragedy through terrible loss–from Harry’s parents’ sacrifice and the sacrifices Harry’s closest friends and secret ally.

Through the lives of these characters, Rowling weaves struggle and triumph; mundane and wonder; bravery and fear; happiness and angst; courage and uncertainty; kindness and cruelty; and love and hatred. These themes explored and experienced by Harry and his friends drew me into the books unlike anything that I have read in a very long time. I felt the things that Rowling wrote her characters experiencing.

I felt an affinity with Harry and his friends as they confronted the challenges presented by youth, school, and Lord Voldemort. I encouragingly agreed with some of their choices, and I steadfastly disagreed with others. This tension between their choosing the path that I would choose and choosing the path that I would not choose endeared them to me as would real friends. Their youthful humanity made their world as alive and real to me–if not more so in some respects–as anything considered mainstream fiction.

Besides reading about Harry Potter, I consider myself very lucky that I can return to his adventures with LEGO. For those of you who know me, I enjoy building with LEGO. Even though Y and I had not read Harry Potter before, she bought some of the last LEGO Harry Potter sets when we lived in Ohio–4867 Hogwarts, 4841 Hogwarts Express, 4842 Hogwarts Castle. We had left these with my parents in Georgia, who I visited before school started back. I made a point of filling my checked bag with all of the LEGO that I could hold, including those Harry Potter sets and some LEGO train gear (motor, battery pack, IR receiver, IR controller, and track).

During the snow day last week, I assembled all of our Harry Potter LEGO sets and recorded a short video of the Hogwarts Express (with the Weasley’s car flying overhead) traveling past Hogwarts. Over the weekend, I modified Hogwarts to be three bricks higher and the buildings rearranged to be slightly closer to their film arrangement (I have only seen the first three films and those many years ago, so I have all eight films to see in order now, too!). I also made a LEGO vignette of the final duel between Harry and Lord Voldemort. Unfortunately, the aftermarket for Harry Potter LEGO sets is through the roof! I hope that I can get some of the other sets such as Hagrid’s Hut (4738), Graveyard Duel (4766) and Snape’s Class (4706)–I’ll have to save my galleons!

If you have never read any of the Harry Potter books, do yourself a favor and pick up the first one. After you begin reading, you won’t want to stop until you find out how it works out for The Boy Who Lived! In the meantime, you can watch the Hogwarts Express make its way to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry below.

Oct. 21, 2023 Update: Video link removed as it no longer exists.

Georgia Tech Library Tours Promote Writing and Communication Success in ENGL1101/1102 and LCC3403

Georgia Tech Library's Main Entrance — Georgia Tech Library’s Rotunda Entrance

Last Friday, I brought my ENGL1101 (College Writing I) and LCC3403 (Technical Communication) students to the Georgia Tech Library for a tour of the facilities and services (and archives for LCC3403).

I believe that libraries are an incredibly important part of one’s on-going learning, personal development, and professional distinction. Libraries aggregate knowledge for its readers through books, journals, databases, and other media. Libraries make it possible for readers to build connections between sources of knowledge, visualize relationships between books on the shelf or articles in a database, and discover things chaotically, serendipitously, and orderly. Libraries, in their own right, are a university for the self-motivated, curiosity-fueled learner. It is the kind of place where people like Ray Bradbury earn a cap and gown.

For these reasons, I am a firm believer in taking my students to the library early each semester and reminding them of its virtues and possibilities throughout the semester. I tell my students that the library is one place where you can grow beyond your peers and become part of a larger conversation in your field of study (or in other domains of knowledge that might enrich their success in untold ways). Furthermore, the Library is the embodiment of interdisciplinarity, because it unites all the disciplines’ collected knowledge in one place for all students and faculty.

Practically, I encourage them to use the library early and often so that they won’t think that it is difficult or hard later on when it might count a lot more in their studies.

With the help of Sherri Brown, the reference and subject librarian for the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and the Writing and Communication Program, I easily reserved a time for each tour and she coordinated with the other librarians and staff to pull off a well-orchestrated, hour-long tour.

We began in the rotunda entrance of the Library for a brief introduction to the library and its computing resources.

Then, we walked downstairs into the basement to visit the Multimedia Studio and its terrific wide-format plotter.

First Floor East Commons near the Science Fiction Collection

We stopped by the first floor, east to see the circulating Science Fiction collection before going upstairs to the second floor, east to see the periodicals and microfiche area.

Second Floor East and Periodicals and Microfiche

Then, Justin Ellis, Library Associate in charge of Gadgets talked with my students about the many technologies from cameras to laptops to tablets that can be checked out for fun or study (or both).

Gadgets, like books, are a technology to be circulated via the Library.

My LCC3403 students had a special treat on their tour, because we visited the Georgia Tech Archives where Jody Thompson, the Head of Archives, introduced institute-oriented holdings (e.g., the Technique or planning reports) and how to search them. They will be using the Archives as part of their final project to propose and implement a technical communication solution to a problem that they identify around campus.

Many thanks to Sherri, Justin, and Jody for helping my students navigate and use Georgia Tech’s incredible Library!

Notes from LMC Conversation Panel on “Books, Libraries, and the Digital Future” with Jay David Bolter, Lauren F. Klein, and Me

These are my speaking notes and discussion notes from today’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication Conversation following Robert Darnton’s talk yesterday on “Books, Libraries, and the Digital Future.” The panelists included Jay David Bolter, Lauren F. Klein (remotely), and me.

We met with an audience of about 25 members of the Georgia Tech community in the Stephen C. Hall Building, Room 102 from 11:00am-12:00pm.

My research in the area
1. My interest in eBooks comes from two tangents.
  1. First, it comes from my research interests in video game narratives in older software for the Commodore 64, Amiga, IBM-PC, Apple II, and Apple Macintosh platforms. Part of this research focuses on the way characters read within the game—particularly, computer based reading on terminals, tablets, virtual displays, etc. and how these ideas filter into reality/production and vice versa.
  2. Second, it comes from my dissertation research on something that William Gibson wrote about obsolescence and how our technologies—typewriters, Apple IIc, etc.—are fated to become junk littering the Finn’s office—in an “Afterword” to his Sprawl trilogy of novels: Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive [To read it, scroll to the bottom of this page]. The trouble with sourcing this text was the fact that it was not published in a physical book. Instead, I discovered from a Tweet that a mutual friend made with the writer that it come from an early eBook designed for the Apple Macintosh Portable by Voyager Company (what’s left of this company today creates the Criterion Collection of films).
    1. Gibson, William. “Afterword.” Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive: Expanded Books. Voyager Company. 1992. TXT File. Web. 25 March 2012.
    2. Gibson has done other things with ebook and experimental writing such as his exorbitantly priced Agrippa: A Book of the Dead, a floppy disk based e-poem that erases itself after “performing” one time.
  3. Since working with Gibson’s ebook, I’ve begun studying other ebooks—rediscovering ones that I read a long time ago and rethinking what constitutes an ebook—thinking about encyclopedia precursors to Wikipedia and other software such as the Star Trek: TNG Interactive Technical Manual, which does on the computer things that Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda could not do in their print Technical Manual.
  4. We can talk more about this later, but I support Aaron Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.” In my research, I have deployed my own tactics for reading and manipulating text that enable scholarship that I otherwise would be unable to do. Read more about fair use and transformation.
My response to Darnton’s talk
1. Aaron Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto”
2. Peter Purgathofer’s Lego Mindstorms-MacBook Pro-Kindle-Cloud-based OCR assemblage for ripping text from Kindle ebooks
3. DPLA scans of Dickinson’s manuscripts (open) and copyrighted scholarly editions (closed).
4. Issues of the Archive, Access, and Control.
My suggestions for future research directions
1. The relationship between haptic experience of pulp books and ebooks (e-reader, tablet, computer, Google Glass, etc.). How do we read, think about, and remember books differently based on the modalities of experiencing the book? We know that the brain constructs memories as simulations, so what are we gaining and losing through alterations to the methods of interacting with writing?
2. A history of eBook readers—fascinating evolutionary lineage of ebook reading devices including Sony’s DD8 Data Discman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Discman).
3. How are our students reading? More students this year than last asked me if they could purchase their books for ENGL1101 and Tech Comm as ebooks. How many students are turning to ebooks due to their cost or ease of access (pirating)? I don’t mind students purchasing ebooks over traditional books, but I have them think about the affordances of each.
4. As researchers, how should we assert our fair use of texts despite the intentions of copyright holders? We no longer own books, but instead, we license content. [Purgathofer mentions this, but Cory Doctorow and others have commented on this at length: one source. Another more recent source.]
5. How do we use ebooks and traditional books differently/similarly? For example, Topiary (aka Jake Davis), one of the former members of LulzSec, said earlier today on ask.fm that he prefers ebooks for learning and studying, but he prefers traditional books for enjoyment.
Other responses, comments, and questions
1. Jay Bolter: What about the future of books, the status of the book, and the status of libraries? What will happen to literature and the literary community? What is the cultural significances of print/digital to different communities (e.g., general community of readers vs. community represented by the New York Review of Books)?
2. Lauren Klein: What are the roles of the archive and how do readers access information in the archive? We should think about how people use these digital archives (e.g., DPLA). In her work, she deploys computational linguistics: techniques to study sophisticated connections between documents. How is the information being used? Deploying visualization techniques to enable new ways of seeing, reading, and studying documents.
3. Grantley Bailey: What about people who grow up only reading on screens/ebooks? What will their opinions be regarding this debate?
4. Aaron Kashtan: Commented about graphic novels and comics in the digital age and about how these media remain entrenched in traditional, print publishing. Also, Aaron is interested in materiality and the reader’s experience.
5. John Harkey: Commented on poetry’s dynamism and its not being wedded to books/chap books. Poetry is evolving and thriving through a variety of media including the Web, as electronic art, and experimental literature. We should think about literature as vehicles of genres and artifactual heterogeneity (essay, collage, posters, augmented reality, etc.).
6. Lisa Yaszek: Pan-African science fiction is likely a model for the future. In the present, no single nation can support a thriving publishing industry for SF, but together, African SF is taking off with the diffusion of new technologies of distribution and reading (ubiquity of cellular phones, wifi, cellular data, etc.).