The programmer's imagination

Put this one.

Speaker 1: Okay, I think I'm I think I'm ready. Hi everyone. Lovely to see you all. Um first of all Thank you to the organizers and all the uh volunteers who are running this. It's um I know how much work it is. I appreciate it. Um the SDGRs who are Doing all the magic typing for us. And um f for this talk I I did some research. So I actually went and visited the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff to talk To discuss some of my ideas with the head of paleontology. So thank you to Dr. Caroline Butler of the National Museum in

Speaker 1: Cardiff. I'm um Daniele. Um that's me. Um I'm not on Twitter anymore, so you can find me on Macedon since Elon Musk made Twitter great again. I'm a director of engineering at Canonical. And these are the other things that I do in this world of software. I'll I'll leave them there. We can talk about those. I am hiring for people to work directly with me in in software documentation at Canonical. So and also for other roles. So if you'd like to work at Canonical but would prefer not to work with me, we can also talk about that because that that's also quite possible. uh to do. So, you know, there are a few people here that I've got my eye on literally

Speaker 1: for uh that I would be really proud to um be able to recruit for um canonical so I hope that we'll be able to have some conversations um about that Um well congratulations, the install worked successfully. What does this tell us? You've successfully installed Django. It tells us also that in the world of Django, we can imagine that success as a rocket launch that worked well. So somebody imagined this for us for some reason. Even if it was a bit of whimsy, it was a choice that they made. And maybe this particular choice

Speaker 1: doesn't have serious implications, but I still I want to investigate this kind of imagination. So I want to ask a question that probably you weren't expecting, but it's actually relevant. Can we own dinosaurs? And the officer is of course yes of course we can because dinosaurs lived until about 66 million years ago, but they're alive now in our imaginations. And it's in the imagination that things truly belong to us. And I acquired my dinosaurs when I read this book as a child, as a small child. I liked Brontosaurus the best because it seemed blameless and peaceable. And it was a pretty striking book for a small child to read.

Speaker 1: In the beginning, nothing lived On the land or in the sea. There were no plants, no animals, no people. And I I don't know if the echo was conscious or unconscious, but you know, think of the book of Genesis. In the beginning the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface uh of the deep. And in that picture, you know, those rocks are being lashed by the sea uh and the storms, there's fire in the sky, and you know bank holiday weekend weather but um actually that was quite a com that's quite a confrontation for a small child to have with big ideas um and I think for many children probably for many of you Dinosaurs represent the first

Speaker 1: confrontation with the idea of the end of things because It's an invitation to consider a time long before them, before their own time existed , before anything that they know existed. And that time is gone. The dinosaurs are gone. They are extinct. They were so grand and uh big and and so on. But Their time came to an end. So it's possible that our time might come to an end, our own world. not just our lives but our our all our our civilization, our world, everything we know, that it might cease to exist. So you know it's like eschatology for six-year-olds. It's quite quite a thing.

Speaker 1: And I still remember now, decades later, those dinosaur-provoked feelings and those Pictures and visual representations of dinosaurs, they were formative visions for me. They were my formative visions. They defined part of my world. And it means that now Several decades later, I don't want dinosaurs to be feathered or warm-blooded. I don't really like it. I I I know it doesn't seem completely reasonable, but you know it's the latest scientific thinking and so on. This we're very proud of this in Wales. This is a Welsh dinosaur. So um

Speaker 1: We're not always reasonable about those things. And that's because they truly belong to us in the imagination. Um oh, but the feathered dinosaur, that was nothing compared to, you know, when I learned that uh the Brontosaurus didn't really exist or was thought not to exist. You know, it had been under threat for nearly a century. But then in 2015 there was um uh some n very new comprehensive research published and um there was almost literally public rejoicing because Brontosaurus was was declared actually to have genuinely been um a distinct and valid genus. It came back from extinction twice. How about that? That's quite something So

Speaker 1: dinosaurs occupy and a tremendous space in our imagination, and they occupy it very forcefully. Um they do that conceptually because they bring together such big and powerful ideas and visually just because of the oh I'm not showing any art and visually because of the paleo art that depicts them. So paleo art is this fascinating encounter between art and science. As creatures of the imagination, dinosaurs are delivered to us by paleo artists and there's this cycle In which the scientific and the visual imaginations and artists and scientists respond to each other.

Speaker 1: Paleo art has to move with the scientific times. So in the early days, lizards were the inspiration. Here's a guanodon in um 1838 with an uh incorrect horn. Didn't really have a horn, but that that's where they thought the that spike went. Samuel Goodrich represented it as uh imagined it as a lumbering quadrupedal beast, still with that little spike on its nose. Then um later reconstructions put it on two legs with its heavy tail as a support and it's the horn became those famous thumb spikes and this remained the classic iguanodon stance until fairly late in the 20th century. But now Iguanodon

Speaker 1: is agile and alert. It's nimble and versatile. It's it's a creature that shifts from two legs to four at will. And you know, it's looking down On us, we are the ones being judged and considered. So it's its place in our imagination and the representation of that imagination has shifted considerably. So I've got a glass of water so well. So this is a reasonable way to see things that the visual imagination is moved onwards by new scientific knowledge and that both of them help inform our cultural understanding. And this is reasonable but also completely wrong because it's actually more like this

Speaker 1: that Everything feeds into everything else. The imaginative work also informs and influences the science. And everything is tangled up together. And The imagination is not passive and it's not neutral. So in the 18th and 19th centuries, at the beginning of the 18th century, you know, the generally accepted idea of the age of the world was In a few thousands of years. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was generally accepted to be in the tens or uh m many thousands, even millions of years. So this vast and frightening gap had opened up in quite a short space of our intellectual time.

Speaker 1: And naturally the imagination filled it with fantastical violence, violence animal and violence geological. You know, here the earth itself is exploding, the sky is on fire. It's an ancient world of terrifying chaos and savagery. And the implication here is that this is a primordial world. It's ungoverned by the law of man or even of God. And if if you look at um some of these um representations from that time, you'll find many of them with explicitly biblical titles. So um this is another very um uh famous image, but there were many like it, two giants battling it out in the ocean, uh

Speaker 1: defining image in 19th century Paleo art. But this is an image that was an image of the time because it would have resonated very powerfully in an age that was defined by the naval battles of uh warring powers in Europe. So the preoccupations always find their way, the preoccupations all the time always find their way into the imagination. Sometimes what's imagined is somehow against what's given by the time. So in so this is a uh from the USSR, in Soviet-era Paleo art, there's this strange tendency Towards the narrative, the impressionistic, the folkloric, sometimes even

Speaker 1: individualistic uh even towards the individualistic so it's a style that's really at variance with the official socialist realism demanded in the USSR and somehow the status of science gave the paleo artist a kind of freedom of expression that was denied to other artists. If we look at more recent work, we'll find the anxieties of our age now also showing up. So here are some scrawny, desperate creatures. um struggling for survival in a dried up and dusty world that has no more resources left to offer them. That's basically us in 30 years time or so.

Speaker 1: And also paleontology isn't just about dinosaurs. This image is in the American Museum of Natural History. It depicts Neanderthal 's. Who are construed, who were construed in the literature of the time and in this image as a primitive, inferior, failed race. Who lost the competition against us. And this image depicts them deliberately and explicitly using exaggerated racial features. They're depictions, these are depictions of indigenous peoples, present-day human beings, as stand-ins for pre-humans on the basis of race

Speaker 1: And you will find again and again that the scientific imagination has delivered a vision of evolution As progress that moves from low to high, from animal to man, from dark skin to light, but it always terminates in the in in the vision of the white male. So paleo art is not neutral and and you know this imagination is not neutral and the imagination is not passive. So back to this what's the imagination doing here in this vision of success.

Speaker 1: Well, in this vision of success, success is to leave the earth behind, which is kind of interesting in it in itself. But is it leaving the Earth behind in maybe what you see as the noble space exploration sense of say the Apollo? program or in the sense of present-day space tourism for billionaires who don't know what else to do with their money other than to do things that destroy the planet. Um well it it it's definitely imagining a rocket with people in it because you can see a little window on the side. So at least it's not a missile. I didn't think it would be, you know. But there could be other ways to imagine the success of launching a Django project. Maybe Django's more like a ship

Speaker 1: or a factory or a city. Well, that they're also complicated things. Or maybe Django is more like clockwork or an orchestra. I don't think it, you know, I don't think it it matters too much specifically here but somebody thought of this and thousands of people have accepted it as A reasonable way of representing that success. Perhaps some people think About Django in certain ways now because of this image that If the image if this imagination is not neutral or passive, it will feed back into

Speaker 1: the conceptualizing that we're able to do. But if you agree with me or if you accept the premise that um the way dinosaurs are imagined Is meaningful and revealing about other things than dinosaurs, and it leads us to think other things, then perhaps we can look at the imagining of software and computers too. So th I was so captivated as a child uh by that imagination of dinosaurs. And when I was a bit older a few years later, I was found myself once again strongly in the grip of of formative visions. Around the time I became uh a teenager, I became aware of and very excited by Computer technology and its promises.

Speaker 1: I was and I was surrounded by the imagination of the time. And I think the imagination of the past of of dinosaurs and and the future of computers, they work in similar ways, speculating into and helping us grasp those things that are no longer quite at hand. So I want to look at the visual imagination of that time as given to us in the popular culture, the books and magazines of the world of computers. I'll start with um Craftworks 1981 album, Computer World. I love that cover. You know, I think, how are we going to see things in the future? On a computer screen. how how how right they are.

Speaker 1: And the songs on this record are they're an extended discourse on the idea of a world that's defined by computers. Um and the notion that we were entering a computer world was very strong. But computer world can mean, you know, you can interpret that in different ways. That It can mean multiple different things and in different ways the songs on the record are meditations on each one of them. I don't know if you can see the titles. Can you see the titles from where you are? Okay, so um so there are songs about um the logical space within Computers and software. Others wonder about the implications of this world defined by computers, or the implications for us that is, personally and

Speaker 1: socially. And some are celebratory and optimistic and some are most definitely uh not. Some of them are about what we can do with computers and some of them um touch on that uh thrill and delight that I think most people here as programmers share, you know, that the last song on the record is called It's More Fun to Compute. And the visual imagination of the time surrounding computers also worked to present and explore these ideas and and not just to present and explore them but also to assert them because the imagination is never passive So there's a challenge for the visual

Speaker 1: um imagination to represent that logical world. Yes, artificial intelligence on your Commodore sixty-four. Of course, what do you think that we imagined back then? And and that internal space, the logical space of uh in inside That world is often depicted as a kind of formalized um landscape or a three-dimensional space. You'll find this kind of it's more than a trope. I think it's just a desperate way to try and Get hold of it. And the funny thing is that I often find myself thinking when I'm thinking my way through a program as if I were thinking through a space a bit like That one sometimes. And I don't know if that's

Speaker 1: see I can't tell now. Is that the way the space really is, that intellectual space? Or was it given to me Through these repeated visual imaginations of it And sometimes the attempt to depict the world of logical form inside computers reaches for geometric uh mathematical patterns. These are from um uh 1970s editions of uh the US magazine Byte. Um here 's the world In computers, so the world represented in computers. Again I like the the There's something on the screen.

Speaker 1: And that what's on the screen is simultaneously inside the computer bit. uh that that's there. Um or the idea that we are in somehow in a world made by computers. And um some of my favorite examples of of this kind of imagining are of computers in our world, what they will do as objects or machines or even as protagonists. So It's not completely clear to me whether they those ones on the left at the organ are themselves musical instruments or going to play a musical instrument. So I I really like that. And here on the other side is the crew of the Starship Enterprise

Speaker 1: turning up at a a museum museum of 1970s. uh computer technology pointing out the features of the uh machinery to each other. And there's the question of what are we going to be doing with these machines? And and here's what I think is a really powerful statement. This is from um this thing this book was published in 1983. It's a world again, uh, a world Represented on a computer screen, um the screen is a window into that um inner imaginary world and at the same time it's a window to the open world outside. But what's really striking is the title.

Speaker 1: It's The Joy of Computers. It's not about finding amusement, but it's about and it's certainly not about all the productive economic work you'll do with the computer, but it's about obtaining joy or happiness. That there is joy and happiness in computers and computing. And this was the promise of the computer world that I found so thrilling all those years ago. And it's all sealed by this visual imagination that accompanied it. But not all of this imagination and imagining is quite so charming So there's a lot of very bad paleo art. When I say bad, I mean it technically, imaginatively, scientifically, artistically, and even morally bad paleo art. And I think you see some of the same

Speaker 1: flaws in the art that imagined computers. A lot of it was trite and lazy and devoid of understanding, and some of it was really quite Horrible. So you can laugh. You're allowed to laugh at this. Although I I kind of like the way it's made out of the the the keyboard But there's also the horrible genuinely horrible quality of illustration and what and the content. You know, what does that man have in his swimming pants But this is not you know, this is one example, but this is not about that particular artist. This came out of a cultural context. After all, it's a book that got published and Got on sale and it's delivering a vision.

Speaker 1: And the point is not, well, you know, sexism in 1983. The point is that the imagination is not passive and it's not neutral. And that we rarely notice what it's doing. Which is why in forty years time or so We'll be looking back and wondering how we right now didn't notice what was right in front of us. There's also the non-imagination, the what we don't imagination or what we have stopped, or don't imagine any Stopped imagining or don't imagine anymore. So computer magazine covers seem to have ended up somewhere here. The imagining has just stopped.

Speaker 1: Or maybe it went somewhere else. And here I think, in my opinion, we are looking at a joyless, lifeless world. The only invitation here is to buy stuff. The cover is a catalogue of things that you might purchase. There is no future to be imagined. So that was the British magazine, Personal Computer World, I think, in um 2000. Five. So I think that somewhere, somewhere along the way, something has been lost. Because this is what the same magazine looked like twenty or more years earlier. And the imagination here was untidy and unfocused and not completely clear, but it was certainly alive.

Speaker 1: It was imagining a computer world where things were going to be happening and where we would be doing those things. And I think If you look at these and and other similar examples, two things shine through quite um clearly. One is a genuine affection for this newly arrived computer technology and the other is a sense of excitement about what we might do with it, that there might be joy in it. In the USA there was Compute magazine. And that's Compute. It's not just an imperative, but it's an imperative with an exclamation mark. That's how important it was. It was the journal for progressive computing, not

Speaker 1: the magazine of really ugly and soon-to-be-obsolete shit that you can buy. And if you look at some of this things that are being suggested or offered to you in those little snippets, if you can read them. It's always this urge towards creativity and experimentation and the thrill of having this relationship with a certain kind of machine. And then there was Creative Computing, another magazine, US magazine, a magazine whose title tells you everything. Creative Computing was founded by David H.

Speaker 1: L. And his mission in life was essentially, as far as I can understand, was to be a kind of midwife to other people's creativity with computers and programming as the vehicle. Not productivity, not economic value, not even amusement or leisure, but creativity. And I don't know if you can see those so well. These are f even earlier I think than some of the others Um oh no, there 's around 1980 or so. Um, you know, computer simulations, you're going to simulate a nuclear power plant or tree growth on your ZX81 or whatever you know probably wouldn't have been a ZX81 in those days. So it's really reaching for something on your behalf and trying to offer it to you. And have a look at the visual imagination

Speaker 1: that you see there. I just realized now I chose two with dragons, but there's a whole There's a vast number of them to choose from, and that visual imagination is also part of what you're being uh offered. Um at some point when I was first interested in computers and so when I got hold of David A. Charles ' more basic computer games that put the book on the right. And um these were programs that were written, mostly written in the early 1970s, for teletype systems, computers that didn't even have screens but um used line-by-line dot matrix printing for their main output. And if you were going to play with these any of these games, you're gonna have to type them in onto your own computer, and probably you're gonna have to adapt them for the idiosyncrasies of the version of basic

Speaker 1: that came with your computer. In fact, one of my copies has got all the notes of somebody translating those programs for a TRS-80, which is nice. And what I got hold of from uh this book was a sense of humanism in computing, the idea that this technology, that this activity Was and could be and should be for humans in a way that maybe other activities however great they were, couldn't quite be because of what computers were. And I you know, I didn't I didn't have the the vocabulary of humanism and and and what that meant as a a political ideal.

Speaker 1: um at the time and I only had the faintest I grasp of the concepts, but it felt to me that somehow I was looking at the true promise of computing in in that book. I d uh for various reasons I didn't have you know I I had one magazine and one book that I just read over and over again. That was all I could uh get hold of um for a very long time. So I read them all from cover to cover over and over again. More of those basic computing books were sold than there were computers in the world to use them on. Yeah. So people were buying them not just to use them on the computers. They were apparently basic computer games was the first computing book to sell more than a million copies. I don't know if that's actually true, but

Speaker 1: Why not? Um I like the um uh Escher style uh uh cartoon uh on the right. But it This is a visual imagination at work that's trying to grasp and represent and offer A conceptual world. And these cartoons by um George Becker in in both the books, I I really uh they were formative in a similar kind of way as those uh dinosaurs were for me a little bit um Earlier. Um this is an example of one of those games where it simulates um uh a black box into which you can fire.

Speaker 1: Atomic particles, and then you don't know what's in the box, but by firing them at different angles and seeing the results, you can interpret what's actually inside. the the black box, just actual an actual physics ex experiment. So these this are the kind of imaginative games that they were. So it wasn't just an attempt to capture an idea, I think, but also to shape it. These visions, these images, they're not neutral or passive. They had an agenda and they were pushing it quite forcefully. I laughed when I I was going through the book the other day and I laughed when I saw this one. This is an a program to simulate having an argument with your father.

Speaker 1: About whether you're allowed to go out. So I can't actually remember what my teenaged self thought of that. It wasn't anything that really needed very much simulating I'm afraid to say. Um a shame I can't ask my father about what he would have thought of it. Most of the games would have um included uh example printout. I don't know you probably can't read that, but it's a printout from the game itself printouts of a line by line engagement, in this case of an argument with your father. And the formal limitations of the Interfaces available on the teletype, keyboard input, text output, line by line, tended to give them a strongly narrative structure. So they all unfolded in well they had to unfold in certain ways through through time.

Speaker 1: But the one that caught my imagination above all others was Eliza. Um and does everybody know what Eliza is? Um okay, so um In case you don't know, Eliza was a program created in the mid-1960s by Joseph Weisenbaum at MIT. And ELISA was what we would now call a chatbot. although the word didn't exist, and that took on the role of a psychoanalyst. And Weisenbaum was a pioneer of artificial intelligence. Um and he created Eliza as part of his argument against the idea that

Speaker 1: Computer power could amount to a genuine intelligence, that a computer could be a mind. And he devised Eliza as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the Turing test, the idea that if you uh could only interact with something through a keyboard and receive replies on a screen or some other mechanism and You couldn't tell whether this was uh a human or a machine on the other end, then you'd have to say then you would have to admit to yourself that you were facing an intelligence. And Weisenbaum wanted to Uh took issue with that and and and Eliza was his attempt to show why that was a dead end of thinking. So he showed how pattern matching and some uh

Speaker 1: clever computation could produce the appearance of a mind. At work, um, which is an illusion that we fall for very readily. Um I was completely fascinated by Eliza, the idea that I could have a conversation with my computer. And at the same time, I was being shown the trick behind this magic. So Eliza Gave me a knife for life that I've used ever since. It was a knife that allowed me to slice through the conflation that was often made and still is made between The appearance of language use and genuine intelligence

Speaker 1: When I was older I read Weisenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason and and that also made a very strong impression on me that has lasted. He wanted to people to question careless assumptions about computer power and to understand uh the nature of human reason before making rash judgments about whether a machine could attain the same powers He was a skeptic uh about his own discipline and he was a humanist. So he was really horrified when what actually happened was that Eliza started to be taken really seriously as a demonstration of exactly the thing that he was warning about. For example, um suggestions were made that Eliza could be used as a therapeutic tool, as a kind of machine psychoanalyst.

Speaker 1: The famous story is that uh he gave it to somebody in his department to play with and explained it to her. And after a while she asked him to leave the room because she was having a private conversation With a therapist. So um fifty years later, Weisenbaum is dead But the same claims and ideas are being raised now for things like chat, GPT, and other large language models. And it's Remarkable to me how much credulity and how little critical thinking is coming out of our own industry. I'm not talking about the popular press and so I'm talking about our own industry. We are the ones who know What's going on inside those black boxes?

Speaker 1: So I loved computers and their unreasonable binary edges because they seemed as sharp and purposeful as live knives. But you maybe don't um we don't see those jokes so much, but many of the old jokes about computers were about how the computer will do exactly what you tell it to do whether you meant it to do that or not. You know, the garbage in and garbage out. But I don't know why people were surprised about computers doing that, because it's the way that every single tool has always behaved. You know, in the history of humanity, levers and knives, saxophones and aeroplanes, if you put garbage in, you will get garbage out. It will not work properly. They are like all machines predictable and deterministic. And mastery of the machine is knowing what

Speaker 1: and how to put things in in order to get the output that you want. And computers are included in that. And that's not a limitation. That's what allows us to use them so powerfully. And um a strange thing started to happen to products, physical products in the 1990s that still goes on today, that the demand of um ergonomic practice was that things should fit well in the hand and things started to be changed so that they would uh uh uh take on the sh very shape of the hand so compare a a 1970s camera and one that's made nowadays the one made nowadays fits the hand almost like a glove sometimes In one way makes it easier to grasp, to hold, but only if you hold it in one particular way, and holding it in any other way

Speaker 1: is more difficult, more unsafe and uncomfortable. It's worse if you're not right handed or have a disability. Think about those there there was this fashion for very asymmetric mice. About 20 years ago. Oh right-handed mice. So you know left-handed, screw you, because that mice is gonna mouse is gonna feel really horrible in the hand. These objects are They're so eager to please, they're craven, that they lose their own confidence or form that would allow us with our wonderful uh adaptive hands to hold them in multiple different ways They're supposed to be helping us, but in fact what they do is force us to hold them in only one way. So our hands evolved over millions of years. They can hold, you know, I can hold almost anything comfortably as long as it's it's not actually spiky or greasy.

Speaker 1: All I need is a foot is something that will make sense to my hand. And we see this In other contexts, for example, the tendency now of search engines to deliver results even when there are no good results to deliver, that's an example, I think, of servile design. Excuse me There's another kind of encounter which is not with a thing but with a being. So I I hugged a lot of people today. And that's another way of that's that's not like holding an object. When you when you hold a person or an animal, it can hold you back. It's live and it has its own, it's a being with its own um needs. And that makes sense because it's an encounter with rules and demands that are appropriate to that.

Speaker 1: So the encounter with the servile object is not satisfactory. Um sorry, uh the encounter with a well designed object is satisfactory, it fits well in the hand. And the encounter with a person Or a being that wants to be held or holds you back, that's also satisfactory. But the encounter with the servile object that's molded So you can only touch it in a certain way, that's not so good. But even worse is the encounter with the uncanny object. Um, the thing that's not alive, that suddenly moves in your hand as if it were. You grasp it and it shudders in a treacherous way. And that's a moment of horror because you it's an encounter in this uncanny valley between the

Speaker 1: inert and the alive. And that's what I find disturbing about our encounters with AI, as it's called, that are uh not just with AI but with computer technology that I encounter on a daily basis So 20 years ago, it was this sensation of amazing power to refine a web search and see the list of results get shorter and shorter and shorter. You could require the inclusion of some terms and exclude others. And I really loved it. It was it felt like I was operating a knife. It was Boolean's search was a knife with this unreasonable binary razor-sharp edge that was sharp enough to cut through anything

Speaker 1: until you got what you wanted if it existed. But I prefer DuckDuckGo as my web searchers, mainly because it's not Google. But of late I've noticed that DuckDuckGo is becoming rather servile, too eager to please. It won't tell me that it had no results. It will just offer me the same number of increasingly irrelevant ones. It doesn't tell me how many it has found. When I want something, it's not helpful to be offered things that are not the thing that I was looking for As you'll know, anytime you're looking for your car keys and somebody offers, helpfully offers you, were you looking what about your house keys? No. So I duck duck go is becoming sludgy And web

Speaker 1: content is becoming sludgier too. If you do a web search for something that you need to buy, for example, this is the worst case. You will increasingly run into huge quantities of low-grade material that was created, if not actually generated, specifically for the purpose of answering to your web search queries. Some of it uh is generated in in in content factories, some of it is generated algorithmically, and some of it I'm pretty sure is being generated by these language models uh now. And they All look indistinguishable from each other. So this stuff that was created specifically for the purpose of appearing in web search results is

Speaker 1: deliberate pollution of the information pool that we need to draw from. And it's the information pool that search engines And language models like ChatGPT and its friends are going to be drawing from. So they are now feeding from and drawing for feeding into and drawing from The same pool of content. We are drowning in sludge of our own making. And more than ever, I think we need sharp knives to penetrate through that. I want to leave you with a couple of thoughts that

Speaker 1: If we want to understand what we are doing now and want to see where we're going, or at least what direction we're headed in. Pay attention to what the imagination is doing. Pay critical attention to it because what we imagine and how we express the imagination is not neutral or passive, but it's always filled with intention and meaning. And it's part of the action. that we will take now and in the future. Even if it's really hard to see our present assumptions and preoccupations and prejudices in our imagination right now, we can remind ourselves by looking at the imagination of other times to see How they what was happening there.

Speaker 1: And also if you want to maybe alter the trajectory of the world in a direction that you like better We can start with doing that in the imagination, which is where these things come alive. Because as I said at the beginning, it's in the imagination that things truly belong to us and where we will hold on to them most strongly. Because I'm afraid that humans are in danger of being softwareized, being reduced or devalued and de-racinated. But I think the alternative that Software will become humanized isn't actually so far away. And it was with us not so long ago

Speaker 1: The that humanist seam that I think was so richly illustrated in those images of the time, that those images that informed our world, the computer world, I think they're still at hand. And I would like us to try to um find them again in our thinking, in our imagination, to find this humanist seam. And also not just to draw from it, but to add your own voice and imagination to it, the programmer 's imagination. And I believe that's possible, really possible, because That vision of computing is there to be reignited above all by human pleasures and joys.

Speaker 1: Because I believe that Being human is being creative. And that's where one of computing's highest values comes from. I believe that there really is a joy in um in computing. So in the immortal words of Kraftwerk, it's more fun to compute, I think it really is. Thank you.

Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much, Daniela. We have time for just a few questions. Yeah, please start. Hi

Speaker 3: Daniela, thank you so much. Amazing talk as always. I realize I'm about to ask for like another hour-long talk. But um what do you attribute the loss of whimsy humanism imagination over the last, say, 20 years Two

Speaker 1: I don't I don't know. Maybe maybe I I I honestly don't know exactly why. Um obviously one reason is that Computers became associated with everybody's daily work. You had to have them to do your basic things successfully. You couldn't be in school without having them. They weren't They weren't another world, they weren't a new world. They were a world of machines that imposed burdens on us. Um But that can only uh be part of the answer. I th I think maybe they were sort of deliberately taken oh I used to be a school teacher so in the school curriculum twenty twenty-five years ago it was horrendous it was

Speaker 1: basically the IT curriculum was preparing you to be A drone in a call center as far as I I could tell. I didn't teach it for very long. It was there was none of that joy or or excitement about the computers at all from anybody, not even the teachers or the students. Um yeah. Do you have an idea why? Late stage capitalism. Yeah, late stage. Okay. Well, no, I uh Yeah, okay. It's it's because of late stage capitalism. Next question.

Speaker 2: Okay, and we we have a question in the audience. Yeah, sure, here.

Speaker 4: Thank you very much. Uh when you mentioned Eliza

Speaker 1: Oh there you are, hello.

Speaker 4: When you mentioned Eliza I thought of that Adam Curtis documentary. I don't I don't know if anyone's seen it. I'm trying to remember the title.

Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I'm not hearing you very well. Could you

Speaker 4: Oh yeah, yes. So Eliza, I thought of an Adam Curtis documentary. Uh there's a few of them on the iPod. Anyway. Do you see a discipline arising from LLMs, large language models? of prompt engineering. I've seen that actual term in existence lately. It wasn't just from my mind. I I worry that people think it's some magical thing like you're saying, you know, it's the imagination of that

Speaker 1: Yeah, I 'm not actually sure what prompt engineering is although I've I've read it and I just kind of Yeah. Yeah. Um

Speaker 4: from my understanding it's training yourself as a human to better prompt a large language model.

Speaker 1: I see, I see, I see what you mean. Yeah. Well

Speaker 4: It becomes like a programming language and it's not.

Speaker 1: I mean I I think that's actually a good idea or a good illustration of the way that these things that we think everything goes in one way, but it's not. But Tobias in his talk earlier made I think the really s astute point about um We are given by things like ChatGPT this shallow layer of facility that helps us get over the bump. And maybe it helps us be more productive, but also at the same time it takes away that engagement that we actually need. in order to be truly good at anything. I if I didn't misconstrue what you said.

Speaker 1: But that's what I understood from it. And I think that's a really important point that Our craft, our skill, does come out of our smashing our heads, our uh bleeding fingers on the guitar. Being tired, being fed up, be you know, wanting to throw the bicycle into the ravine because you can't stand pedaling it a moment more. That's really part of being good at any of those things.

Speaker 2: Okay, let's take one or two more questions depending on the length of the question.

Speaker 5: I'll try to be short. Thank you, Daniela. Beautiful talk. Do you have any points to make about what we can do individually? uh to improve how this world looks. Exa for example with the objects, servile objects that are not fun, everything looking white and grey and black and rectangular

Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm I I think again it's in the imagination that the imagination is not this is not about fantasy. If I want to walk out of the door, that requires imagination because I have to Uh there's this gap between what is the case now and what is going to be. And the imagination is an active faculty that gives us the possibility of acting. So I think taking the imagination really seriously and looking critically at it, so uh Tobias, your talk was full of images. Let's have a look, you know Pull apart some of those images. What are um what's going on in those images? We can ask those questions for a start and then we can start thinking about what we put into our own images or if we're not

Speaker 6: You mentioned search results and that we have content farms producing content and at some point now edificial AI or whatever you want to call it, and they are feeding on themselves at some point. Um how do you think or suggest to break through that um loop to Or at which point do we say we can't use the computer anymore and throw it away and have to start three computers again?

Speaker 1: I wanted to buy a not f exactly a folding guitar but a a guitar that packs down in very small the neck comes off and it pack there's some really good ones and so I was I wanted to buy one of these things. I w I had money not burning a hole in my pocket, but I had money to spend on a folding guitar that I could take traveling. I just found uh site after sight after sight of this Basically they they were sites where you could find affiliate links. But it looked like content and it wasn't. It was a load of shit. It was a load of sludge. In the end, I'm gonna go to a shop. I'm gonna go to physical shop at my great inconvenience and look at some of these things in person. That's how I'm going to get out of it. I'm gonna I've the computer, I can't do it on the computer I got almost nauseated by

Speaker 1: seeing this repeated different ways of presenting the few same things. They're all claiming to be reviews and I know perfectly well not one single guitar passed through the hands of those bastards. And they were probably copying from each other. So it 's a dead end. Out of the computer and into the world.

Speaker 2: Okay. That's a very positive note.

Speaker 1: Thank you so much for your questions and for listening. Um I'm doing a workshop on documentation on I think Wednesday, if you're interested on how to do get it done in a large organization when you can't do it all yourself. And remember I'm I'm hiring so you don't actually have to work with me personally. But um come and talk to me if you'd like that. Thanks a lot and thank you