Dr. Dobb's Journal November 2000
The word "end" has several meanings. One is "the object or purpose for which a thing exists," and I've wondered if that was one of the meanings that Arthur C. Clarke had in mind in titling his novel Childhood's End.
In this, Clarke's greatest novel, he pictures the end of humanity's childhood, which justifies the title in the more obvious sense of "end." But Clarke also presents humanity as being in a state of galactic immaturity. In the novel, mankind's existence so far has been a childhood, a stage that we have to go through to prepare us for the next, mature stage. This is our childhood's end, or purpose: to prepare us for our galactic maturity. The idea that childhood is something -- that it has a purpose -- emerges as a motif of the novel. In The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming Our Imagination (Ballantine Books, 2000), Mark Pesce also asks what childhood is for -- or more precisely, what the distinctive childhood behavior of playing with toys is for. To what end do children play with toys? If, as Pesce argues, it is to learn what the world is like, what does it mean that a fundamental change in the nature of toys has recently begun to happen?
Technology is making toys more alive. That's Pesce's claim, backed up by the behavior and the popularity of several recent recreational creations.
It began with Tamagotchi. These virtual pets were born when children turned them on, and then demanded food, attention, and sleep. They matured, and if neglected, died. Despite the fact that they were just beeps and a few pixels on a tiny LCD display, these toys had an enormous effect. They had needs, or seemed to, and reached children on a new level. They were enormously popular, especially with 8- to 14-year-old girls, not the usual tech-toy market.
After Tamagotchi came Furby, and both the realism and popularity ratcheted up a notch. Furbies were cute furry animals that made demands like Tamagotchi, but Furbies were considerably more sophisticated. For one thing, they talked.
And they learned, adapting to their owners, replacing more and more of their Furby speech with short English utterances, cleverly constructed from a simple vocabulary and very simple grammar. They had simple sensory organs: a camera for sight, a microphone for hearing, switches for vestibular and pressure sensation. They could make seemingly appropriate and recognizable facial expressions. Kids found that it was almost impossible to relate to them as lifeless artifacts. They could only make sense of them by treating them as though they were alive, even though they knew these were just toys.
The effect is extraordinary. Stories abound of Furbies bringing autistic children (as well as Alzheimer's patients) out of their shells. This toy has changed lives.
And Furbies are only the beginning. Toys are going to get a lot more lifelike. And that's a good thing, because toys are the tools that the child uses to learn how to live in the world, Pesce claims. "Their play in the world is actually an advanced experiment in the behavior of that world, and every interaction leaves the child with a broader and more complete sense of the real." These experiments build on one another, and the adult view of the world emerges from them. Or "an" adult view of the world emerges. Just what that view is depends at least in part on the nature of the experiments. That is, on the kinds of toys the child plays with. It may not matter much whether a child plays with jacks or marbles, but Pesce believes that the difference between the new generation of toys and the old toys is fundamental enough to lead to a different view of the world.
As a result of their experience with these reactive toys, "our children will have a different view of the world..." The world they will see will be "vital, intelligent, and infinitely transformable. The dead world of objects before intelligence and interactivity will not exist for them."
And just in time, because the world itself is changing. Pesce seems convinced that the world is changing in just the way that the toys are changing. The world itself is becoming more alive, and the toys of the new generation are well suited to prepare a child for living in that world.
"In the era our children will inhabit, the world is information," Pesce says. It may sound as if he's just talking about the Web, about living in cyberspace, but he means more than that.
Pesce spends a significant part of the book describing technologies that he thinks will transform the world. He seeks to avoid the trap of attempting to predict the future, always an invitation to embarrassment, while at the same time describing a change that he sees already starting to take place, one that he believes will make the future feel very different from the past. "Just as the creative world of children has become manipulable, programmable, and mutable," he says, "the entire fabric of the material world seems poised on the edge of a similar transformation."
Pesce's vision draws on several dreamers' dreams. Eric Drexler's vision of nanotechnology transforming the world is prominently featured in the book. Bill Joy's vision of toasters and alarm clocks sharing their concerns with one another (and paying royalties to Sun) is there implicitly. The Web, too, especially as it ties artifacts together and begins to become a model of the world that rivals the world itself in complexity.
He's a visionary, but it's not necessary that all his visions be realized for Pesce's claim of a more animistic world to be justified. Just one of them, the reification of the Web, might be enough: "This will be the major project of the early 21st century: the creation of a Web with many eyes and ears and hands, granting it the same senses that we have, many times over." This, he claims, will transform the Web, investing it "with a material reality, translating it from the ethereal realm of thoughts and facts and grounding it in the very present concerns of the living."
Mark Pesce didn't invent these ideas about the purpose of play. He cites Piaget and Papert and others, and I found myself going back to Pesce's sources to see what some of these people really said.
The citing of Piaget is natural: Piaget convinced a generation of psychologists that the basic concepts we take for granted -- such as the idea that the world is formed of objects that have some degree of permanence -- must be acquired through interaction with the world. To the Piagetian child, "there is no objective reality...There are only events -- that is, components of the child's own functioning...Overt activity is necessary to the development [of such concepts]." (The Origins of Intellect: Piaget's Theory, by John L. Phillips, Jr., W.H. Freeman, 1969.)
But if a child's concept of the world emerges as a result of its overt interaction with the world, and if a new generation of smart toys changes the way that children interact with the world, then -- well, then it becomes clear why Pesce thinks that our children are being prepared to live in a different world than the one we think we inhabit.
In The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Simon & Schuster, 1984), Sherry Turkle raised some of the same issues as Pesce. She found that young children had trouble deciding whether even simpler toys were alive.
But are the kids confused, or are the categories simply not the right ones for their experience? Are "smart" toys a new category, somewhere between dolls and baby sisters in their aliveness? "One does not have to resolve this debate..." Turkle says, "to see that something changes when we go from traditional objects to computational ones."
And the idea that playing with toys can shape your view of the real world? That's in Turkle's writing, too, particularly with respect to simulations, which at the time she was writing were the most obvious place to look for lifelikeness in software: "Involvement with simulated worlds affects relationships with the real one."
But Turkle didn't anticipate the powerful effect of responsive fuzzy animal toys on children. Furby isn't a very good simulation of an animal or a child, but it does an astonishingly good job of simulating the very things that everyone thought were the hardest a decade ago: emotions, feelings, needs, attachment... Furby's just faking it, of course, but it turns out that it's a lot easier to fake feelings than facts. Maybe that should have been obvious, but the implications for toy design, a field in which faking it is perfectly acceptable, are huge. And maybe a little frightening. For one thing, I don't see what would prevent some neoNazi programmer from creating a toy or game that teaches children that the world conforms to his distorted perspective. Or maybe that's already happening.
Pesce is upbeat about all this, but if he's actually got it right, I see this animation of the world as sad for us nonchildren. Those of us who were not born into this new world, who haven't developed an understanding of it through play, will have trouble adapting, Pesce warns. We could be left behind. And even if we adapt to the new world, we may not be able to live in it in quite the same way that children born today will.
At the end of Childhood's End, humanity's children begin to be transformed, with the midwifery help of some galactic overlords, into some new evolution of mankind, god-like creatures who can find little connection with their parents. Eventually they all depart Earth to join an advanced galactic society, leaving their parents behind. But before they do, one parent has a conversation with an overlord, and gets some conventional advice that has a greater poignancy in this context. "What shall we do about our children?" the parent asks. "Enjoy them while you may," the overlord answers, "They will not be yours for long."
This will interest only a segment of a segment of DDJ's readers, but it may interest them a lot. I resisted the temptation to present this topic as one of my "Paradigms Past" sidebars, but...
I subscribe to a couple of lists where people agonize over the fate of Apple's pioneering hypermedia tool, HyperCard. The discussion on one of the lists recently turned to what can be done to save HyperCard, and someone suggested getting a booth at the next MacWorld Expo in January to promote the HyperCard cause and maybe send a message to Apple. Pledges of hundreds of dollars for booth fees began to pour in. It was looking, as I turned this column in, as though the booth might actually happen. I hope it does, but maybe not for the same reasons as those who are pledging their dollars to the cause.
I actually use HyperCard on a regular basis, so the fate of the technology matters to me. I put together a short list of questions that I needed answers to, regarding HyperCard's fate. This is the list:
1. Will Apple port HyperCard to OS X?
2. Will Apple sell or license the HyperCard source to a third party, or Open-Source it?
If the answer to the first two questions is no, then two further questions apply:
3. What platform should/can I move my HyperCard stacks to?
4. How do I move them?
I think the answer to question 1 is clearly no, which means that HyperCard, as an Apple product/technology, is already dead. Fine; it had a long life. The knowledge of when a battle is lost is useful information.
As for question 2, I don't know the answer, but I suspect that only the open-source option is worth pursuing. Selling off its technology is not something that Apple does, evidently. HyperCard, though, has always had an open-source feel about it. From the start, Apple encouraged people to share HyperTalk code and didn't discourage others from cloning HyperCard: witness SuperCard, Plus, ToolBook, OBO, MetaCard, HyperSense. It's worth the effort to encourage Apple to Open-Source HyperCard.
Or just clone it in an open-source project? That might work; Apple isn't raising any objections to the FreeCard project at http://FreeCard.sourceforge.net/website/ index.php. On the other hand, not a lot seems to be happening on that project.
If open sourcing doesn't happen, my guess is that HyperCard is as dead as Newton. Questions 3 and 4 then apply.
Question 3 is the easy one: There are several good options. Many of the aforementioned HyperCard clones are viable today, and some of them run on multiple platforms. MetaCard is available for Windows and several flavors of UNIX and the current MacOS, and will be ported to MacOS X some time after Apple releases that. SuperCard, in spite of having trouble keeping a corporate home, has been on the upgrade path for many former HyperCard developers frustrated by some of its limitations. Whether it will make the move to OS X, I'm not sure.
Another appealing candidate, for Mac users anyway, is HyperSense. Its scripting language is basically a superset of HyperTalk and it looks like a promising OS X upgrade path for HyperCard users, overcoming the major limitations of the HyperCard model, but still familiar. Question 4 is tougher. SuperCard can import HyperCard stacks with little trouble, but a product like HyperSense is sufficiently different that it needs some help. What would be ideal (and this idea is championed by Doug Simons of Thoughtful Software, maker of HyperSense) would be a text-based lingua franca that can capture all of a stack's contents and design information. There was such an animal, but it's not really supported by anyone or anything today. XML seems like a good choice for this.
What I'd like to see is one good answer to question 4 and several different good answers to question 3. A single lingua franca for HyperCard-like products would allow developers to move between other tools as well.
Whether this will happen or not is moot. It will require competitors in a small market, some of whom already have a porting solution, to cooperate on developing a protocol that provides a one-shot porting capability to users who are resistant to porting in the first place. There's a challenge.
All of this assumes that the answer to question 2 is no. But if Apple Open-Sourced HyperCard, that would create some interesting possibilities. So it becomes important to know, finally, whether that's an option. And that's why I support the MacWorld Expo HyperCard booth plan: not because I have a lot of hope that it will convince Apple of anything, but because one way or another, it will clarify the situation. If the booth group makes its pitch and Apple doesn't go for it, then HyperCard is dead and it's time to move on. Fine with me, but a lot of people aren't going to give up until Apple makes it clear that this is a Newton situation.
And this needs to be said: For many users of HyperCard, Mac users who can't afford or don't see the need to upgrade their hardware or software -- a group that includes a lot of teachers, students, home users, and small-business owners who are relatively invisible to the market -- the fate of HyperCard is a nonissue. If they use it and get value from it, they can continue to do so as long as they like.
Perhaps there are none so free -- or so forgotten -- as those who have left the upgrade path.
DDJ