Leslie L. Lewis’s infinitely contestable diagram of Finnegans Wake
In 1946, Adaline Glasheen, a stay-at-home mother, compiled several versions of her Census of Finnegans Wake, an index of all the people and characters mentioned in it. After years of the automated crunching of data with no care as to its meaning, I heard the truth of her words:
Joyce built his house on doubt; he bet his immortal soul on the proposition that uncertainty is reality—all the reality there is; and he put his artist’s money on the dark horse Incertitude….Finnegans Wake is a model of a mysterious universe.
This would only be an academic exercise if the book were self-indulgent nonsense, but Joyce’s subject was the course of human civilization and the stories we tell about it. Beneath the daunting lexical surface, the book is about the mostly tragic fates of ordinary people who suffer through the currents of history. It was the most human document I had read, piling on the ambiguities that my professional work demanded I simplify or ignore. Next to it my code felt meaningless.
Software engineering was tremendously pleasurable, especially when the daunting arrays of algorithms left complex trails to decipher and debug, and I enjoyed working deep in the engine room. But after twelve years, it threatened to strip meaning from the greater part of my life. My life, that particular set of random details picked out from Google’s great library that happened to belong to me. It seemed to be nothing more than one inconsequential assemblage, a combination more or less unusual than most and no greater in significance. I was losing the ability to distinguish my life from the growing mass of internet data. I wanted to find myself again. Then I discovered computers had already found me.
*1 Some may suggest that Facebook belongs in this list in “owning” social, but I persist in believing that they are another data company on the model of Google; they have just used very different methods to acquire that data and have shifted the locus of data to people.
*2 Google did build clusters of related words, such as “Jaguar” and “car” on the one hand and “jaguar” (noncapitalized) and “tiger” on the other. Yet these associations were made with as minimal a grasp of context as possible—simply by pure proximity.
*3 I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t at Google by the time of HTML5.
*4 A kludge is something like the Hangman special case: ugly, nongeneral, but effective for the time being.
*5 In fact, the character who retains his sanity, Zaphod Beeblebrox, survives not because of his egomania, but because he is, in fact, the most important person in the universe.
*6 1923 has remained the cutoff date for the ever-lengthening terms of copyright since. This cutoff coincides with the rise of films and, in particular, Mickey Mouse, created in 1928.
*7 And yet the gains in voice recognition have been stunning, even if computers still have great difficulty identifying where one sentence ends and the next begins.
*8 I once discussed the problem of algorithmic bias with an activist, who was convinced that some of the emergent racist and sexist classifications of algorithms could be anticipated in advance if software companies were to increase their diversity. Unfortunately, this view is too optimistic. While diversity is a laudable goal to pursue in and of itself, we can’t expect a more diverse workforce to be better able to anticipate what are often wholly unpredictable outcomes.
*9 I owe this observation to Adam Elkus.
*10 No hard science can compete; perhaps only the fundamental philosophical questions of metaphysics (What is the nature of the cosmos?) and ethics (What should we do?) have had as long a lifetime—though answers to them have never been as forthcoming as they have with many questions of mathematics.
*11 Epstein had also conducted Gilbert and Sullivan musicals (and could sing them from memory) and in 1959 had published the first bestselling edition of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in the United States while an editor at Capricorn Books. I was surprised to discover his name on the essay in the back of my old eighth-grade copy and realize it was the same man.
8
PROGRAMMING MY CHILD
Initial Conditions
and errors can happen to you and computers
’cause you are…a computer!
go and do it!
program yourself!
just do it!
explore your toes, explore your nose,
explore everything you have goes
and if you don’t want to do that
you can’t even live
not even houses, ’cause houses are us
—ELEANOR AUERBACH (AGE FOUR), “The Blah Blah Blah Song”
A FEW YEARS after leaving Google, I started another long-term engineering project, which is still ongoing. I sent this progress report to our friends after the first twelve months:
Dear Friends,
Our daughter Eleanor recently spent two weeks away with her mother visiting family and receiving upgrades. On reuniting with her, I examined her new features. Now, you know that she had had her chassis replaced with a larger one in the middle of last year, owing to the malfunction of the older model. This time there was plenty of space, but we went for the functionality upgrade.
I assume you already know that she wasn’t simply changing on her own. I mean, really: you pour food in one end and suddenly she gains the ability to crawl and stand and babble? Sure, and you can grow a beanstalk up to the clouds with magic seeds. It doesn’t work for computers, and it doesn’t work for babies. No, in fact, all of those skills come as upgrades. Some of them can be purchased à la carte, but due to monopolies that have been long left in place due to the nefarious influence of lobbyist money on antitrust law, most of them have to be purchased as packages.
So while my daughter obtained the “standing” and “turn book pages” and “tentative stepping” and “MA MA MA” upgrade (that last one is something of a luxury item, it would seem, and in high demand), we were also stuck with her getting “throw food on the floor,” “play with remote control,” and “chew on glasses” (overstock, apparently). Lemon socialism is what it is. Also the enigmatic “go to sleep” feature, which has her put her head on the ground and feign sleeping, only to rise back up within seconds. Whose idea was that?
Nonetheless, on balance it certainly qualifies as an upgrade, and I fear that we filled so many of her expansion slots that we’re going to be stuck upgrading the chassis again before too long. It’s a shame, because she only now seems to be getting the hang of the current one. She’s taken steps forward without holding onto anything and she’s gained more fine motor control over her extremities, due to the extra musculo-skeletal features that we paid an arm and a leg for (actually, we paid for an arm and a leg—twice). She also seems to have figured out the rudiments of the absurdly complex paired tongue/vocal-cord action, which requires the equivalent of rubbing your belly and patting your head at the same time (which she can’t do yet).
And of course incompatibility remains the norm. Our daughter is not compatible with PCMCIA cards, so we won’t be able to educate her through my old laptop’s eSATA drive nor have my phone connect to her over Bluetooth. Either would have been more convenient than the indirect methods we are saddled with.
Nonetheless, conditions are auspicious.
Yours in engineering,
David
Having a child turned me into a behaviorist. With age, I found it easier to model the psychological motivations of others and better predict responses to various stimuli, but adults are complex. My wife and I have shaped each other deeply, but we never felt that shaping happening. We noticed it when we spontaneously quoted the same Simpsons line, or when we became frustrated with how much explaining we had to do when speaking to anyone who isn’t our partner.
But the stimulus-response cycle is out in the op
en with a child, at least initially. There is little for a baby to respond to other than its parents. The feedback loop created between parent and child is tight, controlled, and frequently comprehensible. I train my child to know that certain behaviors will get her fed, put to sleep, hugged, rocked, burped, and entertained. My child trains me, in turn, to respond to her cries with what she wants. You come to an accommodation; both your systems have synchronized, at least roughly, for mutual benefit (though mostly, for hers). When she is able to control her facial muscles, she learns that smiling will bring a flood of attention and positive feedback. The instinct to crawl provokes constant physical experimentation that slowly develops into crawling and then walking. The nerves and muscles get wired to successfully cope with the world. When my daughter began to crawl, I put on Flight of the Valkyries, because her struggle and determination reminded me of the triumph I felt on getting a particularly thorny piece of code to work correctly. She seemed delighted, like a kid with a new toy—but the toy was her own body. From birth, infants’ brains are coding and debugging their own bodies.
Parents program their children—and vice versa. Psychologist Vasudevi Reddy describes the push-pull of attention this way:
When adults at 4 months [after childbirth] start to get subconsciously desperate at infants’ waning obsession with them (looking around the room, for instance, is absolutely a marker of infants in the lab at 3 to 4 months in contrast to infants gazing exclusively at the mother’s face at 2 months), they start performing more and more exaggerated actions—moving the infants’ feet, singing songs, starting to invite the infant into rhythmic games, and so on to regain infant attention.
While the child’s manipulation of the adult isn’t quite at the level of toxoplasmosis, the parasite carried by cats which infects and alters the behavior of their owners, it’s an example of how even a fairly simple relationship requires ongoing adjustments to our mental algorithms and heuristics (our own “code”). My mind rapidly changed and adjusted to being a father, turning me into a different person. My wife imagined a conversation with our one-month-old going something like this:
ME: shh, shh, go back to sleep
BABY: can’t, somebody is hitting me in the face
wait why are you strapping down my arm
I need that arm to defend myself from whoever is hitting me in the face
ME: shh
BABY: you smell like milk
nghwaaaah! nghwaaaah! need milk
ME: you just had a bellyful
BABY: (screws up face) (poops) belly empty now
ME: (changes diaper)
BABY: I am pleased to be naked
let me stay here, don’t make me sleep and I’ll promise to not turn into an overtired human air raid siren
trust me
look at this sweet face
would I lie to you?
ME: pacifier time
BABY: no, no, no, NO, NO, NO, THIS IS AN OUTR— mmm…
A baby can’t reason, but parents ascribe these kinds of motivations to their babies in order to explain their behavior. Sometimes they are even accurate. As our daughter grew, she learned how to express herself more precisely, eventually using words to explain what physical behavior could not.
Within days of her birth, I had already identified these facial expressions:
a furious glare given me when I woke her up by patting her stomach
intense, wide-eyed curiosity at some big blotch of color (e.g., a parent)
contemptuous indifference when not eating or sleeping
self-satisfied amusement at increasing control over her limbs
tranced-out bliss after eating
and of course the sheer joy of eating itself
I was reading into her facial expressions. But it’s in part by reading into these expressions that babies learn what it is that those facial expressions do. The line between genetic programming and environmental programming is terminally fuzzy. So much behavior in infancy appears hard-coded, from crying to nursing to crawling to grabbing everything in sight, that I often felt like we were playing out a scripted pageant of upbringing that had been drawn up over many millennia and delivered to me through the telegrams of my DNA. But unlike many genetic burdens, such as puberty and sleep, this was one I was happy to take on, even as I reminded myself that this little creature lacked what we think of as memory and surely “experienced” things differently from mature adults.
As you age, each day, week, and month of your life takes up an increasingly smaller percentage of the time you’ve been alive, and so they seem to go by faster. An older man once observed to me that in terms of perceived time, life was half over by the age of twenty. If my infant daughter had any sense of time at all, each thing she did must have felt epic to her. A week became half her life to date! Every feeding: a monumental feast that lasts a million years! Every nap: Rip Van Winkle! Sadly, every stomachache is an aeon in purgatory and every hunger pang is a Hebraic exile in the desert, so I couldn’t really blame her for crying, could I?
Sometimes I got it wrong. I once watched my infant daughter happily jiggling around and smiling as she lay on her back in her crib, around three months old, looking straight up at me. I smiled at her, then saw the clock.
“I’m sorry,” I said forlornly, “but it’s time to go to sleep.”
Her face immediately crumpled up into an outraged grimace and she began to howl. I was momentarily amazed at her comprehension.
“That turned around fast,” I said to my wife.
“You know she’s responding to your tone, right?”
“Oh,” I said, using my happiest chirping tone and smiling at my baby, “so if I talk like this, you’ll cheer right up?”
Her face untwisted, she smiled and beamed at me, and she began her little lying-down dance again.
“I’m sorry,” I said, keeping my tone animated and chipper, “but it’s still time to go to sleep!”
She kept on bopping and smiling.
My work was done. My wife and I made a quick exit from the room, getting a few steps out the door before the surprised and indignant howls started up again, even more loudly than before. We had tricked her! But no, she wasn’t likely capable of feeling tricked yet; her mind was bouncing between satisfied and dissatisfied states, causing her to project displays of happiness and frustration that had been hardwired into her DNA and brain. I too had been hardwired to react to them—conditioned responses that had lain dormant in my brain were on hair trigger now that there was a child to activate them. I was glad for that. In the months before her birth, my greatest fear was that I would not feel that visceral, emotional bond to my child, and would be able to see her only from a detached, rational perspective. I did not think that this was sufficient to make one a good parent.
I was of two minds in those early months of parenting. A part of me felt my baby was inhuman. In her first hours, she was unable to make a facial expression, unable to express anything but varying levels of comfort or discomfort. At this time, children are at their most transparent, as their range of responses is so limited. It’s also the time in which my child seemed most like a machine. Her responses were, if not predictable, closely circumscribed. I imagined coding up a stochastic algorithm, one that relies partly on chance, to cause her to move her arms and legs jerkily, cry when hungry or uncomfortable, sleep nonstop, and nurse—not completely predictable, but rarely doing the wholly unexpected. After a few months of life, a baby has reactions that are a hundred times richer and subtler than they were at birth, and the possibility of any sort of fixed algorithm to control its behavior vanishes. I believe that part of what we consider so particular to being human is how we repeatedly transcend previous limitations as we grow up. To compare an infant and a toddler, or a to
ddler and a kindergartner, is to be amazed that one could possibly transform into the other. Each is an order of magnitude more complicated. By the time a child reaches adulthood, there have been so many overlaid levels of complexity that we must resort to abstractions and simplifications (and labels) just to get a handle on what a person is like. It is incomprehensible that this adult had been a crying baby. This process is developmental and ecological, not algorithmic.
The other part of me, though, was filled with feelings of parental love. I responded to my child’s coos and cries with affection. I made faces and spoke to her and moved her feet and held her in the air like an airplane. I held her little body and rocked her back and forth, just because it made her smile. Her smile conditioned me to do it. Even the occasional variation of “airplane dumping its waste out its exhaust and onto the shirt and face below” did not dissuade me.
I played these games with her out of love and out of the knowledge that they were helpful for her development. I knew that my affection for my daughter was partial and irrational. It was the clearest evidence of psychological dispositions assigned to me by evolutionary processes. Isn’t parental love one of the most powerful forces in helping babies survive to adulthood? I knew that I needed those irrational feelings of affection and devotion, as well as whatever chemicals and hormones they produced, to boost my spirits and help me provide the greatest amount of comfort, safety, and love to my child. So I dwelled on those feelings. I reminded myself of them. I did everything I could to maximize their presence in my mind, because I thought they were the single most important resource I could marshal for my child.
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