So how, David Liddle wants to know, do they compute the differential equations necessary to catch a Frisbee?
Take the dog for a walk. Bring the Frisbee along. Give it a toss. As the dog chases the flying disc, gauges its trajectory, adjusts for changes in speed and direction and judges the precise moment to leap into the air (provided it cares to), consider this: If you sat down and worked out the mathematics, you'd find that in order for Ashley Whippet to snare the saucer and return it to you covered with bits of kibble and dog slobber, he has to solve a second-order, second-degree differential equation. And let's face it, you know your pooch is smart, but probably figure his math skills topped out at long division. So what's going on?
David Liddle, co-founder of Interval Research - the much-talked-about but very secretive think tank in Palo Alto, California - has given this question some thought: "We know that the dog doesn't do any arithmetic, but there's a computational process [at work] that's not really solving an equation, but is exactly identical to it in its results." He believes "there's some hot stuff we can do if we get back to studying a bit more on how information processing works in animals." Humans included.
Of course, we've always used metaphors of nature to describe (and market) our information processing devices: Computers were once labeled electronic brains, and are today prone to what we like to call viruses. But Liddle's idea of a natural model for interacting with information and media is a bit older than computers. "I figure I have had between 50,000 and 100,000 fathers before you get to someone that we'd probably agree was a different species," he says. "And only the last thousand or so even existed in a time when there was anything like civilization or the processing of information."
Our skills at reading and writing symbols haven't had much impact on our lives from a Darwinian, survival-of-the-fittest point of view. In other words, Liddle says, we're using bodies evolved for hunting, gathering, and gratuitous violence for information-age tasks like word processing and spreadsheet tweaking. And gratuitous violence.
Humans are born with a tool kit at least 15,000 years old. So, Liddle asks, if the tool kit was designed for foraging and mammoth trapping, why not try to make the tasks we do with our machines today look like the tasks the body was designed for? "The most nearly muscular mentality that we use (in computation) is pointing with a mouse," Liddle says. "We use such a tiny part of our repertoire of sound and motion and vision in any interaction with an electronic system. In retrospect, that seems strange and not very obvious why it should be that way."
Human beings possess a wide variety of physical skills - we can catch baseballs, dodge projectiles, climb trees - which all have a sort of "underlying computational power" about them. But we rarely take advantage of these abilities because they have little evolutionary value now that we're firmly ensconced as the food chain's top seed.
Slowly, though, the dualist division seems to be healing. Bit by bit, we're being given the opportunity to use physical activity above the wrist and mental activity below the brain pan in order to work with information-rich media. Voice recognition is a beginning, but it doesn't capture very much of the richness of human communication.
The first significant step toward using more of our antique physical forms to interact with computers may be Sega's Activator, introduced in October. The Activator is a ring of sensors that are placed on the floor. Stand inside the ring and move, and the Activator translates your movement into the actions of characters on the screen, or into music.
Where next? Will architects design structures by standing inside a virtual space, punching holes for windows with a fist, or pushing walls around to change the dimensions of a building? Will computer graphics artists paint like Jackson Pollock, roaming over digital canvases, splattering colors, shapes, and forms with the freedom afforded by a full range of body motion? How would a hunter-gatherer body be most comfortable working with a spreadsheet? Or does the new model of working with data mean the entire concept of double-entry bookkeeping goes the way of stone tools? Liddle isn't saying. Not surprisingly, he's trying to keep Interval Research's work encrypted for a while longer. But he has given hints.
"We need to learn how to use some of the natural computation in our body and stimulate it artificially with a digital engine," Liddle says.
For example? "We ought to be able to make the optic nerve see things without light passing through the eye. I ought to be able to create a vision inside my visual cortex without having to send any light through there. That shouldn't be very difficult to do, particularly for simple images. I ought to be able to control a mouse without ever moving, by just generating the intentions to move that mouse and tapping into that in a rather simple sort of pre-neuromuscular way that allows me to control rather elaborate computing models." If we're clever over the next ten to fifteen years, Liddle believes, we'll learn how to exploit these physical capabilities.
First steps will probably involve looking at animal models. How do dogs catch Frisbees? As a species, dogs have been around for several million years. We can be relatively sure that for most of that time, there were no flying plastic discs to chase. What is it that exists within a dog's tool kit that makes it adaptable enough to deal so elegantly with a motion pattern that 99.999 percent of its ancestors never saw?
Liddle believes certain human skills may be cognitive and physiological building blocks that, if we looked, we might find present even in creatures with less highly-developed nervous systems. "There is an interesting hypothesis that says that evolution doesn't start over from scratch very often," Liddle says. "It chooses sometimes to retain certain components it has produced and reuse them cleverly in a number of different ways." He points to the famous highly-flexible three-bone linkage. It makes the gills of a fish work; allows the jaws of many reptiles to expand, tighten, and swallow rodents; and is also the same basic three-bone joint found in the middle ear of humans.
The path from voice recognition and Sega's Activator to the kind of systems David Liddle envisions is mostly unmapped. To reach that destination will require a radical change in our thinking.
To illustrate his point, Liddle calls on another example from nature. Consider gorillas or chimps living in a well-maintained zoo. If you leave the door to their enclosures open, he says, most will watch the open door for a while, then walk over and take a hesitant look outside. "And 95 percent of them will then close it," Liddle says. "They don't really want to go outside that door, because they don't know what that means to them."
Liddle believes we face the same problem today. The door is open, but we keep wanting to close it. We know what a computer is. We know the rules of its operation and what it can do and can't do, and don't want to be confused by a bunch of new possibilities. "It's ridiculous," Liddle says, "but we are not willing to leave that door open, let alone walk out of it and say, 'Wait a minute. This is a technology that changes everything. We can communicate in all new ways. We can store things in all new ways. Why do we have to stay on this same old boring trolley track of how we think about computing? How it's labeled, who can sell it, who can buy it, and what we do with it?' " If you have trouble coming up with an answer, try asking the dog.
