From: Bodyjackal_<bodyjackal@aol.com>%Holonet@paradigm.co.jp (Bodyjackal <bodyjackal@aol.com>,Holonet)
Subject: technology supression....
Date: Thu Mar 02 20:04:57 MET 1995


   This post started out as a letter to the author of a story called
"Wampanoag", published in Intertext Volume 4 Number 4. For those of you
who haven't read it, it was about a Russian inventor attempting to patent
a neural/optical computing device that required no software and very
little hardware, only some lenses and a Single Lens Reflex camera. I was
quite taken by this concept and wound up thinking a lot about it in the
shower one day, and this is what resulted. The author's reply allows me to
post these as (hopefully) the start of a discussion on modern invention
and supression. Feel free to add your own ideas to the mix....

                                                                    Joshua
Work

bodyjackal@aol.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
(sent to jdifonzo@powerhouse.com)

     Mr. DiFonzo-

     Hello. My name is Joshua Work and I am a student, freelance writer, and
fan of the Intertext ezine. I read your story "Wampanoag" in v4n4 and enjoyed
it.
      But I have a few comments I feel the need to voice and would like to
hear your responses. My email adress is bodyjackal@aol.com, if you are so
inclined.
     First off, I would like to inquire as to the basis for the optical
neural network device you described. Does it have any actual scientific
background, or is it merely one of your personal inventions?
What is the purpose of the SLR camera? Where does the "conciousness" of this
sentience exist, if anywhere?
      Second, I feel that your treatment of government supression is dated.
These days, no technology can be so conviently bottled back up as in the days
of the civil war and even the second world war. Once the demon is loosed, it
is here forever. Proof lies in such things as encryption and ATM's. Even the
government's control of data is uncertain, evidenced by China's Tianamenn
Square faxes and the NSA employee handbook's publication. And what are the
plans for a new invention? Nothing but data, capable of the same
manipulations and transfers as all else.
      Third, I don't think any intelligent individual would act in the manner
of your main character. Granted, the change to society would
be enormous if such a device were to come into widespread use, but I am not
sure that this would qualify us as "not ready". This change wouldn't be
instantaneous, although it would probably be fast. And while there is no
money to be made off software, and little from production, the real source of
income lies in the applications, therefore the services using those
applications. America is fast  becoming a service economy, for good or ill. I
refer you to the list of things America does best, according to Neal
Stephenson in his book _SNOW CRASH_: movies, music, microcode, and high-speed
pizza delivery. With the removal of microcode by the new AI's, that still
leaves three, all service based. While this would injure the traditional
industries, it would produce new economic niches that could possibly be more
important on a global scale than that which they replaced. Historical
precedent lies in the introduction of the computer as a means to telecommute,
which will slowly replace the need for as much travel even as travel becomes
faster and easier.
      Faced with the threat of losing this new technolgy forever, or losing
the meager (a mere personal fortune, anyhow) income generated by sales, the
best alternative would be to Net the blueprints as far and wide as possible.
Fax them. Mail them, both e and s. Send the prototypes to South America or
South Jersey, and store a few away so that even if all the rest fails, you
have backups. Take out safe deposit boxes and lock up copies of the plans.
Find "data safes" and leave the electronic version on some obscure BBS on the
Internet. Wrap the whole thing up as a virus and make sure everyone knows
what to look for. Encrypt other copies and make sure that no one official
will learn the keys. Rename it something innocent and spread the word,
quietly.  It can be done. The governement's reaction times aren't as fast as
the spread of information. Do it right and no one will ever be able to stop
it.
         Once it's out there it's safe. The next step would be to deal with
the ramifications. Obviously, all traditional computing is rendered obsolete.
This doesn't mean, though, that it's instantly useless. The new AI's could be
told to interface with them, accept data at a rate faster than even a modem
could be merely letting the AI slave the system to itself. While the verbal
interface is nice, detailed plain text files or even graphical compostions
could be it's "programs' for complex operations taking too long to bother
saying. There would be software, but it would be software that anyone could
program, if they just took the time.
          And that software would be the key to the applications. If you just
don't tell people how you did something, most of them wouldn't be able to
figure it out (unless they used the device, but that too takes a little
thought). It's just not as *easy*, once someone has already figured out how
to do it, and is willing to let you use their machines to do it. Because this
software wouldn't be the kind you distributed. It would be resident only in
your machine, with detailed instructions on how to prevent others from 
copying/interrogating it (ie security, of a sort anyway). All the other
person would need would be one of the machines, tabula rasa and ready to
go.

      Of course, this little scheme is still vulnerable to others actually
taking the time to do it themselves. But for really complex things, things so
complex it would take a lot of time to even tell the thing how to program
another thing what to do, it wouldn't be worth it. Examples include
high-speed networking between machines, capable of handling and processing
amounts of data undreamt of. (come on, if this thing can translate Russian
without prior programming, it obviously has no data limitations). And even if
someone should manage to make their own, it still wouldn't do much good if
the only machines allowed to interface with the network were the ones on
"approval lists" resident in the network servers. To get approval, all you
have to do is pay. In the start, the profit would be small because nothing
would stop someone else from setting up their won and simply undercharging,
or else giving it away for free! Major industries and important governmental
functions (like 991), would have to be given free acess. The widespread
initial use of these instituions would set the standard for the time to come,
and allow for later commercial profits. (what does this remind you of?)
       Of course, there would be hackers, those attempting to gain acess
without aying, and those trying to timeshare their own machines out to
others. But these are problems that can be dealt with by a small, streamlined
organization and a team of troubleshooters who can affect major policy
changes very quickly and without damaging the services already offered, and
while always improving them. It all comes down to reaction time, and that's
been cut to days, if not hours. The wrong mistake at the wrong time can turn
this nice monopoly into a major informational coup. There's the problem of
government anti-trust laws, but because anyone can technically program their
own rival net, it's not a monoply with the earmarks of the old public
utilities. And the governemt reacts so slow.....
       The potential application of this device is not limited to the
super-symbolic worlds of information and finance alone. If this truly can
process information that fast, the research that can be achieved when linked
to advanced scanning equipment would be incredible. And these machines could
design new scanning equipment (itself with tremendous sales potential,
because even though their plans would be well known, the capablility of
manufacture would still rest in the hands of capatalists), in order to gain
greater access to the enviornemt. The benifits to medicine, psychology,
physics, geology, biology, and a horde of other different fields are too
great to list.       And if these machines could someday be tasked to turn
conceptual technologies such as cybernetics, nanotech, and even
personality/event modeling into reality, they would be the ultimate
"wish-machine". Just ask and it shall be grated unto you, if you know how to
ask right and are capable of doing what it instructs. Even the shorter term
benifits of making concepts real would be incredible: smartwheels,
enviornmental forecasting, perfect autopilots/autodrive... perhaps even human
(or human-like) companionship. Who knows.
       My point, sir, is not that I did not like your story. In fact, it was
probaly one of the most thought provoking pieces of work I've read in a long
time (ranking right up with _SNOW CRASH_ and _HEAVY WEATHER_, two recent
idea-troves). I just feel a lot differently about the conclusions you drew,
and the almost Luddite response of your main character to seal up this
wonderful potential until fifty years after his death. Such actions are the
trademark of a decade only recently gone by. Now we must not allow ourselves
to fall into such thinking, lest when the real "dream device" come along we
fail to use it to it's fullest potential. I, for one, do not wish to see
another "analytical engine" ignored for lack of vision.
        But these are just my own humble thoughts. I would like to hear your
reply, and if possible I would like to post this letter and your response on
alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo for further discussion by the public at large. I feel
that we need to explore conceptual technolgy in an effort to integrate the
need for it into society, so that it's evolution will come to pass all the
much faster. After all, look at the concept of the global telecommuncations
network and how far it has come once Industry smelled the profit. At the very
least, we will come farther faster, and if we already understand the path we
want these technologies to take, we can deal with the effects that they have
on people, and know what to do when it all starts happening for real. Sure,
it won't be exactly the same, but we'll at least have started thinking about
it.

   Thank you very much for your time and your story.
                                   Awaiting your opportunity,

                                                   Joshua Work
                                                      8 Feb 1995