Speeds and Feeds

It was her eyes that caught my attention. She had the most incredible green eyes, just one shade this side of being unnaturally too green. The skin on her face seemed to glow in the diffuse light, framed by auburn hair.

She was standing just inside a department store, smiling at people walking past her but obviously watching for someone.

It wasn't me. As I walked in, she gave me that same soft half-smile she'd given an elderly woman moments before, briefly making eye contact before her gaze flicked past me, scanning for somone in the open space behind me.

But in that moment I saw her eyes, and I could not go on.

I stepped to the side and stood by a display of sunglasses, waiting for a break in the stream of people approaching the store. Then I walked up beside her and cleared my throat. "Excuse me..."

She turned and gave me a very professional smile. "Yes, sir, may I help you?"

Oh. She worked there. I'm not stupid, but sometimes I'm a bit slow. Nevertheless, I went ahead with the line I'd thought up while pretending to look at sunglasses. It was a terrible line, but it was the only one I had.

"Sorry, I just wanted to say hello. You looked, uh, lonely."

She stared at me for a moment then laughed and shook her head. "No. I'm just watching for women between the ages of 25 and 32 so I can tell them about our spa services."

I nodded, and looked out into the mall. The concourse was decorated for spring like a Sequoia forest, with wide-spaced tree trunks separated by unnaturally smooth ground imaged over the mall's actual floor. The solidographic trees appeared to rise hundreds of feet into a blue sky, although the mall's ceiling was surely not more than fifty feet up.

"I don't see any coming," I said. "Can you talk to me instead?"

"Yes, sir, how may I help you?"

Hmm. Starting over, were we?

"Well, what's your name?"

She gave me a more realistic smile, apparently accepting that I was not there to learn about the spa services. "You can call me June."

I offered a hand. "I'm Mark."

Her grip was very soft, but pleasantly warm and not rushed. "I'm pleased to meet you."

"Likewise," I began, but then her eyes flicked past me and that professional smile came back. She nodded briefly to me and stepped away, intercepting a well-dressed woman who was walking toward the store.

I waited at the side of the store entrance while June made her pitch. She was very good at it. Eventually she turned and pointed up into the store's atrium, apparently indicating where the spa was located, and the woman walked toward the escalators.

June scanned the forest clearing just outside the store, and seeing no one from her target group, returned, smiling the way I preferred, her pretty green eyes sparkling.

Suddenly I couldn't wait through the usual small talk. "Listen, June, when do you get off duty here?"

She stopped smiling for a moment, giving me a frank appraisal. "I'm booked through the end of the month, of course."

I nodded quickly. "Sure, I understand. June, right. But after that?"

She shook her head. "Nothing, after that."

"Well, my company needs a spokesperson for the Web interface, trade shows, that sort of thing. We're a color-science company. You'd be perfect."

Her head tilted a bit. "Compensation?"

"We're well funded. IPO next year. I think we can work something out. And we can host you on anything you need."

She paused, giving me another appraising look. "All right. Let's talk. But for now, I need to get back to work."

We traded contact information and I walked into the store. Our company didn't really need a full-time spokesperson, but marketing decisions were up to me. A new face was just what we needed. Our customers couldn't help but see the value of good color... with those eyes.

(Inspired in part by Blade Runner and The Green Eye Project.)

I really enjoyed going through this image collection over on CNET's News.com. It lists ten influences from the world of science fiction on today's high-tech industries:

• Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
• Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Minority Report
• William Gibson's Neuromancer
• Bruce Sterling's Distraction
• Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
• Arthur C. Clarke's 1945 invention of the geosynchronous communication satellite
• Isaac Asimov's I, Robot
• Star Trek
• Karel Capek's R.U.R.

I'll go along with the Heinlein and Star Trek references, and add eight more references that inspired me personally:

• Heinlein's 1956 The Door Into Summer, in which the the protagonist is an electrical engineer and inventor; among many other great ideas, the book predicts a sort of computer-aided design system
• Larry Niven's Known Space series, which probably has more high-tech content per chapter than any other work of its kind
• Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's 1974 The Mote in God's Eye, in which the authors described in practical terms how pocket computers could work-- one character "took out his pocket computer and wrote quickly with the attached stylus"...
• Niven and Pournelle's 1981 Oath of Fealty, which makes many challenging and inspiring predictions about the role of technology in society
• The Instrumentality series by Cordwainer Smith (Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger), which feels to me like it was actually written in the future and sent back to the 20th century by time machine
• Jules Verne, who first established science fiction as a legitimate literary genre
• Vernor Vinge's 1984 True Names, which gave me my first full understanding of the potential of the Internet
• H.G. Wells, who took over the leadership of the field of science fiction toward the end of Verne's career

And one bonus entry: I'd like to offer my personal thanks to Jerry Pournelle, engineer and friend. I don't think I'd be blogging here if not for Jerry. His work as a science fiction writer has been all the more influential to me because of his many decades as a columnist for Byte Magazine and his own websites, JerryPournelle.com and Chaos Manor Reviews. Jerry has also made substantial personal contributions to this nation's space program, strategic defense, and political discourse. Although Jerry himself would probably deny it, I think it's possible none of us would be here if not for his work in these areas.

Incidentally, I'd like to give a shout out to another great website I probably should have mentioned in my recent blog on the subject-- Technovelgy is all about the connections between the worlds of science fiction and high technology. For example, here is their page showing notable examples of engineering content in sf. It's a great place to spend a few hours.

Feel free to add a comment naming your own inspirations from the world of science fiction. I'd love to see them.

Have you ever heard of the Homebrew Computer Club? I'm sure you've heard of the products designed by its members: the Apple I and Apple II, the Osborne I, maybe even the earlier Sol-20 (one of the prettiest little personal computers ever; I have a beautiful example myself).

Wikipedia reports that the Homebrew Computer Club stopped meeting in "roughly 1977"-- about 30 years ago. But a small part of it survives. Some of the people in the Homebrew Computer Club spun off the Homebrew Robotics Club, and that club still meets regularly.

I try to attend meetings when I can, but I've been missing a lot of meetings since I took this job at Montalvo Systems. I missed the meeting this month; blogging about it sorta helps make up for that.

HBRC members are still mostly engineers and programmers. Some are parents and kids, which bodes well for the long-term health of the hobby as well as the long-term supply of workers for high-tech industries. Club projects involve everything from simple wheeled robots that can drive around on a tabletop without falling off the edge to GPS-equipped machines like small versions of the DARPA Grand Challenge vehicles. Pretty much every robot has a microprocessor brain; some have many microprocessors, each in charge of some subsystem.

The connection between microprocessors and robotics is not mere coincidence. Microprocessors revolutionized robot design. It was certainly a delayed effect, since microprocessors had to grow up for a while before they surpassed the previous methods for robot control. But when this happened, more or less in the 1990s, microprocessors put robots on the Moore's Law path.

No longer must robots remain tethered to industrial minicomputers, slaving away day after day to build Honda automobiles. In fact, Honda itself is making robots that can walk off the job if they want to.

Of course, they're not smart enough to want to, which brings me to the final ingredient required for intelligent, independent robots: synthetic brains. PC Magazine and CNET covered the recent Cognitive Computing conference, where researchers described projects to reimplement the brain in silicon. Not merely duplicate the results of thought, but the process itself.

I attended a presentation on this subject by Jim Burr at the 1993 World Science Fiction Convention in San Francisco. If I recall correctly, Burr projected that it should become possible to implement an electronic copy of the human brain, in a size that would fit inside a human head, consuming a similar amount of power, by 2050... and built in silicon, which switches far faster than biological neurons, the electronic version will be a thousand times smarter.

Moore's Law has probably slowed down a little since then, and it might slow down more, but it's still possible some of us will live to see this achievement. What happens then, I can't say, but maybe robots with silicon brains will start an Organic Humans Club...