The mechanized imagination
Fiction has followed developments in the computer industry very closely and used them enthusiastically for its own creations… and vice versa. There are therefore important novels that have realistically represented the situation of information technology. For example, Microservants (Microservers. 1995) by Douglas Coupland, a generational epistolary novel that tells how a group of young Microsoft programmers leave the company and start developing on their own. However, science fiction fiction took the lion's share of this imagery
The appearance of the first computing products in the modern sense, the computers or "electronic brains" of the XNUMXs, was seen by many as a sign of the future. Computers also occupied a central role in the imagination of the time, alongside jet planes, flying saucers and atomic bombs.
These vacuum tube instruments were, on the other hand, a significant novelty with respect to what had been imagined up to that moment: even if the stories of common robots in the XNUMXs and XNUMXs can already be considered an anticipation of the interest in the future computer science, the elements of discontinuity are very strong. Those who had thought of higher intelligences had in fact always seen them in relation to mobile bodies: biological or mechanical, but always rather traditional. Robots were then imagined as mechanical workers.
The theology of the machine
The first computers, decidedly flashy and immovable, lent themselves instead to being described as solemn divinities, cared for by a clergy of technicians and scientists.
A classic science fiction story of the period starts from this context, The Nine Billion Names of God (The Nine Billion Names of Gods, 1953) by Arthur C. Clarke, evidently inspired by the textual analysis work conducted by the Jesuit Roberto Busa on the works of St. Thomas with the help of IBM. In the story, a group of Tibetan monks comes to the conclusion that the ultimate goal of humanity is to write all nine billion names of God resulting from the possible combinations of the letters of a sacred alphabet. To speed things up compared to human work, the monks therefore turn to an American manufacturer of electronic computers to generate and print the combinations. The job succeeds… and, of course, at the end of the activity the world really ends.
The same logic is found in another famous account of the period: The answer (Answer, 1954) by Fredric Brown. Barely one page long, the text describes how the product of connecting all the supercomputers in the human universe produces God. A more rational variation on the same theme is found instead in The last question (The last Question, 1956) by Isaac Asimov, where a rapid succession of scenes depicts how, over billions of years, ever-developing generations of computers merge first with humanity and then with the very fabric of space and earth. time, eventually managing to reverse the entropy of the Universe.
The computer as a dystopian tool
Even in the XNUMXs, the increased sophistication of science fiction fiction of the period didn't change things much. However, reflecting what was happening in the outside world, in this period the computer is described more or less metaphorically as the perfect tool for a bureaucratic and militarized society that seeks to make people's individuality disappear.
The prestigious Hugo Award was won in 1968 by Harlan Ellison with the story I have no mouth, and I have to scream (I Have No. Mouth, and I Must Scream, 1967), in which a supercomputer unleashes nuclear war and torments the few survivors. However, there are exceptions and personal ways. For example, in Italy, the novel stands out The big portrait by Dino Buzzati (1960), in which a researcher tries to reconstruct a virtual simulation of his dead wife.
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At the end of the seventies, the diffusion of the personal computer led to a rapid transformation of the imagination, with effects that have continued until today. In this period computers, which for over thirty years had remained the work tools of governments and large companies, entered homes and took up positions on writers' desks.
The cyberpunk
The first consistent manifestation of this new state of affairs is cyberpunk. Born in 1984 with the novel Neuromancer(neuromancer) by William Gibson, this literary movement often shows how “the street finds its use for things”.
In cyberpunk novels computers are therefore used by more or less legal operators and petty criminals, committed to stealing the secrets of some large company. Beyond the literary results, this narrative has also left a trace for the way in which it has been able to interpret the spirit of the time and describe a future which, from certain points of view, the present is approaching in a disturbing way.
Gibson himself, together with Bruce Sterling, was also the author of another lead novel: The reality machine (The DifferenceEngine, 1991), which is a landmark for fiction steampunk. In this work, the authors tell the story of an alternative world in which Charles Babbage managed to build his Analytical Engine and the information revolution developed alongside the industrial revolution, with a steam-powered computer and pedal-operated word processors alongside the first sounding locomotives.
Lo steampunk
Steampunk then followed its own paths. At its origin, however, there is the search for a way to talk in a narratively satisfying way about the personal computer revolution of the XNUMXs, with its products that may not be very spectacular but are now visible to the general public.
On the other hand, science fiction has not limited itself to drawing inspiration from technical evolution. In many cases it has also created it, or at least helped push it in certain directions.
This is especially evident in the case of cyberpunk. William Gibson did not limit himself to describing stories based on computers, but consecrated a narrative invention: "cyberspace", or, with a definition revived by cinema, the Matrix. Understood as a shared technological hallucination, cyberspace is a virtual environment in which operators and "console cowboys" can enter and act through a dedicated interface.
The idea had already been anticipated by other books and films, but with Gibson it becomes a definite commonplace, even if how to enter this space is largely left to the benevolent imagination of the reader. The concrete development of "virtual reality" systems and applications, particularly in the XNUMXs, has therefore often been carried out within a cyberpunk imaginary.
The theory of the technological singularity postulated by Ray Kurzweil, the futurist, inventor and writer of numerous books spanning the topics of health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism and the technological singularity.
Artificial intelligence
More generally, it can be argued that much of the interest in computers has been the product of a self-reinforcing spiral. The more computers evolved, the more central they became to the imagination, and this in turn inspired other people, on many levels, to become interested in computers.
Research in the direction of artificial intelligence still benefits from this prestige today. The idea that, as in the stories of Brown and Asimov, the evolution of computer capabilities can lead to an intelligence superior to that of humans is currently unrelated to the level of available products.
However, this does not prevent many, even insiders (from Ray Kurzweil to Elon Musk), from expressing themselves in enthusiastic or concerned tones about the developments of these technologies, in a framework more linked to the imagination of science fiction than to any concrete result .
On the other hand, developments have been remarkable on other fronts. For example, it has now become normal for fiction to take computers or artificial intelligences as characters.
The end of the computer aura
In Kim Stanley Robinson's remarkable novel Aurora (2015, still unpublished in Italy), the story is seen and told through the words of the artificial intelligence that controls an interstellar spaceship. Without a proper name but endowed with an excellent literary culture, the computer also wonders whether it is conscious or not, and is unable to give an answer to the question. Nonetheless. or perhaps because of this, he is one of the most empathetic characters to have been presented in recent fiction.
Desktop computers, which were at least tangible and describable, have now been joined by a series of virtual tools that have become an integral part of daily life and have therefore lost all traces of their aura. Difficult to reconnect smartphones and tablets to eschatological visions, or even just to social logics of control and rebellion - although these tools are perhaps more suitable for these purposes than their predecessors. Reflections on artificial intelligence, beyond any physical manifestation, therefore remain today one of the most interesting cases of a possible intertwining between narrative and technical development.
Mirko Tavosanis (Karlsruhe, 1968) teaches Italian Linguistics at the Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics of the University of Pisa. He has spent periods studying and teaching abroad in New Delhi and Hong Kong. His research interests mainly concern the relationship between language and technologies. Her blog is Language and writing. He has published writing and communication manuals for various publishers. Between these Languages and artificial intelligence, Italian on the web, both published by Carocci in 2011. He is the author of the essay "Italian, dialects, English ... The lexicon and linguistic change", contained in the volume of the Accademia della Crusca, The Italian language and the Romance languages in the face of anglicisms, edited by Claudio Marazzini and Alessio Petralli (goWare, 2018).
