The new wizards: Teach our kids to code.

The New Wizards and the

Problem of Magic Technology

Peter Every and James Shuttleworth

Coventry University

cience fiction is rarely useful when it comes to accurate speculation about the future. This is why it is particularly noteworthy when an author gets it right. It is fabled that William Gibson wrote Neuromancer, the book that gave us the term ‘cyberspace’, on a battered old typewriter after listening to hackers talking

in a Canadian Coffee shop. Science Fiction is, however, incredibly revealing when used to symptomatically read the politics and culture of

the present and recent past. Arthur Clarke, being like all of us, the product of his generation, would have viewed

the use of technology to accelerate civilisation in primitive cultures in a relatively positive light.

Clarke, somewhat more than just a pulp author, wrote about technological colonialism from two directions; from the perspective of the 'responsible use of technology for the good of civilisation', as well as from the perspective of beings on the 'receiving end' of a civilising alien technology (most movingly in the book ‘Childhood’s End’ in which a ‘caretaker alien species’ nurses the last generation of humanity through its extinction before the emergence of the next evolutionary step). Clarke’s concept of a magic ‘benevolent technology’ is probably best seen in the role of the monolith in 2001 a space odyssey.

In the film clip a device from an unimaginably advanced civilisation imparts intelligence to early hominids. This

was Clarke’s speculation on a genuine scientific conundrum: how did humans evolve such large brains in such a

short space of evolutionary time? To watch the clip follow this link: http://vimeo.com/30988849

S

"You know, I think I'm going

to go and do something really

intelligent, like kill an animal

or, maybe, in a few million

years, wage thermonuclear

war ...”

This pulp cover depicts ancient

Britons (at Stonehenge?) in the

face of a magical alien force.

The tagline reads: “Were the

celestial judges themselves

blameless?”

'Technology in the service of progress’

(read, colonialism) was a particular

theme in the work of H.G. wells.

In Things to Come, Wells proposes the

‘brotherhood of efficiency, the

freemasonry of science' as a cure to

despotic warlords.

It is really worth reading this clip against

relatively recent events in Iraq and

Afghanistan and the project of ‘bringing

democracy to the Middle East’.

To watch this clip follow the link:

http://vimeo.com/30981434

f course today we wouldn't dream of seeing

representations of colonialist adventurism in which

humans violently 'civilise' cute, blue, but ultimately

primitive, alien cultures as acceptable, would we?

And, for sure, our

sympathies in ‘Avatar’ are

meant to lie with the Na’vi –

yet still many viewers report

a visceral thrill at seeing all

that awesome technology...

blowing stuff up.

For the purposes of this talk, however, let us let go of

our suspicions of technology as a tool of colonial

adventurism and engage with Clarke’s assertion as a

neutral observation.

So first of all we’ve got to ask: what is magic?

Magic seems to be the experience of any

phenomenon that is inexplicable through recourse to

rational explanation.

O

Any really well executed

magic trick always leads to

one question

The best magic tricks violently awaken our

curiosity because, in the absence of rational

explanation, we feel a strong urge to reconnect

the phenomenon that we’ve just witnessed with

some rational domain.

There is a link between magic and curiosity and

people like Penn and Teller have made a career

out of demystifying magic tricks.

It’s not really magic!

Captain Kirk’s Communicator. As a boy I always wanted one of these. A

fit in the pocket mechanism for talking to Starships.

40 years later we have iPhone. Is the iPhone magic? Why isn’t our curiosity piqued?

Perhaps it’s enough to know that the device is the product of science and therefore a rational explanation of how it works is ‘out there somewhere’ if we could only be bothered to go and look.

Actually, you can have a lot of fun with this. Go and ask your parents how the internet works or a printer driver or the central locking system on the car, sit back, relax and enjoy the ride!

How does the Internet work, Ted? (Ted’s technical analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes) Look at all these magical features, though; the iPhone even brings down governments!

Magic Technology at the heart of true social and

political change: The Arab Spring.

s our technology becomes more magical it also, paradoxically, vanishes. Technology simply becomes part

of our cultural and social landscape. Where once we feared the impact of technology, we now take it so

for granted that it becomes invisible. It takes some effort of will to re-cast it as magical. Our iPhones

may do everything and more than a Star Trek Communicator, but we hardly see them as truly 'magical'.

We are currently living through what has been described by many as the era of pervasive computing – which is

the normalisation of technology to the point it becomes both physically and culturally invisible to us.

Interestingly, over the past 100 years the dominant rhetoric surrounding technology has changed a great deal.

So, for the next few slides, and with the help of some film clips, let us recount a little history.

A

The rhetoric around technology in the 20th century

suggest that it is an agent in the service of progress

and that progress is a function of capitalism

The following clip shows how the imposition of

efficient 20th century technology impacts on the

body, dignity, and even the human rights of the hero

Charley Chaplin, playing, as he always does the

'everyman'.

In the clip the factory owner is introducing

technology to make worker’s lunchtime as efficient as

the production line in front of them.

To play the clip follow the link:

http://vimeo.com/30979618

Defence against the Dark Arts n Modern Times, Chaplin's clear warning is that technology in the service of progress can be dehumanising.

This warning is echoed throughout the Twentieth Century by many Critics. The advent of the personal

computer in the 70's, however, brings a special urgency to the call for popular technical education to return

the ability to control technology to ‘the people'.

Despite being considered counter culture, people like Richard Stallman, Steve Wozniak, The Peoples Computer

Company, as well as countless early hackers and phone Phreakers, insisted that the need for popular technical

education was a political imperative under the banners:

“learn to use the technology before it gets used on you!" and, after Clemenceau, “Computers are too

important to be left in the hands of the corporations”

I

Case Study: The People’s Computer Company 1972: The first edition of the PCC magazine is hand drawn. These are the days before Desk-top publishing.

The slogan reads: “Computers are mostly

used against people instead of for people.

Used to control people instead of free

them. Time to change all that -

we need a ... People’s Computer Company”

The PCC material is archived here

The back page of PCC1 is a hurried education in

the basics of BASIC:

“A program is a series of statements. Each

statement tells the computer to do some specific

thing. So far we have only used two types of

statement ‘print’ and ‘end’.

1978: Now the product of a desk top

publishing programme, the ‘geeks’ have

been bought off with positions in the

now burgeoning sunrise I.T. industry.

Notice the ‘soon to become recreational

computing’.

No longer the tool of revolutionaries, the

new focus on recreational computing

uncannily presages the soon to be born

rhetoric of consumer technology and

personal freedom’

Ecstatic!

Jailbreaking invalidates your iPhone warranty when perhaps all you want to do is gain root access to a device you actually own. Technology as Intellectual Property clearly the message is ‘don’t meddle with our tech’!

Everybody knows that the Internet

is made of cats.

In this clip from ‘The Time Machine” H.G. Wells depicts the

society of the Eloi from the year 800,000 who want for

Nothing, question nothing and have lost all sense of curiosity.

The warning, of course, is that they are completely at the

mercy of the sinister Morlocks who, incidentally control all of

the technology that provides sustenance for the Eloi.

I ask you not to read the following clip as in any way similar to my experience of classroom teaching. That would

be scandalous! Follow this link to watch the film clip: http://vimeo.com/30983299

We asked 2011 Computing Students on

Facebook how prepared they felt for the

programming and mathematics that would

be part of their course. They said:

“I had actually never heard of Computing as

a subject until 6th Form, and assumed ICT

was the only computer related course at that

level. I'm all for bringing computing into the

national curriculum. The only thing I really

learned in ICT after year 7 was using Macros

in Microsoft Access”

“We spent a lesson on Photoshop, and a

lesson on Flash, but our IT teachers couldn't

use it themselves. Best 2 lessons ever!”

“At school I only had the option of ICT, so I

start this degree course as a novice. If the IT

related courses at GCSE and below were half

decent, most of us could have been well

versed in all of this stuff by now”

“We had various combinations of

PowerPoint, Excel, Access and Word in most

years. It not only bored me to death, it

didn’t challenge me at all”

“In ICT class I had to beg my teacher to use

HTML as I didn’t want to do something as

easy as ‘making a poster’ for my coursework”

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable

from magic” Arthur C Clarke (1917 – 2008)

“Everything will be computers” My Nan (nineteen-nought-blob – 1992)

Both are true, but maybe not as expected

Today’s technology is certainly

magical, in the sense that you don’t

have to understand how it works.

Yet it does what was, not that long

ago, impossible or unthinkable.

But! It’s actually easy to see how it

all works, read about the smallest

detail or most obscure aspect, tinker

and repurpose.

The curtain is actually pretty easy to

pull aside.

My Nan said that one day 'everything would be computers', and that's sort of true, but the computers she was

thinking about were the type we sit down in front of.

That's not how it turned out.

In the picture above there are possibly thousands of 'computing devices'; in the mobile phones carried by the

pedestrians, in the GPS systems of the cars and busses, embedded in the traffic lights and traffic routing systems,

in the sensors that switch on the Christmas lights, in the door access systems to the offices, in the sewer control

systems, in the interactive billboards and adverts. The thing is we don’t even think of most of them as being

'computers' - but they are.

The future of computing is...like

the future of most things ... not

something we can easily

predict.

Some of our favourite failed predictions:

It will be years - not in my time - before a woman will

become Prime Minister. - Margaret Thatcher

That rainbow song's no good. Take it out. - MGM

memo on The Wizard of Oz

Rock 'n Roll will be gone by June. Variety, 1955

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in

their home. Ken Olson chairman and founder of DEC

Radio has no future. - William Thomson (inventor of

the Kelvin Scale of temperature)

X-rays are clearly a hoax. – ibid.

The aeroplane is scientifically impossible. – ibid.

So, for now, let’s stick to the present

100% accurate

May be a better definition? No.

We're surrounded by technology.

Some of it is obvious some of it less so

There is a lot more to our environment than meets

the eye BUT IT’S NOT JUST THE PHYSICAL DEVICES

THAT ARE IMPORTANT

When describing your environment, do you consider

the wires in the walls, the plumbing under the floor or

the sewers beneath the street?

What about the Electromagnetic environment?

What about the on-line environment and on-line

services? For many people, on-line cloud services and

apps (Amazon, e-mail, Facebook, flickr, Google Maps,

etc.) are more important than "real-world" services

such as the postal system.

The modern augmented environment I walk around with my family, my bank, all of my files, TV and radio, my friends and

Stephen Fry in my pocket.

A mobile phone is the most obvious example of the augmented environment, but there

are plenty more.

Look around you....

Automatic doors

GPS satellites

RFID tags

Barcodes

Magic! So, if "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"...

... And our environment is full of such technology ... then the people who can

build, control and manipulate such technology are the...

Wizards of the

Modern World

THIS IS IMPORTANT

We rely so much on technology.

What if it breaks?

How do we know who/what to

trust? How do we do something

interesting? How do we verify

what we’ve been told about it?

What if Google does become

Evil?

How would you know?

Standard Open Source operating systems mean

that we can understand the landscape (Android,

Linux)

Standards for documents (HTML, CSS), storage

(SQL), communication (XML, JSON, etc) and

interoperability (XMLRPC, AJAX, DBUS) make it

much easier to create new artefacts that are

similar in quality and scale to "commercial"

offerings

Documentation, collaboration and

communication:

the Internet makes them all better.

Projects like Arduino allow similar ‘hackability’ in

the physical world

The curtain is thin, but it is still there, some

effort is required. You also need to find it.

Work with data

Code a better country http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/15081

Teach our kids to

code

None of which are ICT

Teach our kids to code!

Just like the people’s computer

company back in 1972

Getting Started Many free or cheap tools are available to help you get started in ‘magic technology’. Documentation

and help forums for these are plentiful. Here are a few of the interesting ones:

Arduino: http://www.arduino.cc/

Processing: http://processing.org/

Python: http://www.python.org/

Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/

XAMP: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

Codify for iPad: http://twolivesleft.com/Codify/

About the authors Peter has a background in Linguistics,

Cultural Studies and Post 1968 European

Philosophy.

James is a Software Engineer.

Peter says ‘Awesome’ a lot and still gets

excited by the concept of email. James

has mountains of electronic stuff that he

hoards and tinkers with obsessively. His

prized possession is a copy of Emacs

running on a tablet PC.

They are both Associate Heads of the

Department of Computing at Coventry

University.

This document is released under a Creative Commons share-alike licence. We make no explicit or implied claim to copyright for the

images and film clips referenced by this document, which are used for the purpose of education and critique.