The Micro Millennium - A TP View

In 1973, the computer scientist and science populariser Dr Christopher Evans became scientific advisor to a new children's science fiction series: The Tomorrow People. He continued in this role until the conclusion of the series in 1978 and was instrumental in the concepts that underlay TIM, the Tomorrow People's artificially intelligent 'biotronic' computer.
However, in the same period, he also wrote at least two popular science books on the rise of the microprocessor ('The Mighty Micro' and 'The Micro Millennium') and edited at least two anthologies of horror fiction ('Mind in Chains' and 'Mind at Bay').
The last of these, The Micro Millenium (ISBN 0-671-46212-1) was written in the same years as Dr Evans' death in 1979 and lays out what he thought would happen to our society, economy and culture in the years up to 2000 as a result of the invention of the computer. Both as an intellectual episode, and from my viewpoint as a TP Fan, I was interested to see how he thought things would turn out.

Simply put, it seems that he was both remarkably prescient at times and remarkably wrong at others - and more interesting than the fact that he got things wrong (that's inevitable in any work of speculation) is how and why he did.
He was quite right that computers would get smaller and more powerful, he was right that they would be common features in cars and around the home - used for vehicle safety, entertainment and communication rather than just number crunching. And he was right that they're increasingly used in education, for financial transactions and for databasing medical and criminal information. He speculated that the increasing influence of computers on the economy and on communication would lead to the downfall of the communist bloc - since information technology is essentially gadget-driven and hence alien to socialism. He even speculated that electronic mail might become more widespread than just being between a few scientists or people working on the same mainframe.
But he also said that, by the 1990s, we'd have our household equipment talking to us to tell us its status or just say hello, the printed word would have virtually vanished, medical computers monitoring our condition and administering treatment from wrist-watches, private home tuition from computers for children, a ten hour working week, no need for currency in its present form, and - most importantly - artificial intelligences at least as intelligent as Man.
His vision of the future wasn't precisely Utopian - he described riots and urban unrest as a result of these upheavals, which would force people to work from home - but he certainly envisaged that by the 1990s the majority of the people in the world would be living a life of leisure and luxury, we'd have space tourism and exploration, and AIs sharing our world.
In actual fact, the computer revolution he talks about has been both far more extensive and far more subtle than he was predicting - you could almost say 'insidious'. Arguably, computers are far more widely embedded into our culture - in our equipment, our communications and our lifestyle - than even Dr Evans predicted. But they haven't had the massive politico-economic effects he was talking about.

So I started wondering what had changed between 1979 and the period in the mid eighties when most of these changes were meant to be occurring, and I realised that there were at least four factors Dr Evans didn't seem to be accounting for. Two of them - the creation and remarkable success of Microsoft Windows and the World Wide Web - couldn't really have been predicted. They were more like the wild cards of history. Between them they put computers in every home, not as a substitute for work or a series of single purpose devices, but more as a multipurpose information, entertainment and communications tool. The third was the fact that despite their abundant raw materials and ease of manufacture, computers still haven't become cheap enough to be completely disposable - and a large part of that is again tied to Microsoft and the expense of software rather than hardware.
The last factor is a little more fundamental, and this is what got me thinking about how the TPs might react: The genesis and evolution of artificial intelligence that Dr Evans predicted, simply has not occured. There are probably two reasons for this.
The first, and quite possibly most important, reason is that the developement of AI has proved far more difficult than anyone in the 1970s predicted - not due to lack of computer processing power, but rather due to the unexpected complexity of human intelligence and language. A computer that cannot communicate in idiomatic and natural language will never pass the Turing Test - but natural language is a mass of contradiction, idiom, analogy and meaning carried by inflection. In the attempt to program a computer for artificial intelligence, scientists have been forced to a new appreciation of how little understood human intelligence is.
The second reason is more of a sociological issure. People, on the whole, don't *want* their microwaves and televisions to ask them how they're feeling. Most people (and I know I'm generalising here) don't want their kids to learn from a computer rather than a human being. An average person quite enjoys having some measure of control over their lives, rather than giving in passively to computer control. And most people don't feel comfortable with the concept of true artificial intelligences.
After the computer became the multipurpose every day tool it is now (largely with the advent of Windows - love it or loath it!), and after the difficulty of the field was realised, research into true AI became a relatively poorly funded curiosity rather than the main thrust of computer research. Voice recognition and speech synthesis research continued, but primarily as aids for those who are disabled. In essence, humanity - on some level - decided that computers were going to be our tools, rather than our equals, and the funds shifted into paths that furthered that, more readily attainable, goal.

So now we, as Tomorrow People fans, we face some interesting questions. Dr Evans felt that widespread artificial intelligences with the intellect of Man or better were inevitable. I would guess that TIM was a manifestation of that - an advanced race of humans would be accompanied by an advanced race of computers. So, assuming that there was a mass breakout of the kind the series suggested, in Dr Evans' vision, TPs would coexist with a race of intelligent computers. So -

How would they react to that?

Would a race of humanity with a highly evolved intellect and mental gifts - intentionally or otherwise - inhibit the development of artificial intelligence in the same way that Homo sapiens appears to have done?

Much as the TPs in the Lab loved TIM, they rarely seemed to treat him as a true equal, and indeed he was never designed to be one; his role in maintenance and communications of their home meant that he would always be following their orders or requests. So could a TP consider an Artificial Intelligence as an equal?

And Dr Evans raised the possibility of AIs becoming the dominant life-forms on some possible alien worlds. We know that in the TP universe, a biotronic AI can be telepathic. Would the Galactic Federation would accept a race of telepathic machine intelligences into Overmind as equal partners? From what we've seen, the Federation use biotronic computers as computers rather than friends - judging by the attitude of the one who reported to the committee in the serial 'War of the Empires'.

Of course, it's possible that none of these questions really have an answer - or that you're all looking at me in bemusement wondering why I'm asking them - but I'd be interested to hear from anyone with comments!

By the way, Dr Evans has a very readable style. The first half - describing the history and current status of computers in 1979 was fascinating. The second half of the book gets bogged down in AI-related predictions that never came true, but even so I'd recommend it if you find it on eBay (as I did) or elsewhere.

This page created by Elizabeth Stanway (June 2005) and was informed by a discussion on the tpdis mailing list. Email me here.

Note: The concept of the The Tomorrow People is the property of Roger Price and Thames Television (Freemantle Media). The series can be purchased on DVD from 'Revelation Films' in the UK and 'A&E Home Entertainment' in the USA.

The images of 'The Micro Millennium' shown here are for illustrative purposes only, and shown as the book is now out of print.

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