Computer? … Computer! … COMPUTER!

by David Benjamin

“The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play.”

— Capt. James T. Kirk

MADISON, Wis. — All through my grade-school years, a Friday afternoon tabloid called The Weekly Reader was every kid’s gateway to a golden tomorrow. In its inky newsprint pages were unveiled breathtaking technological marvels certain to emerge in the immediate future. These inventions would ease our lives and sweep all humanity to pinnacles of convenience and consumerism previously unimaginable. Among those I recall— which actually came to pass—was the tantalizing imminence of the moving sidewalk. 

Except, as it turned out,”ambulators,” as The Weekly Reader called them, have shown up only in airports and train stations, and people have yet to figure out how to use them. There’s a sign at each ambulator entrance that says to keep walking, but there are inevitably some non-sign-readers who stop cold and settle in, halting everyone else’s progress while the smart pedestrians who avoided the conveyor belt walk past faster than the speed of the “moving sidewalk.”

Such is technological progress in a human environment

According to The Weekly Reader, we were also due, any minute, for flying cars (visible today mainly in re-runs of “The Jetsons”), heated streets (still confined solely to Iceland) and the obsolescence of coal mines and oil wells—in favor of “sun power”—by the magical date of 2000. 

By the Sixties, just after physics and chemistry gave us the hydrogen bomb and the ICBM, we saw the popular gush of techno-optimism sink to a trickle. We were busy overworking a few innovations of previous decades, including napalm (née 1942, Harvard) and the transistor radio (née 1957, Sony). But still, in that bewildering decade, pockets of techno-fantasy were still operating, and fueling my hopes for a Weekly Reader future—namely, Captain Kirk’s computer.

Remember?

Long before Steve Jobs founded Apple, even before Bill Gates turned MS-DOS into the Operating System That Ate Everybody’s Brain, Gene Roddenberry and William Shatner planted in our minds a vision of personal computing so sublime that no real-life advance in this gadgetry has afforded me a thrill even slightly comparable.

I can’t identify the episode of “Star Trek” in which this emotional moment occurred, but it tickled my fancy like few things I’ve seen on TV. It was a simple vignette. Captain James T. Kirk needed something done. I don’t recall what he wanted. Maybe it was a communications link to Earth, a gazillion light-years away. Maybe it was a sociological profile of planet Golan-Globus 91, or a DNA map of the common short-eared tribble. Perhaps Kirk was just hungry and he wanted a sandwich.

Didn’t matter. All he had to do was sit down in front of a basic CRT monitor and say, “Computer?”

That’s all. Suddenly, in a voice seductively reminiscent of Miss Peggy Lee, the computer sprang to subservient life, eager, desperate, aching in her loins to fulfill Capt. Kirk’s tiniest whim. And she was fully capable of doing Kirk’s bidding—doing anything—in the blink of an eye. She could even spit out a perfect, mouth-watering, three-dimensional, 2,000-calorie Kosher pastrami sandwich on pumpernickel with lettuce, Russian dressing and a slice of baby Swiss. 

Kirk didn’t have to hit the power switch. His computer was switch-agnostic. Miss Peggy Lee (let’s call her that) was always turned on, hot to trot, at her Captain’s beck and call. Nor did he have to touch a keyboard. Kirk didn’t need no stinking keyboard. Nor did he care whether the user interface was key-activated, touch-sensitive, word- or icon-based, tile-formatted or menu-directed, or equipped with any of a thousand navigation tools, because he didn’t have to navigate anywhere. The computer’s job was to do that, exactly the way a starship trooper under her captain’s command would do it—immediately and properly, without pumping the boss for directions, instructions, options, repetitions or superfluous keystrokes. 

Jim Kirk said “Jump.” Miss Peggy Lee knew how high.

I mention all this because Microsoft has just birthed its latest succubus—Windows 11. According to early reviews, Microsoft is once again nakedly mimicking Apple in a reluctant effort to enhance the user-friendliness of its new devices. This makes its adoption a natural fit for a youthful demographic whose post-literate habits derive from XBox, iPods, iPhones, iPads and iMeMyself. Of course, for older PC users who wasted the best years of their lives learning how to write linear text in “Word” and double-click through mazes of drop-down menus on “desktops” strewn with 15 apps at once, Windows 11 means a twelfth or thirteenth trip back to the drawing board for updates on snap windows, pre-set slots, pop-ups, layout options, hot swaps, widgets, hangouts, mindshare, taskbar settings, TPM security chips, default apps, BMP, DNG, JPG, PNG, TIFF, NEF and the magical mystery of Windows + Shift + S. 

Everyone will likely be required—by his corporation, her boss, or their clients—to “get up to speed” on Ol’ No. 11 (or its eventual de-bugged version, due out in six months and subtly re-named, say, “Windows Super-11”). Unlike Capt. Kirk, every user will have to learn a whole new set of thumb-and-finger skills and a fresh re-structuring of work habits. These routines will barely have time to imprint on his or her psyche before, oops! Windows 12.

Neither this nor the next Mac, nor even the maddeningly dyslexic Alexa, suggests, even vaguely, that we are making progress toward Capt. Kirk’s lovely, whiskey-voiced digital slavegirl. Dating all the way back to The Weekly Reader, our typical electronic working device—whether phone, tablet, computer, camera or car—still has no more than a rudimentary ability to speak English, or French, Spanish, Farsi or Klingon. It still requires its human servants to not only learn its opaque digitese, but to soon re-learn an equally witless and literal new dialect—with new terminology, commands, vernacular, accents and inflections, even new physical skills and gestures—with every generation of new devices. 

These generations keep getting shorter. Today’s twenty-somethings, with a pre-programmed affinity for the screen topography of Windows 11, are probably destined, five or six years from now, to find themselves clinging (like us) to “outdated” technology (because they know how it works) and cursing the stylish but confusing newfangledness of Windows the Thirteenth. 

The one constant in this moonwalk march of progress is that our machines—as much as ever—continue to bend human users to a mindless tyranny built into them by designers who seem to have little more human feeling than your average Vulcan. Beyond such ancient and intuitive inventions as the wheel, the fork and the Linotype, there are precious few machines in current vogue that respond intuitively to human purposes in human terms. For that sort of sophisticated intellectual breakthrough, we still have to take flights of pure fancy on the United Starship Enterprise …

… which, so far on TV and in the movies, has been blown all to hell eighteen times and rebuilt into an upgraded, newfangled Enterprise.