THE MACHINE THAT NEVER SAID, "I DON'T KNOW"

By:
Chaumont Devin
1055 River Street, Apt. 403
Honolulu, HI 96817

Written November 3, 1993.

"So you want to know how I became a billionaire," said J. J.
reflectively as he leaned back in his plush office chair.  He sat
ensconced among the lush tropical plants that decorated his suite on
the top floor of Honolulu's famous Kauahi Tower North.  The
tradewind breathed fresh air through open windows here and there.
J. J. believed it ironic that here, where the air ranked with the
best in the world, the entire city seemed to buzz with the drone of
air conditioners, and he certainly wanted none of that for himself.
At any rate, he could afford the one or two Oriental beauties needed
to make sure the ambiant conditions were held just right.  None of
them would be without a degree in zoology or botany or something of
that kind.  But of course this didn't mean they had spent any time
in classes.  They had simply been tested for the required knowledge,
which they had gained on their own.  They were refreshingly young.
As a matter of fact, the one he happened to be gazing at just then
could not have been a day over fifteen.

"It started when I was a boy in Indonesia," he said, turning to his
guest.  "By the age of four, I was asking so many questions that I
had become something of a nuisance.  I had five older siblings, and
to them I was 'The Question Box.'  That was on better days.  I also
had the habit of pulling down the outer cuffs of my tropical shorts
when I talked, and this earned me the name, 'Baggy Pants.'  My other
salient characteristic was the way I walked barefoot.  I was always
barefoot, and this in turn brought many remarks about my being
'pidgeon toed.'  Such things were what made up my world at the edge
of the primeval forests of Ambon.  Never heard of it?  You might
remember the name from Rhumphius.  Yes, Alfred Russel Wallace as
well."

"Indeed, these names recall to my memory some of the finer moments
of my existence in old Ambon.  The sunrises there were particularly
remarkable, and it was that first burst of life in the morning that
spoke most eloquently to me.  At such times people might notice a
tiny white American lad with long locks of golden hair wandering out
into the edge of the forest alone.  In Ambon, where people went in
and out of the forest every day, such a sight would have been no
cause for alarm."

"I am saying these things to define the dilemma of my existence.  I
mean that locked up inside my tiny frame was a mind that longed to
commune with the universe whence I had sprung, but that no one could
see this because it was not what they were looking for.  Unlike most
people, I believe that the human mind is at its peak sometime during
the early stages of childhood, after which ensues a long process of
degeneration.  By experience, we learn to better control and use the
deteriorating faculties that remain to us as we grow old, but there
is simply nothing to equal that rush and burst of life that grips us
at the very first."

"At this point allow me to elucidate the process of learning as it
was meant to be.  I imagine no modern psychologist would seriously
challenge the premise that we somehow manage to learn much more
before entering school than ever after.  And what computer scientist
is unaware of the Texas Project?  Of course it took Dr. Lamech to
finally realize just how much information there is locked up inside
the head of a four-year-old child, and then to set about creating a
computer with that information built in.  How long did they work at
it?  Wasn't it something like twenty years?  And of course they are
always making refinements to this day.  But dr. Lamech's computer
only understands English.  By the time I was five, I spoke both
English and Malay.  The question is HOW.  Various wearisome theories
have been promulgated to explain the phenomenon of early-childhood
learning, as you well know.  Unfortunately, many well-intentioned
people just don't seem to get the point.  I say, 'well intentioned,'
out of respect for their sincerety."

"What I am driving at is that in school we learn from the bottom up,
whereas in our natural estate we learn from the top down.  How far
would I have gotten in understanding my four-year-old world, for
example, if instead of learning that a bird is an animal that sings
and flies, I had been forced to dissect hundreds of birds and
examine their cells through the lense of a microscope?  What if
before being allowed to know that a bird can either sing or fly, I
had been forced to sit through semester after semester of lectures
on windpipes, muscles, and bones?  And if all that were not bad
enough, what if some of the professors delivering those lectures
didn't even know or care whether birds could sing or fly.  As
farcical as such an idea may seem, it is not all that far from what
once really happened in everyday college life."

"But let me illustrate the way I learned from my mother, who taught
me most of the things I know."

"Mother, what is a bird?"

"An animal that flies."

"Mother, how do birds fly?"

"They have wings."

"What is a wing?"

"A wing is something like a long arm with lots of feathers on it."

"What's a feather."

Etc., etc.

"You might say she taught me from the top down.  But from another
perspective, she didn't teach me at all.  I learned.  Can you
imagine my mother saying, 'All right, J. J., today we are going to
learn about birds.  A bird is an animal that uses wings to flie.
The wings are a part of its body.  A wing is something like an arm
that is covered with feathers.  A feather is...,' etc.?  Of course
not.  As soon as I was able to sit up, she set me out on the lawn in
a box, spread bread crumbs around me, stepped back, and said, 'Look
at the birds!'  I couldn't have been older than six months, and yet
I remember the experience to this day.  If I wanted to know more
about birds, I could ask."

"This sort of thing worked pretty well in the beginning for things
like birds.  Unfortunately, I was given erroneous information or 'I
don't knows' when I asked for more details about such things as
gravitation and the motions of the earth around the sun.  The 'I
don't knows' were much more useful than the erroneous information.
As a matter of fact, at first the sun went around the earth, then
much later the earth was made to go round the sun."

"Looking back now, I can only wonder what I might have become if
instead of being seen as a pidgeon-toed question box, someone might
have been there to feed my starving mind.  What if, instead of being
brushed off as a bothersome child, I might have been given free rein
to access the mysteries of the universe as it was then known?  Can
you imagine the potential that atrophied and wasted in my young
mind?  But as you can see, my tutor would have had to be a being of
great wisdom and patience.  A being that was willing to wait until I
asked the right question, and then to respond with a crystal-clear
answer to that question and that question alone.  Oh that my mind
might have been fed.  Not crammed, but fed one precious morsel at a
time until it could grow and expand and apprehend."

"As a missionary child, I spent very little of my life inside school
rooms.  The question that ultimately arose from my life was how it
was possible for me to skip year after year of school and yet always
come out near the top of my classes whenever I got into one again.
Do you suppose my parents bothered about such things?  Hardly.  I
did learn to read from my mother.  I will give her credit for that.
But it was my sister who taught me to spell, and my brother who
taught me basic math.  No, the greatest influence upon my intellect
was probably a Dutch Radio operater named Bill, who had had the
knowledge and the patience to answer my questions on a long
freighter passage home from Indonesia to the East Coast. I fall back
on the knowledge of physics I gained from that man to this day."

"If I had lived in an American city environment, it is true, even
these individuals wouldn't had had time for me.  It was the unique
circumstances of my life that kept me from school and still made it
possible for me to learn.  I was able to gain great amounts of
knowledge quickly because of the way in which that knowledge was
presented to me.  Perhaps now you can understand my disdain for our
American educational system, and even our culture at large.  Of
course you already know why our traditional educators hate me so
much."

"But what really bothered me about our system for acquiring and
documenting human knowledge was the shameless pedantry about which
the whole thing was spun.  While working as a computer programmer, I
remember walking into Hamilton Library to see what I could find out
about natural language translation.  All I wanted to know was what
had been done by others so far, what techniques had been developed,
and the essentials of how each of them worked.  I found myself
confronted with a bewildering array of publications brimming with
words that no dictionary had ever defined, at least not with any
meanings even remotely connected to the way they were being used.
My options were clear.  I could either go back to college and spend
years learning this new field, spend the same amount of time trying
to piece together what was really going on from the pedantic 'works'
in the library, or just go ahead and do what I wanted to do on my
own.  At the risk of re-inventing the wheel, I quickly decided to go
it on my own.  At that point, the library, the university, and the
educational system in general seemed somewhat less than useless to
me."
"It was such memories, questions, and observations as these that led
ultimately to the development of my famous machines.  There had to
be an answer to the question of my own life, that is, how I could
have gained so much knowledge without suffering through interminable
classes at school like my peers.  This answer came to me at last
through a combination of study, observation, and thought.  At the
same time, I saw that while the sum total of human knowledge was
growing at an alarming rate, many high school students weren't even
listening to their teachers anymore.  What they were learning was so
trivial, and the problem of the acquisition of any real knowledge so
daunting, that they had simply tuned out and given up.  We had had
enough of jargon, smug professors, and smiling librarians.  We
needed direct and personal access to real knowledge.  It was high
time to act."

"I reasoned that we needed a system whereby we could quickly access
all human knowledge from the top down.  There could be no
compromising with the old ways.  It would take nothing short of a
cognitive revolution.  We would have to do away with the whole
educational system together with all research libraries and all the
cute little textbooks that kept coming out in endlessly new editions
in one fell swoop."

"The answer was at our fingertips.  It was the machine.  The
hardware was there, and software technology was well on its way.
What we needed was some insight, and a revolution in the way we
thought.  What remained after that was the human problem of
reorganizing knowledge into the form it was always meant to be."

"We had to find willing experts in every field of human knowledge
and set up committies to deal with the painstaking task of going
through all those stacks of publications.  There were books that
were intended to show how smart their authors really were.  These
books were often rife with such unexplained jargon as could only be
understood by individuals who had spent years studying a particular
field, or who were somehow personally acquainted with the authors
and their friends.  Other books were hopelessly padded with what we
called "fill," that is, page after page of trivia obvious to anyone
who could manage to sort out what was really important.  We reasoned
that the presence of so much of this fill must be economic, since it
was found that bigger books cost more money as a rule.  We also
found many thousands of books that said exactly the same things.
Looking back now, one can't help smiling at the billions of dollars
required to keep such redundancies grinding off the presses and
clogging our shelves.  And all the time our silly politicians were
screaming about money spent on space, the military, and foreign
aid."

"But speaking of money, perhaps the most incredible savings was in
the time needed to teach a child to use written texts.  The sum
total of man hours lost in teaching, learning, and practicing
standardized spelling in America alone might have been used, say, to
feed the subcontinent of India for half a milennium or so.  At one
time, as you may recall, you could never be sure your spelling of a
word would be acceptable unless you had specifically studied the
spelling of that one particular word.  I mean, even the simplest of
monosyllables, as in the spelling of the word, 'I.'  No one would
have known what you were talking about if you had spelled it 'ai.'
It had to be spelled 'I,' and the 'I' had to be capitalized,
otherwise the entire document in which the word appeared would have
been discredited completely.  It is hard to believe that just a few
decades ago, even the brightest of students would not be expected to
communicate 'correctly,' even after twelve years of training in the
literary arts.  Our 'phonetic' alphabet was little better than a set
of pictographic symbols.  You may have read the recent report about
even our most ordinary children being able to master Phonenglish in
less than six months.  Well, all my machines used nothing but
Phonenglish from the start."

"Yes, our reorganization of human knowledge was a formidable task,
but it was a human investment that had to be made for the future of
Planet Earth.  People were frustrated at first because just like our
professors, our machines had also learned to say, 'I don't know.'
But unlike the professors, who usually forgot them, our machines
kept close track of these queries to which they were forced to
answer, 'I don't know,' preparing lists for analysis by our expert
teams.  The system would then be adjusted to answer correctly next
time round, and gradually people began getting answers to every
question they asked."

"I suppose this is the answer to your question.  I am a billionaire
because I created the machine that never says 'I don't know."  I say
'never' loosely, because I suppose there will always be questions
the answers of which we don't know.  But with 99.99% probability,
you can bet that if any of MY machines says 'I don't know,' then
that scrap of information has simply never been documented by man."

"Was there resistance?  You BET.  At first people HATED what I had
done.  By 'people,' of course, I mean those who were not in the
know.  The press was so poisonous it's a wonder people didn't drop
over dead just from walking past the news stands.  And our
intellectual revolution created more news than all the battles of
the early 21st century.  But my machines were simply too powerful.
People found that they simply had to have them if they were to
compete.  It was just too easy for people who had my machines to
learn anything they wanted to know, and this gave our users the
edge.  One of the most beautiful moments of my life was the day we
took one of our demonstration units down to Aala Park.  You should
have seen those bums!  Here were people from whom the world of
knowledge might just as well have existed in another universe
suddenly getting instant answers to all the questions that had ever
plagued their minds.  People got so excited that alcoholics forgot
to drink, and cocane users forgot to use drugs.  The results were so
immediate and dramatic that that demonstration unit never got out of
the park.  It was purchased by the City of Honolulu as a
rehabilitation device.  Then people started buying our units and
taking them home, and they fell into the hands of their kids, and
before long people realized that our schools were not much better
than babysitting institutions, just as I had known all along."

"In fact, children were quickly filling important roles in all areas
of society, advising parents on such matters as how to invest in the
stock market, how to improve farm production, etc.  Our economy
boomed.  More and more children failed to show up for class.  The
traditional educational system, having adopted a bad attitude from
the beginning, then tried to crack down.  There were fights, and in
the end a general boycot of all schools.  Some educators, refusing
to have anything to do with our new age of information, ended up on
wellfare. Some were so confused and hurt that they even decided to
end it all.  In the end people realized that some kind of
educational system was necessary after all.  But the role of the
instructor became more like that of an expert.  Instructors would
explain areas of knowledge that needed to be covered, administer
examinations, and hand out accreditations."

"The result of all this was to reattach our children's minds to
reality.  Since people could learn all they needed to function in
our society by age thirteen or so, the problems of adolescence were
pretty much done away.  Man was restored to that erstwhile harmony
with the environment which he once enjoyed.  By puberty, people were
ready to marry and take on the responsibilities of life, as they
were always meant to do.  Gone were the years of stasis which eat
away at the soul.  The drug market collapsed with a resounding thud,
and our nation surged ahead as never before."

"You see, schools served an important purpose for a time, but in
this era they simply don't work.  As a matter of fact, they haven't
really worked very well for quite a while.  There is just too much
information at large.  We had to reorganize not only our
information, but also our very minds.  We have abandoned the tragic
waste of intellectual and physical resources that accompanied the
old, bottom up system of learning.  Our task now is to strike the
right balance between man and machine."

"Let's see.  What was it you wanted to know?  How I became a
billionaire, right?  Well, here's my machine.  Let it speak for
itself.  Don't bother looking for a keyboard.  It understands
everything you say.  Ask it what a billionaire is.  Ask it how many
billionaires there are in America--IN the world.  Ask it how to
become a billionaire.  It will tell all.  Just remember that it
answers with such clarity as to be understood by your four-year-old
son."