And I am six years old, and it is the year I get Mr. Machine.
Santa Claus brought me Mr. Machine for very specific reasons. I took things apart when I was a child. Things children shouldn't take apart. Toasters, for example. Radios and TVs. I would take them apart but not always remember to put them back together. I remember once taking the knobs off our TV (yes, knobs. You changed the channels by hand, oh, the horror of it all!) right before there was some football game on because I was watching something and I knew that without the knobs the channel couldn't be changed.
I also remember not being able to sit down for a week.
Mr. Machine was something I could take apart and had to put back together in order for Mr. Machine to be Mr. Machine again. A good lesson, that.
I loved Mr. Machine for reasons that are steeped in the vagaries of childhood. Mr. Machine, you realize, was always a wind-up away. He did what I wanted him to do. Not so much a mindless servant -- children give all things minds. It makes things far less complicated when you can communicate with everything around you and get reasonable, rational responses to your questions -- as a ready friend.
Like Puff the Magic Dragon's Little Jackie Paper, I got older. I lost touch with Mr. Machine. Not really sure how it happened. We promised we'd stay in contact but somehow, neither of us ever wrote to each other.
Until yesterday, that is. My wife found Mr. Machine waiting for me at the Vermont Country Story and yesterday evening, Mr. Machine and I remade our acquaintance. He didn't seem to mind that I'd taken so long to get back in touch, he said, and yes, I could put him on top of my humidor, next to my reading chair and beside one of my stacks of books.
I bring all this up because I've spent the past 16 or so years developing what is called a Symbiotic CyberSemiotic System. That's a 25-dollar way of saying "a machine intelligence that understands and can respond to human psychological and emotional states". I've published papers on the subject and am scheduled to present on the topic again.But I hadn't remembered, until last night, playing with Mr. Machine when I was five or six and wondering what it would be like if he could do just a little more than walk around a room, ringing his bell and opening and closing his mouth (well, he can. That's what childhood imagination is all about).
What would it be like if Mr. Machine could really understand me? What if he could understand me and others? What if he really could be a friend, a comforter, a counselor?
Luckily, I don't have to worry about those things because he already is all of them, to me (I get paid for my imagination now).
And I still take things apart. I'm better at putting them back together. Of course, there's no guarantee that what I put together has any resemblance to what I took apart. Like The Six Million Dollar Man, I've learned you can put things back together better than they were before.
What about you? Can you trace your vocation back to a seminal event in childhood, probably forgotten until someone opens the Pandora's Box of memory and (at least in my case) childhood joy comes rushing out? I'd love to read your stories, if you'd care to write them and either post them here or send them to me.
Oh, before I forget, Mr. Machine says hello.
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Tracked on: January 14, 2007 8:15 AM | Permalink to Trackback