Speaking in Tongues –
I was speaking in tongues. As a pastor, I am not allowed to know what those words mean.
All I wanted to do was extend the number of times my wife’s Samsung phone rang before surrendering to voicemail. The ever-so-polite artificial intelligence at the phone company was less than helpful. It had many suggestions. It could explain voicemail, ringtones, the history of telephony, if I had asked. But it could not answer my simple question. How do I get more ring time?
Eventually, I stumbled upon the answer. It looked like this:
**61…**…#
There were stars and numbers and pound signs and mysterious parameters. To make matters worse, I first had to ask another question:
*#61#
The phone dutifully answered with an equally mysterious number, which I then inserted into the first incantation.
Magic.
The phone rang longer.
I had been speaking in tongues. There was a time when this would not have surprised me. My first real computer was a Commodore 64. It powered up with a blue screen. So I was surprised when I heard modern computer users shudder at the thought of a blue screen. It usually indicated frustration and disaster. The Blue Screen of Death meant your data, your program, even the machine itself just went where all bad little programs go.
Our C64 blue screen was different. It greeted us with a single encouraging word”
READY.
And a blinking cursor. The machine did not ask for a password. It did not insist on a software update. It did not invite me to improve my user experience. It simply assumed that if I had turned it on, I probably had something interesting to do.
The Commodore 64 was one of the last completely knowable machines. Not without frustration. But knowable. If you wanted to understand how it worked, you could. You could learn BASIC. You could peek into memory, poke around, learn machine language.
You could discover that RAM was hiding under ROM. And you could make the machine do things beyond the designers’ wildest dreams.
And mostly, you were not alone. There were magazines, reference books, user groups, and bulletin boards.
There were, in effect, guilds. A guild is a curious thing. A guild assumes that knowledge should be shared, but not simplified. The apprentice does not become a master by pushing the right buttons. The apprentice helps the master, assists the master, and – when ready – gets to crawl under the house while the master waits in comfort. The apprentice learns through every fiber of his being.
A friend of mine retired after many years dealing with taxpayers’ problems at the Internal Revenue Service. He learned the computer system the hard way – with arcane command-line commands and instructions. These gave him access and power within the massive system in order to accomplish everything the taxpayer needed.
But technology advanced, and eventually, the IRS developed Windows interfaces that worked well enough for perhaps eighty percent of cases. The remaining twenty percent were usually hidden from ordinary searches and correction. That power belonged to the old guild members who inhabited the system.
The same thing happened to telephones. Somewhere deep inside the modern cellular network, hidden beneath a thousand helpful screens and pleasant voices, someone left a command line.
*#61#
No explanation. No animation. No cheerful tutorial. Just the command, with a short, cryptic explanation. Either someone, somewhere, assumed there would still be apprentices, or the modern world forgot the importance of mastery.
I am not opposed to progress. Indoor plumbing is progress. Antibiotics are progress. Automatic transmissions are progress. Graphical interfaces can be progress. Artificial intelligence might be progress.
I once read a science fiction short story where a nation was tangled in a tremendous conflagration. The enemy was advancing on all fronts. But somebody made a tiny discovery:
Mathematics and arithmetic could be performed without a calculator! And that is how they won the war!
We have become very good at using machines. We worry that the machines will someday take over and maybe even enslave us. But that is not the problem. The trouble is that we have become less interested in inhabiting our tools.
The old systems expect patience, and curiosity. They require resilience during failure. Learning often comes with an occasional muttered word unsuitable for church.
In return, they offered understanding. The apprentice eventually became the master. The machine and the system remain tools.
Perhaps that is what I miss. Not the floppy disks. Not the blinking cursor. Not even the hopeful blue screen.
I miss the quiet confidence of having a machine that does not try to be happy or helpful. It simply sits there before its human companion and says:
READY.
And trusts that, with enough time and enough frustration, we might learn to speak in the tongues of machines and humans.
