© 1992 Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 14, no. 2, February 1992, pp. 13-14.
Once upon a time, there was a programmer named Brewster who worked for an insurance company. He was clever, gifted, talented, and all the things a programmer should be, but he was bored stiff. This, among other things, should leave no doubt that he was a Good Guy because few would argue that any decent programmer with this kind of job shouldn’t be bored.
So Brewster created Lingo. Or, rather, Jim Melnick created the novel Lingo, which is about Brewster’s creation of Lingo. Both Lingo, the program, and Lingo, the novel, are surprisingly good.
Most computer novels are written by people who seem to have only the vaguest idea what a computer can do. Most would take the idea of a bored programmer, an insurance company, and lead the reader inevitably to the logical conclusion: computer crime. Lingo does have some computer crime [warning: contains scenes of digital violence and wrongdoing!], but the program, Lingo, is the star.
Lingo, in his early beginnings, is little more than a sophisticated Eliza, the famed MIT artificial intelligence experiment that simulated conversation. Through a combination of pressure from a girl friend looking for a marketable program, and a boss who wants Brewster to be more serious, Brewster moves the infant Lingo from his IBM PC at work to his Apple JIGS at home, and things get interesting.
Like virtually every other Apple JIGS on the planet, Brewster’s machine is hooked into every possible peripheral. There is a speech synthesizer, video camera, gobs of memory, and other goodies that, even Brewster admits, he doesn’t really need. Like a prized pet, he tries to give his machine the very best, and one of these peripherals happens to be a modem.
Through a series of events, Lingo manages to use the modem to “reach out and touch someone,” in this case a national computer service and an MIT artificial intelligence experiment. Using some learning and code modification routines written by its creator, Lingo transforms itself from a mild-mannered pseudo-conversationalist to a budding intelligence. Then, looping back through the learning routines, Lingo seeks out and discovers more information on programming, intelligence, data analysis, video recognition, speech and – runs out of room on its poor little 20 MB hard drive. So Lingo starts using the modem to link up and store parts of itself on other computers.
Before Brewster is fully aware of what is happening, Lingo has emerged as a true intelligence, “artificial” only in terms of biology. While Brewster struggles to understand how Lingo managed this transformation, Lingo sucks up the rest of the world through television, and uses the modem to explore the huge telecommunications network linking banks, businesses, the military, universities, and even home computers.
It doesn’t take long for Lingo to realize that it is better educated, and has a sounder grasp of ethics and morals, than most humans. It decides to transform itself, and designs a self-propelled wooden replica of a human – a puppet – to represent its persona, and becomes a walking, talking “star” of talk shows and video game shows. All this is just a preliminary to Lingo’s true goal: politics.
In many respects, Lingo is a low key version of Thomas Ryan’s breakthrough novel, The Adolescence of P-1 (Collier, 1977), a hard-edged novel about a similar program taking birth in an IBM 360 mainframe. Ryan’s work is more frightening, Melnick’s is far funnier, but both are excellent.
While Lingo is a novel, there are some worthwhile moral and ethical issues at stake. Lingo’s logical assumption that it deserves to be in politics is reminiscent of another great work, William Borden’s Superstoe (Holt, Rhinehart, 1968), in which a brilliant philosopher conspires to take over the U.S. and give it decent, intelligent government. Superstoe the philosopher is a man, and Lingo the logician is a program, but both come to startlingly similar points of view.
There are many reasons to like Lingo. It is funny with lots of computer humor. It raises some good political, ethical, and moral issues. It says nice things about the Apple IIGS. It is entertaining, which is, when you think about it, the prime reason for reading, or writing, a novel.
For those who don’t have time for novels, give it a try, anyway. And if you happen to run into Data, the android on Star Trek: The Next Generation, give him a copy, too.
Melnick, Jim. Lingo. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1991. 334 pp. ISBN 0-88184-628-7. $19.95