Earlier today, one of my Twitter correspondents mentioned that he much liked my conceptual descriptions of wearable computers called jiminies. I did a couple of short items in PC Techniques describing a technology I first wrote about in 1983, when I was trying to finish a novel called The Lotus Machine. I got the idea for jiminies in the late 1970s, with elements of the technology dating back to my Clarion in 1973. (I wrote a little about that back in November.) A jiminy was a computer that you pinned to your lapel, or wore as a pair of earrings, or wore in the frames of your glasses. Jiminies talked, they listened, and for the most part they understood. I remember the first time I ever saw an Amazon Echo in action. Cripes! It’s a jiminy!
1983 was pre-mobile. Jiminies communicated with one another via modulated infrared light. Since almost everybody had one, they were almost always connected to an ad-hoc jiminy network that could pass data from one to another using a technology I surmised would be like UUCP, which I had access to at Xerox starting in 1981. I never imagined that a jiminy would have its own display, because they were supposed to be small and inobtrusive. Besides, our screens were 80 X 24 text back then, and if you’d told me we’d have full color flat screens soon, I’d have thought you were crazy. So like everything else (except the big bulky Alto machine in the corner of our lab) jiminies were textual devices. It was spoken text, but still text.
I never finished The Lotus Machine. I was trying to draw a believable character in Corum Vavrik, and I just don’t think I was emotionally mature enough to put across the nuances I planned. Corum was originally a rock musician using a technology that played music directly into your brain through a headband that worked like an EEG in reverse. Then he became a ghost hacker, where “ghost” was a term for an AI running inside a jiminy. Finally he went over to the other side, and became a cybercrime investigator. Something was killing everyone he ever cared about, and as the story opens, he’s pretty sure he knows what: a rogue AI he created and called the Lotus Machine.
The story takes place in 2047, with most of the action in Chicago and southern Illinois. I realized something startling as I flipped through the old Word Perfect document files: I predicted selfies. Take a look. Yes, it’s a little dumb. I was 31, and as my mom used to say, I was young for my age. But damn, I predicted selfies. That’s gotta be worth something.
From The Lotus Machine by Jeff Duntemann (November 1983)
Against the deep Illinois night the air over the silver ellipse on the dashboard pulsed sharply once in cream-colored light and rippled to clarity. Corum’s younger face looked out from the frozen moment into the car’s interior with a disturbing manic intensity, raising a freeform gel goblet of white wine, other arm swung back, hand splayed against a wood frieze carved into Mondrianesque patterns. His crown was bare even then, but the fringe at ear level grew to shoulder length, mahogany brown, thick in cohesive waves.
“Please stop tormenting yourself,” Ragpicker said.
“Shut up. Give me a full face on each person at the table.”
“Ok.” One by one, Ragpicker displayed each person sharing the booth with Corum that night. Three faces in tolerable light; one profile badly seen in shadow. When people congregated, their jiminies cooperated to record the scenes, silently trading images through infrared eyes, helping one another obtain the best views of vain owners.
A slender man with waist-length black hair. “Dunphy. Dead ten years now.” Steel grey hair and broken nose. “Lambrakis. Dead too, was it four, five years?”
“Five.”
A lightly built Japanese with large, burning eyes. “Feanor. Damn! Him too.”
The profile…little to go by but thick lips and small, upturned nose. “I’m pretty sure that was Cinoq-the nose is right. How sure are we that that’s Cinoq?”
“Ninety percent. You began sleeping with him some months later. Of course, if he had had a jiminy…”
“Damned radical atavist. I often wonder how he could stand us.” The car leaned into a curve. Corum’s fingers tightened on the armrest. “He died that year. Gangfight. Who else heard us?”
“In that environment, no one. It was four A.M. and nearly empty, and the fugues were playing especially loud. At your request.”
Corum stared out at the night, watched a small cluster of houses vanish to one side, tiny lights here and there in distant windows. “An awful lot of my friends have died young. Everybody from the Gargoyle, the whole Edison Park crowd-where’s Golda now? Any evidence?”
“Not a trace. No body. Just gone.” The ghost paused, Corum knew, for effect only. It was part of Ragpicker’s conversational template. So predictably unpredictable. “She hated it all, all but the Deep Music.”
“It’s not music.” Not the way he had played it, nor Feanor, nor the talentless dabblers like Lambrakis. Golda wanted to reach into the midbrain with the quiet melodies of the New England folk instruments she made herself from bare wood. It didn’t work-couldn’t, not in a medium that spoke directly to the subconscious. Rock could be felt, but true music had to be listened to.
She loved me, Corum thought. So what did I do? Sleep with men. Sleep with teenage girls.
“She took drugs,” Ragpicker reminded. “You hated drugs.”
“Shut up. Dead, like everybody else. All but me. And why me?”
“It isn’t you!”
“It is. We’ve got to find the Lotus Machine, Rags.”
Silence.
“We’re going to start looking.”
Silence.
“Ragpicker!“
The ghost said nothing. Corum reached up to his lapel, felt the warm black coffin shape pinned there, with two faceted garnet eyes. A ghost, a hacked ghost, hacked by the best ghosthack who ever lived, hacked so that it could not assist in any search for what Corum most wished to forget.
“I hacked you a good hack, old spook. But it’s time to own up. I’ll find the Lotus Machine myself. And someday I’ll unhack you. Promise”
We have two Echo Dots now, so I’ve seen what it’s capable of doing. Of course, its voice recognition relies on being able to forward the raw voice data to Amazon’s vast cloud and its AI algorithms for analysis, whereas I think you’d envisioned jiminies being a lot more self-contained. You didn’t envision ubiquitous high-speed networking back in those days (hence the “poor man’s” version you depict working using infrared)…whereas Alexa (and Siri, and Cortana, and Google’s nameless voice assistant) couldn’t function without it.
I intuit that the key to strong AI is massive parallelism, which takes a lot of CPUs. The jiminies ran their ghosts in a little block of grown crystal that might best be compared to a 3-D FPGA chip. Each crystal domain is 20 atoms wide, so there are a lot of them. The domains can be set to be conductors, P-semiconductors, N-semiconductors, or insulators, depending on the magnetic states of two cobalt clusters at their centers. So not only could programmers create CPU and memory elements as needed, the ghosts could too, on the fly, depending on what challenges they were facing at any given moment. (You may recall Cosmo describing the technology to Brandon Romero in TGO.)
How well this would work I don’t know. I suspect heat dissipation would be a serious problem. But a couple of cubic inches of that stuff could run some mondo complex software.
In truth, I did predict ubiquitous wired networking in other parts of the novel. The jiminies, however, were designed to be mobile devices, and without Wi-Fi (which I should have guessed but didn’t; hell, I was a ham!) they could not count on any sort of connectivity, except possibly in crowds.
I’m about to post another little piece of the novel here, just for fun, and because I’ve been fighting off another damfool cold and haven’t been writing much lately.
“Jiminies” for Jiminy Cricket, yes?;
Yes. Sits on your shoulder (or your lapel, or in your pocket) and offers advice. Seemed pretty obvious to me.