The Bray Perspective

Since time immemorial, mankind has assigned gratuitous human personalities to inanimate objects. Primitive peoples worshiped mountains and streams, ships were styled 'she' by their (predominantly male) crews, and many people have pet names for cars, bikes and even household appliances.

Computers are no different. Petting is rare, although I once worked with someone who had personalised her PC with the features, feet and fluffy tail of a furry animal.

But muttering and abuse are commonplace, as we curse the inability of the most complex software to perform the simplest task, or of the 20th century's greatest invention (the Internet, silly) to outstrip the pace of a hurrying slug.

Who can blame us for trying to communicate with our computers? With their 'friendly' interfaces, multimedia accoutrements and increasing use of speech, they appear a good deal more sentient than the average mountain, aircraft carrier or vacuum cleaner.

The trouble is, they are not. A Cray can forecast the week's weather for the whole world. But tell it you have caught a chill, and you might as well expect sympathy from an arms exporter.

This strikes me as daft. With all those megamips and teraflops going to waste on the nation's desktops, why don't we use a few to make our computers feel sensations and emotions just like us? A former programmer colleague of mine was convinced that computers should be built with the capacity to feel pain, and swore that after a bad day's debugging he could see the imprint of his own forehead on the top of his terminal.

I entirely agree that pain should be the first emotion to be implemented.

Instead of bashing their heads against the display, tomorrow's users will be able to press a button and cause a 1,000-volt spike to rip through their computer's main memory.

It may never be necessary to stab the pain button because tomorrow's computers will also be able to experience fear. Rattled users will only have to hiss 'I'm not telling you again - show me where that footnotes command is, or else', and the petrified machine will be pulling down menus and highlighting icons before you can say 'reasonable force for restraining violent prisoners'.

An equally effective weapon will be sarcasm because the sentient computer will be programmed to feel embarrassment. Putting on our best Lloyd Grossman accent, we shall sneer: 'Surely you haven't lost that file I created yesterday?' and watch the display blush vermilion while the operating system scours the hard disk.

After the computer has mucked you around more than usual, it will realise and apologise, thanks to its capacity to feel shame. 'I'm sorry,' the digitised voice will croak. 'Don't worry about running that disk utility tonight. I'll do it for you after you've gone home.'

The experience of electronic emotions will not be totally adversarial, however. Some will allow computer and user to empathise for their mutual benefit.

A computer that could feel fatigue, for example, would be able to warn users to take a break before they got a headache or contracted RSI. And a machine that could feel disgust would be an ideal ally for parents and teachers, anxious to protect the young from Internet-borne pornography and subversion.

Nor will digitised emotions be entirely negative. I see no reason why a workstation should not feel proud after achieving something difficult, or pleased when it has helped us with a new function. And a spot of courage before a major hardware or software upgrade would seem perfectly in order.

But I'm having second thoughts about the whole idea. Supposing computers developed the full range of human emotions - smugness, jealousy, rage, hate and the sheer cold-blooded indifference most of us show to everything around us? Perhaps a dumb machine is better after all. It's the only thing in the office we can shout at without it getting upset.