When HARLIE Was One Read Free Page B

computer.
    A couple of other notes about this edition.
    Back when this book was written, computers weren’t just quaint, they were primitive. Most of the interaction was on teletype-like printers or occasionally an alphanumeric terminal. There were no graphics. Everything was text and numbers. And most of it was all caps—not because we were all shouting at each other, but because it was easier to write code that way in a world where every byte was expensive.
    I didn’t even see my first computer until a year after When HARLIE Was One was published. (It was a DEC 10 and it looked like a refrigerator full of wires.) So my experience of the state of the art at the time I wrote this book was an IBM Selectric typewriter. 2 (Look it up.) It had an infuriated golf ball that clattered back and forth across the page. The keyboard had a satisfyingly tactile clickety-click feeling that no subsequent keyboard has ever matched. That machine was as solid and dependable as you could imagine. It was my first technological love affair.
    Typing on that Selectric, it was easy to imagine that I was having a conversation with a dispassionate intelligence engine embodied somewhere in its metal chassis. The back-and-forth of the Selectric type ball paralleled the back and forth of ideas and insights.
    All the conversations with HARLIE were written in capitals because it was the way computer conversations showed up on printouts. It was the convention of the time. Today it looks quaint, ugly, and almost unreadable, but I have resisted the temptation to reformat the text because if I allow myself that first change, pretty soon I’ll be rewriting the whole thing all over again. Nope, not gonna do it.
    The only change I did allow myself, and only fanatic readers would have noticed it, is the spelling of one character’s name. Handley has been changed to Hanley to honor my friends John Hanley Sr. and John Hanley Jr.
    Meanwhile. . . .
    HARLIE’s still with me today. Sort of.
    I’ve been off my own journeys for a while, studying what I call the technologies of consciousness, so I don’t need him at the keyboard anymore, but the question I typed so many years ago is still rattling around in my head.
    As of this writing, this is how it looks to me. If I were still using HARLIE’s voice, this is what he would say:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  The function of life is to make more life.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  To accomplish that, life creates consciousness.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  The purpose of consciousness is to make more consciousness.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  To accomplish that, consciousness creates contribution . Contribution is about making a difference for others.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  The function of contribution is to make more contribution so that consciousness can expand and life can spread into new domains.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Sentience is a product of contribution. It is not just self-awareness, but awareness of the selves of others as well. It is created in partnership and demonstrated in combined efforts that are greater than all the individual selves.
    As for me, in this long, long journey from adolescence to senility, with occasional stops at what passes for maturity (but is more often sheer exhaustion), I remain enormously indebted to large numbers of people, starting with those who resisted the temptation to strangle me in my crib, all the way up to those who put up with me as I struggled with my involuntary humanity, and concluding with those who believed I was worth the effort to coach and encourage.
    You guys know