It has some intelligence, or tries to. There are ways to route requests. How do I get this thing I need from the Company? Well, it comes from some part of the company, and the software assumes you don’t know where that part is, and it gives you a few abstracted ways to specify that. Sometimes it grabs it out of your description of the problem you want to solve.

Or, you know, tries to. In practice, you do know where things come from, or have ways of finding out, so you make your request, you email the relevant person with the request number, they go in and correct whatever mistakes you or the system made so the wrong people don’t receive it and cancel it and they get credit for the work, and then they get to work.

Anyway, I was struck by how poorly this works, and I reflected on my experiences with using intelligent software. There seems to be a continuum of intelligence:

Highly intelligent software: Google is the example that comes to mind. It spell-checks my most obscure searches, and can tell if I want to do a search or convert between units. Its intelligence makes it easy to use, like having an assistant. It also gives me the option of bypassing its intelligence.

Stupid software: the BMC example above seems to fall in this category. As does Clippy, Microsoft’s intrusive office assistant thing that popped up and annoyed you, before Microsoft woke up and killed it. As does Microsoft Word’s document formatting, which I find infuriating. I often spend more time battling it than I do writing my damn document.

Unix-philosophy software: software that relies on the intelligence of the user. It’s not trying to be intelligent. It assumes you are, and gives you tools to do what you wanna do without getting in your way.

The Unix command line is the canonical example. Unix tools like grep, find, and sed are examples of tools that do particular things, do them reliably and predictably. They put a burden of expertise on the user, but they make sense. The boundaries between what grep and find do make sense. The way they talk to each other makes sense.

As complex as they may be, they serve a powerful philosophy: simple tools that work together to accomplish complex things. Pieces of a puzzle that has a sensibility behind it. A consistency that allows you to make predictions about how they work, even if you don’t know their function exhaustively.

They eschew intelligence, by design. Grep knows what you can tell it, on what terms, in what language. Grep knows what you do tell it when you invoke it. It knows what the end of a line of text in its input looks like. It knows little else.

Wikis probably belong in the same category. They are simpler than Unix command-line tools, arguably better designed, but they do exactly what you tell them to. And you can integrate them with other tools in all kinds of interesting ways.

The intelligence here is also in the designer: not just in anticipating my needs, but also in an appreciation of the limits of their understanding, and the thought to give me power in flexibility.

Google, on the other hand, knows a great deal. Google sits on one of the biggest piles of data, if not the biggest, in human history. Google is actively analyzing that data, pulling intelligence out of it, making it useful.

And Microsoft? When Microsoft Word screws up the formatting of my spec, once more, there’s no way for it to learn from my frustration. There’s no accumulation of information. It thinks it knows what I want, and it’s usually wrong, and there’s no way to train it. Which is why I hate using it.

So we see a distinction between software that is stupid and software designed with no pretense of intelligence in the first place. And we see what it takes to make software that is intelligent: software that can collect information and learn from it. Whether or not it is using a process behind the scenes that humans would describe as ‘intelligent,’ the effect is the same.

It’s awfully hard to do that well–Google spends billions on making and keeping their one-line entry tool smart. It’s also difficult to make intelligently designed, powerful yet simple tools, that talk to each other in useful ways. I don’t know how much Microsoft spends making their document formatting engine, but I have a feeling most of it is wasted.

I had voted for Obama that morning, and I’m excited about him, but the undertow of habit is strong in my mind. So I struggled with debate for a while. But I managed to get myself up, treated myself to a rare cab ride, and made my way to the Hyatt Regency.

And after an interminable wait, being shuffled from ballroom to ballroom, I stood with aching feet in that crowded room in the presence of the man. These are my thoughts:

First, I projected my hopes and fears onto the loose framework of his message, just like everyone else does. It’s sad, I know, but I can’t escape the feeling that a good cult of personality is exactly what this country needs right now.

The challenges that face this country, this world, are very large. The excesses of the last century have left us with a financial crisis and an environmental crisis at the same time. Both multi-trillion-dollar problems that will take decades to resolve, and more than a technocratic laundry list of ’solutions for America.’ They will require the utter transformation of American society.

I don’t say that lightly. I expect to lose and gain jobs in that process, change careers. I expect to watch my friends struggle, and my parents struggle in retirement. This is going be a dark time, a test.

And it’s going to require all hands on deck. This is it, folks. The party’s gone on very long, and the bills are coming due. There will not necessarily be a nuclear war, though that may happen, and not necessarily famine or plague, though those may be entailed. This could make the Great Depression look like a walk in the park.

When I think about the times ahead for us, I imagine lifting a school bus over my head. That’s how hard it looks to me, what it’s going to demand from me personally, to get through the next few years. And I realize it will take that from more than me: it will take that from every American, and a lot of others besides.

This is the context in which I hear his words: yes, we can.

It’s going to require the depth of vision he demonstrated in his early opposition to the war.

It’s going to take his understanding that Islamic extremism is not the greatest challenge our country faces in the twenty-first century. It’s not even second.

It’s going to require a politics of hope, because the politics of fear could lead to the loss of liberty for this country, and the loss of the dynamicism we desperately need to get through to the other side of what we face.

So this is the substance of Obama: not the laundry list of policy proposals. Though the moral courage, integrity, and commitment to change are important. The depth of vision thing is central, his essential intelligence, and so are his leadership qualities.

FDR had a cult of personality. Abraham Lincoln might not have had one in the moment, but the nation came to understand his contribution after he died. They led us through our greatest trials, and it made a difference. They had something special. I think Obama does too. And I think it’s exactly what we need right now.

My left hand is a little more relaxed. My speech seems slightly better just today. I did feel some pulling in my mouth yesterday during the adjustment session, but it went away. I wonder if he turned on the juice just to be tricky. My walking is going back to the way it was before the surgery.

I really can’t wait much longer to get back on my bike again. I’ve been waiting for the weather to warm up just a bit. Friday’s Critical Mass. I may go then.

They turned my implants on Friday. No results yet. They tested them again, and noted some side effects at higher voltages. As some may recall, I am participating in research, which means I might be in a control group. Meaning I might be getting zero voltage for the next three months. Or maybe not. Like I said before, it’s for science.

I still have a bit of extra shakiness–a little like after you fall off your bike. It’s been lingering a while. I tried to go in to work last week–made it through Wednesday, and decided I still needed more time off. So I’ve been relaxing at home.

Oh, one piece of linky goodness I found: David Byrne has a new piece in Wired covering the rearrangement of the music industry, with an eye towards new options for musicians. Fascinating to see things get to this point–you can begin to see the outlines of the future of the music industry. Really exciting and cool stuff.

So, the story: as you may recall, they were only able to implant me on the left side the first time. The week before the third surgery, I went in for a test run with the implant on the left side. The results were not so good–side effects at low voltages. Also Doctor Bakay reviewed the position of the electrode, and felt it was off by a bit, they decided that as long as they were going to be visiting the neighborhood of my brain, why not stop in on the left side?

All fine. Easier done now than later.

So I go in for the third procedure, implanting me on the right side. The first medical doctor who does anything to you in a procedure like this is the anesthesiologist. There’s this guy, a med student (Rush is a teaching hospital). I roll with it: he seems to know what he’s doing. At some point you have to get used to doctors younger than you, right? I mean, he’s fresh-faced, but he’s not a child.

He inserts the IV. He starts some of the anesthesia. I’m feeling pretty easy, but I’m not knocked out yet. He puts me in the halo, which is weird–not painful, but it’s odd feeling your skull pushed out of shape. Presumably they MRI me, again–by then I was under.

I wake up in the OR, with them poking around in my brain, first on the right, then back on the left, Dr. Verhagen manipulating me, more static, yada yada. I was comfortable until the end.

A few things happened around that time:

The familiar pain of the halo points started to come back. Oddly, it was the points in the front that seemed to bother me most this time;

Later they started stapling my scalp back together. Pulling it and stapling it together. While I was awake. Quite painfully. This was not how it went last time. At one point I asked ‘Why do I need to be awake for this?’ As in, give me a damn general already.

They gave me a local at that point, and explained that they couldn’t give me a general anesthetic. I think it was because they were switching to the left side.

At some point, they finished up there, and started stapling my scalp together in earnest. Again, quite painful. They sedated me–which is not the same thing as a general anesthetic. Their words: ‘You’ll feel it but you won’t care.’ Well, I did, quite a lot, in fact.

I made my displeasure apparent, but they kept trying to reassure me it was almost over. I don’t recall how long this went on–it certainly seemed long. It was not unbearable, but it wasn’t fun either. I had been under for this part in the previous surgery.

It was so bad, I did a bit of wrestling with the idea of a lawsuit. It’s a tricky thing–I’m a person who could easily and profitably abuse the legal system in this country. I’ve given it some thought–could be a pretty nice lifestyle. But it just seems wrong.

And this case–well, it’s close, but it really does seem to fall in-no-harm-no-foul territory. As awful as the experience was, I’m fine now. No evident injury… so I’m letting it go.

Anyway, went through that, got the usual excellent care from the nursing staff at Rush, went through the fourth surgery, to implant the battery on the right side. (Actually they went back and reimplanted a new battery on the left, too–something about wires not meeting.)

And I’m back at my parent’s place again. Getting a little stir crazy. Also a little weepy, similar to what I experienced before. Though with an edge of justification–something else to deal with.

I want to go back to my place soon. I want these damn staples out of my scalp! My appointment to get them pulled is next Tuesday. They’re tighter-spaced than they were before, and they stick out more, and more crookedly. And there are more of them… I have a row across the top of my head and a row behind and above each of my ears.

At least it’s still an even job–should heal well, probably better than I had expected from the previous surgery. I’ll have what looks like an incipient horn on the left side. On the right it should be reasonably smooth. Nothing you would notice if I didn’t point it out.
They finally turn the damn things on Friday, the 21st.

I’m not planning to go back to work till the week after Thanksgiving. The following Friday (the 30th) is the next surgery–we start work on the right side. Then Tuesday after that (12/4) we finish that up, implanting the generator on the right. They want me to come in that Monday to test my current hardware.

This should be significantly easier than the last time. They drilled both holes last time, so no new skull holes. They think I should have some amount of anatomical symmetry, so they should be able to poke the same locations they found before and get some results. It’s reasonable to hope that this will go much more smoothly than last time.

After that we begin starting up and tuning the system. Fingers crossed: that’s where the payoff for all this really starts. Like I said, one step at a time.

I was eating as normally as you can eat in a hospital later that day. No puking! Yay. I seem to have good range of motion–I’ve heard some people complain that their wires pull. I feel mine, but they don’t get in the way. I’m in a small amount of pain. They gave me vicodin. I’m back to Tylenol at this point.

I’m just taking it easy for now. Next we get the remaining staples yanked, and turn on the generator. Or, you know, pretend to turn it on.