The Diamond Age (Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer) by Neal Stephenson

‘The (affluent) old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in it – but their children believe ..for an entirely different reason ..because they have been indoctrinated to believe.… Some never challenge it.. others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy. Which path do you intend, …conformity or rebellion?’

‘Neither… Both are simple-minded… They are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction or ambiguity.'”

Author Neal Stephenson wrote The Diamond Age in 1995 to several literary awards and a general consensus that this was an apotheosis of cyberpunk science fiction. While his meticulously described technological inventions may be fictitious for the moment, Stephenson has a reputation for “being able to see the future” (Naval Ravikant). Devices and technology in his stories have predated yet resembled actual inventions like Google Glass and Bitcoin. Stephenson has also married computer viruses with Sumerian mythology in other works.

“It’s easy to look at war-torn parts of the world that are just a mess and think that those places are just different or they went down the wrong path… But I think we’re always one or two generations away from being a failed state. Maybe that time is getting closer.” – Neal Stephenson, 2019

So. Does Pseudo- or Articifial Intelligence exist? Sure, it’s been here for awhile now. Just.. not in the evil-computer-taking-over-the-world way they like to make doomsday sci-fi movies of. AI is unlimited in potential… forever lacking in humanity. Stephenson has said in a 2008 interview with Gizmodo, “…there are many, many examples of scientists who espouse some form of religious faith, so I don’t see any essential hostility. …I grew up in a community of church-going scientists and engineers.”

“A Turing machine…. is still a machine… it has no soul.” – Nell’s thought on the Primer, as she searches for the human being the Primer has engaged in her raising, all her life.

At a time when the landscapes of healthcare and kids’ education could be greatly affected for the foreseeable future, I thought reading Stephenson’s Diamond would be interesting…

Neal Stephenson doesn’t come from a long line of writers and literary greats. Instead, he grew up with electrical engineers on his dad’s side and biochemistry professors on his mum’s. Several years after the Diamond Age, he went to work for Jeff Bezos in his space program, spending 7 years on “novel alternate approaches to space, propulsion and business models,” until Blue Origin went mainstream.

The story of the Primer is a good one to be sure, but as some commentators say, the story and writing style doesn’t keep you addictively having to keep turning pages, the way some other writers get you hooked. Stephenson’s skill is a different one – that of creating technologies within his stories that are j-ust this side of “fiction”. You read him, and expect some of these things to be in early stages of research & development somewhere.

So the story goes…

Far in the future and a stone’s throw from Shanghai, Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, doting grandfather and eccentric and powerful Equity Lord of New Atlantis, one of the most influential philes made up of corporate oligarchs priding themselves on elaborate etiquette and culture, expresses his dissatisfaction with how his three children have been raised and educated. Not wishing for his only grandchild to grow up similarly lacking, he commissions the brilliant bespoke engineer John Hackworth to develop a device titled A Young Lady’s Interactive Primer.

“Finkle-Mcgraw couldn’t prevent Elizabeth’s parents from sending her to the very schools for which he had lost all respect; he had no right to interfere. It was his role as a grandparent to indulge and give gifts…(so) why not give her a gift that would supply the missing ingredient in schools?”

The Primer is a Pseudo-Intelligent (ie AI) computer in the form of a book, picking up all that happens around it not unlike what Siri already does today, except it further imprints on the first little girl who opens it. From then on, the book reacts to everything in its environment in relation to the child it is bonded with, designing personalised stories and situations to educate and raise a girl capable of thinking for herself, teaching her what she needs to know to survive in her surroundings.

Alongside being a top-performing engineer with an unlikely penchant for English Literature that leads the Lord to choose him over his colleagues, John Hackworth is also a doting father, with the sorts of anxieties and hopes we can all relate to as parents. Alongside professional success and personal ingenuity are yet rather illogical dreams for his daughter that illustrate his true (unstable) emotional state – when the little girls of New Atlantis’ uppermost crust attend Princess Margaret’s birthday party – where bespoke engineers (including Hackworth) have been engaged to construct a new (and pink) island in the middle of the ocean for the party of impeccably-dressed and impossibly well-mannered girls to explore with their governesses, he hopes his own daughter might become fast friends with the parasol-twirling Princess herself. “The air became Fiona, desiring – no demanding – love….”

Even as newswires furiously post This Just In! The Parasol Is Back! and Fiona’s mother idly observes she has forgotten to pack one, then promptly also forgets that she has forgotten, having ascertained Fiona is dressed presentably enough to attend the party regardless (I like her mother :D)…

As the years-long Primer project reaches completion, Hackworth makes elaborate arrangements to smuggle out the design of the precious Primer for his own daughter. (This part always bothers me – he is quite well-to-do, their family has several maids including a personal trainer, he certainly ends up rebuilding the thing over and over again tailored to various little girls throughout the course of the storyline, describing it as a fairly easy thing to do, why in the world did he have to illegally copy Elizabeth’s version??)

On his way home from re-assembling the stolen data via collaboration with a “reverse engineer” – a breed of technical expert who focuses on rebuilding and reinventing – Hackworth is mugged by street kids trolling for components to sell in the black market. One of the boys fights off the others to bring the Primer home intact to his 4 year old sister Nell. It will be years before he realises his gang had first been engaged to pop over this particular engineer by an influential crime lord made aware of the Primer’s existence following the employment of aforementioned reverse engineer. (The Primer however also comes with obfuscating nanotech, hiding its true physical appearance from the boys, resulting in them not recognising it as the object their employer had been looking for.)

The Primer in the meantime prepares Nell for the day her brother Harv already knows will come: When his leaving her in better hands will be the best thing he can do for her future, as his past misdemeanours, albeit for the two children’s survival, will otherwise hurt her chances at acceptance into a phile. This is probably the most heartbreaking part of the story, because Harv is not that much older than his sister, plagued with childhood consumption, and has terrible beginnings as well – beaten, neglected, yet still repeatedly showing more strength of character than pretty much every adult he’s had around him in the slum of the tribeless Leased Territories.

It is during the worst time of abuse the children experience, that Nell bonds with her Primer (to be exact, when her mother’s boyfriend-of-the-moment is hitting her with it). The Primer weaves her few threadbare soft toy friends and the room she is locked in into the storybook adventures that help her cope in order to survive.

“Princess Nell understood that (the removal of her mother’s boyfriend) was a terrible thing for the Evil Queen, for her mother was weak and helpless without a man…“

In the meantime however, the authorities catch up to Nell and Harv soon enough. Despite the rigid class laws and severe penalties in place for mugging those of a higher station in life, various law enforcement officials who pride themselves on their professionalism, strength of character and Confucian Justice, will look the other way, recognising that the stolen technology is the little girl’s only chance at a better life, an opportunity the entire system these upstanding professionals have built their honourable careers on has failed to provide, to too many unwanted children.

Crime lord: …I have already prepared my signed confession… You may now take me, and the crew…, to prison for the crime of baby-smuggling. I trust you can find qualified caregivers somewhere within your jurisdiction…

Judge: For some time I have been contemplating a change of career…

The collective epiphany of society’s unwanted children leads crime lord and morally upright judge of impeccable standing to form an alliance, compelling Hackworth to reproduce the Primer for tens of thousands of orphans (this number eventually reaches about 300,000).

At some point, Lord Finkle-Mcgraw will discover this and…….. go along with it, discreetly making other arrangements as well, so that the casteless Nell will end up going to the same school as his own granddaughter Elizabeth and Fiona Hackworth, daughter of his rogue engineer – who is allowed to give her a copy of the Primer he risked everything for, if he then fully immerses himself in calibrating the future Primers to suit unwanted little girls from different tribes speaking different languages as well.

Before Hackworth leaves Fiona to embark on the project, he ceremoniously presents her her own hard-won copy, speaking aloud for her Primer to pick up, and so Fiona’s version will come to personify her absent father as though he never left. (Now everyone wants one 😀 )

“In education, there should be no distinction of classes.”

“In your Primer, you have a resource that will make you highly educated, but it will never make you intelligent. That comes from life. …all must consider the cultivation of the person (as) the root of everything…”

The story is also a sociologist’s or psychologist’s dream fiction – there is a lot of opportunity for plot development in the Primer being used by 3 girls from very different levels of society – a (seemingly) extremely privileged sort whose influential grandfather is trying to stealth-educate. An upper-middle class daughter whose father vows to provide the best for her at any cost. A girl of the lowest caste who is often just one step away from further abuse from her mother’s various boyfriends. Guess which girl-and-Primer combination goes the furthest? Yet it might not be for all the reasons you imagine… 😉

Hackworth designs the Primer’s Pseudo-Intelligence along the premise that as long as the society the child is intended to fit into is fairly homogenous and the very loose general assumption fits, “all” children in a particular caste of society will have similar experiences. He describes the design as an “easy” one to come up with – a pseudo-intelligent computer that maps these otherwise “universal” experiences onto the unique psychological terrain of the one child, adjusting its responses to what it hears around the child in its “Siri” position.

This is the delicious irony of many things in life – we overthink, and then think it’s because we have “underthought” 🙂

Hackworth’s Pseudo-Intelligence pulls from a massive communal database of publicly available lore, facts, teaching techniques and child psychology studies (sound familiar? I think I’ve heard of this one in our world – it’s called the internet) to write its stories and lines tailor-made to the child it has bonded with. However, it still produces its content consistent with the original prevalent culture of “racting” for entertainment – employing a human “ractor” to read/act out its script. “Ractors” also have some options of improvisation available to them.

The “racting” past time of this cyberpunk world is not unlike the enhanced interactive experience depicted in Ready Player One book and movie:

The major difference in Stephenson’s world is that it is nanotechnology that connects you, and sometimes you are unaware of it because you can get “infected” by rogue mites in the same way you pick up a virus (scroll all the way down for another illustration from BBC’s Dr Who.) Naturally, then there are countermeasures, also in the form of mites, that serve purposes of medication or vaccines. Basically, nanotechnology in Stephenson’s world replicates in machine form the things Nature has evolved as an actual life form, for the purpose of being programmable. With code. 🙂

“If someone had handed me a script and told me what part I’d be playing, I’d refuse it…… I’m raising someone’s kid for them..”

“…I’ve incurred all the disadvantages of parenthood, without actually getting to have a child…“ – Miranda, the young woman aspiring to be a highly-paid “ractive,” who starts to recognise Nell’s usage pattern

After a few years as the main randomly sought “ractor” by Nell’s Primer (the program initially simply seeking out higher paid “ractors” who have more experience in children’s entertainment), Miranda will figure out what the Primer really does, and make it her life’s quest to find the child she is raising virtually, adjusting her working hours to remain available for Nell’s Primer to engage her, as Nell’s usage patterns change around school (after she has escaped the house she is locked up in) and other activities.

(One of my favourite Adventures of Princess Nell stories is where she has just escaped the Dark Castle and is repeatedly approached on her journey to safety by friendly strangers in various forms, saying many different and seemingly perfectly logical, reasonable (and nice) things that all involve her leaving her companions to follow the stranger. Nell realises that once she agrees to follow the stranger in the story, there is nothing she can do (within the story) to change the outcome. Every path after Princess Nell agrees to be separated from her friends leads to capture and imprisonment. Which is how by-then 6 year old Nell IRL learns not to follow strangers by herself no matter what they may say.)

After the 3 girls are older (and each has turned out very differently) however, it is determined that their lives/ circumstances greatly influenced the usage patterns of their Primers, which in turn influenced how each girl turned out.

This of course drives home the extent to which execution matters.

You may have the sharpest tool in the box, but without care or skill in using it, much of its effectiveness will be diminished. (Rather a waste of resources and an additional risk to your investment, to pay top dollar for the best system or education or research or infrastructure for your child, only to leave the execution of the so-carefully prepared instruction to a less than competent person.)

I also liked to say in my former life in derivative financial products – it’s the same knife (or derivative investment product), but it does something very different, whether you give the knife to a sushi chef practiced in humility and restraint as well as trained in skill…. or a freaking monkey 😀

Is the tool more important, or is the human holding the tool more important? (Anyone else feel this way about derivatives: arrogance gets you killed in the market. And the humble person is the most secure one in the room – not needing to prove anything to yourself or anyone else will save your portfolio.)

Anyway. Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw, the girl everyone assumes has everything in life handed to her on a platter, with parental hovering and numerous social expectations and heavy restrictions leading to overly-strict enforcement of rules and etiquettes and bedtimes (at times right in the middle of an important Primer lesson that surfaces when the occasion calls for it) ends up being allocated numerous human “ractors” who are completely unable to “get” the whole picture. Part of it is because the random interferences of various caregiving adults makes it more difficult for the Primer’s design to work – Too Many Cooks (or in this case “parents” or “tutors” second-guessing each other) affects the quality of her interactions with her Primer.

Elizabeth will finally throw a big nutty in class at the senseless enforcement of repeated copying of old textbook lines (8 hours a day for 8 Saturdays – she made it to the 7th, I think it was) as punishment for not upholding quite the right classroom demeanour, resulting in further Primer deprivation and her horrified very proper parents removing her from the school entirely. Years later, Nell will discover Elizabeth has left the New Atlantis phile altogether, taking up with a “triad” or rebel organisation.

“I suspect Lord Finkle-McGraw sees all the hypocrisy… and that he upholds it anyway, because that is what is best in the long run…. he has been worrying how best to inculcate this stance in young people, who might not understand as he does, its historical antecedence…”

Fiona Hackworth, during her father’s physical absence, is placed by her mother under the charge of a nanny who enjoys the discretion awarded her in the disciplining of her charge a little too much – it also results in interrupted sessions with the Primer that limit its effectiveness, and Fiona develops mild depression to boot, as her parents’ marriage falls apart.

(John Hackworth gets unconsciously embroiled in what appears to be a swingers’ club, The Drummers, for the next 10 years due to nanomites injected into his bloodstream by his crime lord employer that, while serving to make him the main “ractor” in his daughter’s Primer – he will eventually realise he has memories of being with his daughter all the times she has her Primer with her – also remove his awareness of his immediate surroundings. Because of his nanomite “infection,” picked up by the surveillance technology of his phile, his wife is informed and promptly divorces him.)

The divergence in original storyline around the girls allows for the exploration of the concept of mites designed to seek each other out, exchanging genetic material and data packets with thousands of similarly implanted Drummers. It becomes clear towards the end that Hackworth is steered into the group in order to “seed” thousands of Drummers with his mental abilities.

(What’s infinitely more bizarre is the extent to which organised crime and law enforcement realise they are on the same page, when it comes to saving the world by educating it. :D)

Furthermore, the potential of the Drummers’ seemingly mindless pleasurable past time with their use of a particular form of nanomite has the ability to link and engage thousands of human psyches, unbeknownst to themselves while in “racting” experiences, harnessing their collective mental capabilities to crack encryptions in the same way throwing enough computing power to run infinite permutations and combinations may eventually yield success. The entertainment industry of the future (and also organised crime) decides this would be absolute gold to harness.

In Miranda’s quest to find Nell, hitherto deemed nearly impossible for the otherwise sheer breadth and depth of deliberately scrambled random data in the population’s “racting” pastime, she agrees to work with financial backers and hackers looking to crack the system for monetary and regulatory gain by joining the Drummers.

A near grownup Fiona Hackworth “escapes” her nanny and embarks on a journey of self-discovery with her beloved father. They eventually experience the participatory theatre of the Dramatis Personae, the dirty, slightly hypocritical little secret entertainment of abandonment discreetly sought by otherwise “respectable members” of their very proper New Atlantian phile. The formerly staid John Hackworth turns out to be “quite the hit” among phile-mates, but as Fiona turns out to be an even bigger one, she abandons her father to continue his journey on his own, herself pursuing her “true calling,” among the ranks of the Dramatis where she feels she has finally found social acceptance and can be herself without fear of faux pas.

The story is also rife with various other concepts of nanomite use – programmed to seek out infections or repair tissue damage, stimulate muscle fibres in athletes, perform birth control (by seeking out and destroying an ovum in the womb), change the appearance of both animate and inanimate objects.

Stephenson is not the only person high on something when he devised nanotechnology that alters appearance or behaviour – here’s a similar concept in the Dr Who episode, The Empty Child (9th Doctor):

(Dr Who’s Empty Child episode with the storyline featuring nanotech drew about 7 million viewers back in 2005. It absolutely matters, how you use the tool, in this case, the idea of obfuscating nanotech 😀 . <pause> And can someone make a real TARDIS, please!)

Princess Nell reaches her final quest in the Primer, and meets the Man Behind The Curtain (or in this case King Coyote)…. “What is your purpose for coming here?” “…..to discover whether Wizard 0.2 really is a Turing Machine…”

“Well, you have your answer… most certainly it is the most powerful Turing Machine ever built… the Land Beyond.. all grown from seeds… is not controlled, but managed by Wizard 0.2…. (and) controlled by me.”

“King Coyote” explains that messages are picked up and relayed from all over, but ultimately a human reads them and writes the replies, for the raising of a child still needs be by a caring, loving human being. In his castle is a library. Within it are the rules for programming Wizard 0.2 (which is of course the Primer), and the plans for how to make atoms attract other atoms, …and build themselves into machines, buildings, whole worlds…

“Now you have conquered this place Nell, you will find it rather boring… It is your responsibility to build new worlds for others.. there is plenty of white space out there.. and I have my own quest. I am no longer King Coyote – call me John.”

Nell will lose herself for a time in the vast library of knowledge, learning, feasting, on Hackworth’s database of blueprints and plans accessed through the Primer until she notices first one, and then thousands of little mice in highly organised platoons. As she flings open the doors of the library, making Hackworth’s knowledge available to all, the grateful mice reveal their true form – girls not much younger than herself, all connected virtually through their Primers in orphanages. Inexplicably to everyone else, the girls like to call themselves The Mice Army.

Nell will return to the slum of the Leased Territories to bury Harv, who has died of consumption (having been quite sick for a time as an adult, Nell bringing him food and treats when she could venture out of her school), and then go in search of Miranda through hostile phile territory, she’ll find her in the end, but not before being attacked and captured, then rescued by the girls of the Mice Army connected and alerted through their Primers.

“In simple Pudong clothes, streaked with the blood of herself and others, broken shackles dangling from her wrists, followed by her generals and ministers, walked the Barbarian Princess, with her book and her sword.”

The End.

Epilogue:

The acclaimed Game Designer Will Wright, now in his 60s, has quoted The Diamond Age’s Primer concept during lessons on the future of Game Design, “Alongside Augmented Reality, AI is going to make the biggest impact by far. …Not intelligent opponents, but an intelligent Game Master/ Designer. …a master game designer very rapidly re-programming the game around you to make it more interesting (specifically) to you… If an AI could understand you to that degree, it could also find other people that are that similar to you, and push you into a shared experience.”

“Can we build an AI that is trying to understand the player at a deeply fundamental level? In some ways it scares me – something like that could be so addictive, if it was effective… That would be the most interesting, disruptive, fundamentally game changing thing that’s going to happen (in the field of Game Design)…”

Wright met the investor Jeff Braun back at a pizza party in 1986 when the latter was looking to get into video games – they formed the company Maxis, and made SimCity in 1989 (which has undergone many evolutions since then), still credited as one of the most influential computer games ever made. The “revolutionary” concept at the time was player empowerment. The Sims, once referred to derisively as The Doll House Game (“and girls don’t play video games!”) focused on home rebuilding and quality of life of the home owners as a benchmark for success in playing the game. Released in 2000, it had earned investors a cool billion by 2006.

Wright started down the Sim journey that led to his then-biggest professional success ever, after losing his own home to the 1991 firestorm in Oakland that devastated 2843 houses and 437 apartments.