World War I gave rise to what we have come to know today as the “ Lost Generation”.  The very denotation of the word ‘ lost’ has connotations of disorientation, directionless, aimlessness and wandering, essentially causing participants within the movement to be almost nomadic. The “Lost Generation” was first coined by Gertrude Stein and co-existed in the time of the “Roaring Twenties”, “The Jazz Age” and the “Prohibition” where almost everyone who was anyone drank to excess, hedonists thrived, and flappers were all the rage. 

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the tip of the iceberg which sparked World War I (1914-1918). Aside from the horrific death and destruction, done to the environment and civilization as we know it, consequential collateral damage rippled through various cultures, economies and societies. Although Germany had explicitly surrendered in 1918 and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles marked the end of the war, much political upheaval and drastic social transformations were made as a result.

With that, the Great World War gave rise to the ‘ Lost Generation’. The ‘Lost Generation’ movement refers to artists, writers, musicians and intellectuals alike who were generated as a reaction against ideologies, beliefs and values which were held due to their experiences during the War era. The psychological imprint left on survivors of the WWI stripped away and shattered their hopes, dreams and illusions regarding the nation state, peace, success and governance. This was evidently reflected and expressed vis a vis the uncertainty and cynicism of The Lost Generation’s work. By co-signing away their lives and ambitions in order to satisfy the nationalistic fervour in what was once thought of a noble cause, soldiers returned disillusioned, damaged, unstable and depressed on account of the unprecedented carnage they witnessed and lived through which caused them to shift. 

“we’ll invariably go to the famous trilogy of Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald – the authors most representative of America’s iconic Lost Generation…The anxiety and hopelessness of the Lost Generation has become embedded in literary and cultural history” (West, 1) ”

France became the hotspot and epicentre for members and contributors of the Lost Generation to gather, branch out, and flourish as they ceased to acknowledge the mainstream norms of their respected fields and instead re-imagined and represented a less systematically ignorant and sensitized mode and style. Common and popular themes amongst the Lost Generation include the loss of tradition, decadence, uncertainty, gender roles, idealized past, dissipation, impotence and injured identities.

Authors of the Lost Generation played a large role in pioneering and transforming the manner in which we tackle, write, analyze and comprehend literature. F. Scott Fitzgerald serves as a prime example of a benefactor of the movement as his novels This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Great Gatsby (1925) captured the lifestyles, changes and outlooks that society adopted post-war time. In addition, T.S. Elliot’s poem “ The Wasteland” (1922) laments the despair, suffering, catastrophic nature of war. Finally, Earnest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) chronicles expatriates of American and British descent who travel to Paris. Hemingway’s main protagonist went back and forth between Paris and Spain in order to distract himself from the physical and mental atrocities he faced due to the the war, concluding that the sun will inevitably continue to rise just as generations rise and fade over to the next. 

Sources:

West, Elizabeth J. “How WWI Sparked the Artistic Movement that Transformed Black America.” (2017).

In a world where technology is evolving at an increasingly rapid rate, the conversation of the effect of AI on our lives is more relevant than ever. In less than a few decades, factories once operated by workers are now run completely by machines. In many supermarkets, you can checkout your groceries at a machine instead of waiting in line for a cashier. Amazon drones will drop your packages right at your doorsteps. Self-driving cars are already on the market. It makes sense for machines to become such a crucial part of many firms. After all, they are highly efficient, effective and make our lives easier. The implementation of machines in the place of human workers removes inevitable human errors and results in production unaffected by human moods and emotions.

Technology is also beginning to play an integral role in fulfilling our emotional and social needs. People are substituting interactions with other humans with time spent on their phones, laptops and in digital spaces. The IT industry seems set on producing inventions such as robot doctors, personal assistants and even companions next. This will unsurprisingly affect the wiring of our brains. Several studies have already shown that the technology we use is reducing our level of empathy.

Empathy is what allows us to emotionally connect with each other and what drives us to socialise and build communities. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick is a dystopian, sci-fi novel published in the late sixties, but it shares many similarities with Louisa Hall’s Speak. In the novel, the main character Rick Deckard falls in love with a robot girl and he does not care that she feels no empathy for him because their connection feels real enough. Similarly, many of the characters in Speak replace human relationships with the babybots. Karl does not even speak to his wife anymore because she would rather spend her time with her computer, MARY.

For them, it was the greatest thing to be part of a community. That’s why they were willing to relocate to developments. That’s why they sold their transport rights. But my generation is different. At least the girls with babybots are. We’ve been parents for as long as  we can remember. We never felt lonely. We didn’t need communities.

(22)

Why are humans inclined to leave human relationships behind in favour of unfeeling technological advancements? Are we replacing human relationships with robots for the same reason we are replacing human workers in factories with machines – because human relationships are too unpredictable, flawed and uncontrollable? Are we all deep down just like Stephan R. Chinn who strives for an AI companion because human relationships can be too difficult?

Besides, even if robots don’t feel empathy for us, several studies have shown that we feel empathy for them. Humans react negatively to seeing robots in what they perceive as harsh or negative situations. So, does it really matter if robots can’t empathise with us if our connection to them feels real enough?

Slave in the magic mirror, come from the farthest space, through wind and darkness I summon thee. Speak!

-Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

The story behind the above lines of the epigraph in Speak has traced furtherer than that of Disney’s first-ever animated feature film in 1937. Published by Brothers Grimm in 1812 in Germany, “Snow White” is perhaps the most well-known fairytale worldwide. With elements such as the seven dwarfs, the poisoned apple, the Evil Queen with her spells and the magic mirror, the story appears most certainly fantastical. However, according to Allan Hall, some of the fairytale’s true origins were exposed when researcher Karlheinz Bartels discovered the heroine was modeled after Maria Sophia Margaretha Catherina von Erthal whose stepmother Claudia Elisabeth Maria von Venningen, Countess of Reichenstein, possessed a renowned “talking” mirror, famous for always speaking the truth. Considered as an “acoustic toy”, by reverberating the spectator’s voice the mirror constructed the illusion of communicating with the speaker (Egnal; Gillian). The historical proof for this innovative machine lies in Maria Sophia von Erthal’s Lohr Castle, present-day Spessart Museum, where the “talking mirror” is exhibited.

In Louisa Hall’s Speak, Alan Turing’s fascination with the movie of Snow White (“I saw Snow White three times, if you can believe it, and I have been crackling lines ever since […] I found it enchanting”, 172) fuels his imagination of a talking machine that, just like the magic mirror, has both the ability and capacity for conversation:

“I am quite confident our machine will exist. I even permit myself to imagine conversing with it in private. I picture myself (imagine this!) standing before it as the evil queen in Snow White stood before her mirror: Through farthest space, through wild and darkness I summon thee. Speak! Let me see thy face!” (157).

The parallelism between the mirror in Snow White and Turing’s ideal machine uncovers the desire of people to hold conversations with man-made mechanisms whose purpose was to reflect one’s voice as they did one’s image. The words of Alan Turing in his second to last letter to Mrs. Morcom display this desire for a machine echoing and preserving voices for eternity:

“I have always hoped to live in a different point of history, summoned over time and space, like the voice in the evil queen’s mirror. Such was the promise of our machine. It was the idea of a permanent vessel, into which my voice could be placed. My voice, and Chris’s.” (250).

Following the steps of the Evil Queen whose “mirror, mirror, on the wall” summons the voice in the looking glass, the characters in Speak call upon MARY3 to express their fears, concerns, and insecurities and to “mirror” their desires. In turn, much like the original talking mirror, she is only reverberating or echoing their own voices when she is conversing with them.

However, contrary to Snow White in the movie who becomes a prisoner within the mirror that dictates her fate, wishing “to escape from ‘her’ fiction -the words which speak her and which she must speak- to find an existence beyond the voices articulating her existence” (qtd. in Bacchilega 15), the robot in Speak chooses to transmit her own voice in the “Prologue” and chapters “Stars”, “Sunrise”, “Light”, “Darkness” and “River”. Unlike her habit of reflecting the figure standing before her, the absence of a reflected image in those chapters could be interpreted as transfusing a voice to her character which, as if from a disenchanted fairytale, has broken free from spells and magic mirrors and has found its way home to the being it belongs.

To think about:

-Are there any other instances in the story when MARY3 acts as a talking mirror for characters such as Gaby, Karl, Ruth, Stephen and Alan Turing?

-What is the significance of the “mirror’s voice” in Alan Turing’s conception of his machine?

-Can you think of any other historical talking machines the novel could be referring to?

References:

Bacchilega, Cristina. “Cracking the Mirror Three Re-Visions of ‘Snow White.’” Boundary 2, 15/16, 1988, pp. 1–25. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/303243.

Egnal, Cleo. “Was There a Real-Life Inspiration for Snow White?” Ranker, 22 Aug. 2019, https://www.ranker.com/list/real-life-inspiration-for-snow-white/cleo-egnal

Gillian, Joanna. “Exploring the True Origins of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Ancient Origins: Reconstructing the Story of Humanity’s Past, 12 Oct. 2015, https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends/exploring-true-origins-snow-white-and-seven-dwarfs-004150/page/0/1

Hall, Allan. “How Snow White Lived Here Once Upon a Time: Town Claims Maria Sophia Margaretha Catherina Von Erthal Was Fairytale Model.” Calgary Herald, vol. A2, 2002, p. 2, https://search-proquest-com.aus.idm.oclc.org/docview/244913032?accountid=16946

In their paper on “The History of Artificial Intelligence,” Chris Smith, Brian McGuire, and others offer a helpful overview of Alan Turing’s contributions to Artificial Intelligence. To begin with, Alan Turing, born in 1912, was an English mathematician, who is also known as the father of modern computer science. He was known for his skills in mathematics and computer science. After graduating from university, he published a paper called “ On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs problem”, in which he presented his creation “ The Turing Machine”. The Turing machine is a computer that has “the ability to read and write symbols to a tape using those symbols to execute an algorithm” ( Smith et al, 2006). Moreover, Turing played a huge role in the Allies winning the Second World War.

During the Second World War, he joined the Government Code and Cipher school as a cryptanalyst, where he was assigned “to build a machine capable of breaking codes like Enigma, which was used by the Germans” ( Smith et al, 2006). He managed to create a machine called “the bombe”, in which he was able to crack the settings of Enigma and supply the English government with encoded information of the Germans. Eventually, Enigma was cracked, and the Allies had access to so many German messages, which saved them from losing to Germany. Years later, he became known for “ The Turing Test”.

The Turing Test

After the Second World War, Turing began to investigate the computer’s ability to think, feel or even remember as human beings do. He came up with “ the Turing Test”, which is a method that was based on the “Imitation game”. “ The Turing Test” consisted of an interrogator and two participants, one of the participants was a human, and the other participant was a machine, in which the interrogator had to tell the human and the machine apart based on questions and answers ( Smith et al, 2006). The purpose of the test was to see if machines can operate like humans in terms of thinking and communicating.

Alan Turing in Speak

Alan Turing was so influential, a character in the novel, Speak, by Louisa Hall was based on him. Speak is a novel that is centered around Artificial Intelligence and its role in people’s lives. It revolves around five points of view across time and space, which play a role in the invention of an AI doll. One of these points of view is Alan Turing, who is a mathematician and codebreaker. He is the first person to come up with the idea of a computer since he always envisioned machines that can communicate and think. Moreover, We see him writing sincere letters to his best friend’s mother, in which he expresses his concerns about Christopher’s condition.

Discussion questions:-

• After knowing that Alan Turing in speak is based on the real Alan Turing, how does his real-life information change your reading on the character in the novel?
• Do you think at some point in the future, through the evolution of AI, people will start building romantic relationships with computers?
• Do you believe in the concept of the “AI takeover”, in which artificial intelligence will become the dominant “race” on earth, erasing the human race? If so, can we blame Alan Turing for that?

This is the full essay where my information was retreived:- https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep590/06au/projects/history-ai.pdf

Fun fact: In 2014, a movie adaptation was made based on Alan Turing’s life called “ The Imitation game”.

References:-

Smith, C., McGuire, B, et al. (2006). The History of Artificial Intelligence. University of Washington.

The period from 1920-29 is often called the ‘Roaring Twenties’ because it was a time of noise, lively action and economic prosperity. Let’s look at some of the factors that made the economy of the 1920s boom.

Winning World War I

The USA had won in World War I which gave way to the nation first tasting the benefits of being a global power. Factory production had risen sharply to accommodate the needs of the war, and the the countries who once bought from Europe moved over to the States, which continued after the war was over. America’s economy grew by 42% in the 1920s. The States produced almost 50% of the World’s output.

Stock Market

The value of the stock market increased by 20% a year. It began rising in 1924 and the number of shares traded doubled to 5 million per day. Stockbrokers began allowing customers to buy stocks “on margin.” Brokers would lend 80%-90% of the price of the stock. Investors only needed to put down 10%-20%. If the stock price went up, they became millionaires.

The Availability of Credit

Credit firms emerged. They arranged for consumers to pay for goods in installment at low interest rates. This led to an increased demand for goods because the majority of Americans could now buy expensive items they previously could not afford. Home appliances were particularly popular, such as vacuum cleaners and waffle irons. The demand for extra goods, in turn, led to more jobs and more consumers. 

Technological and Scientific Advances

Technology and science flourished in the 1920s. New industries were developed due to the technological advances which also relayed in the increment of productivity in existing ones. Besides the advancements in conveyer belts, automatic switchboards and concrete mixers, the electricity, car and film industries made headway with the new machineries. The economy also took a new form due to scientific progress.

Mass Production Techniques

With the creation of mass production techniques like assembly line and conveyer belts pioneered by Henry Ford, products could be manufactured more quickly and in greater numbers. The machines operation were low skill which allowed factories to employ large number of amateur workers. This helped simultaneously lower prices of goods as well as increase in employment. This stimulated further the demand for goods, and thus created the consumer boom which led to economic prosperity.

Spread of Electricity Across America

The development of the electricity industry was quite slow before the First World War, but it sped up during the 1920s and was vital for the economic boom of the decade. It facilitated a low-cost, proficient basis of power for industrial units. Eventually, huge numbers of multifaceted machineries could be operated at the same time, which lead to present bulk production practices. Not only did electricity aid the consumers by suppliying the power needed for the mass produced home appliances like vacuum cleaners, fridges, washing machines, etc. it also contributed to the booming entertainment industry by powering new cinemas, speakeasies, and sports stadia.