Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin, 1958.
At the beginning of the book, Danny develops a device that allows him to do his homework and his friend Joe’s homework at the same time by using a system of pulleys and a board that holds two pens at once. (This seems like an unnecessarily complicated device, since he and his friend could accomplish the same thing just by sitting next to each other and talking over their answers as they both write them down at the same time, although Danny says that he plans to build a second pen board so Joe can work on their English homework at the same time as Danny does their math homework.) Danny thinks that it would save even more time if he could find a way to build a robot that will just do the homework for them, but Joe warns him to be careful because things often go wrong with his inventions.
Joe leaves to get more materials for their homework device, and suddenly, Danny is surprised by a tapping at the window, and he sees a girl’s face looking in at him. It’s surprising because Danny is on the second floor of his house. At first, he thinks that this girl who seems to be hovering in the air must be from outer space or something, but it turns out that she’s just an ordinary girl on a ladder.
The girl tells Danny that her name is Irene Miller and that her family just moved in next door. Her father, Dr. Miller, is an astronomer who will be working at Midston University. The reason why Irene is up on a ladder is that she’s built a weather balloon, and now, it’s stuck on the roof of Danny’s house. Unfortunately, she’s just discovered that her ladder isn’t quite long enough to reach the roof. Danny, who loves science, is intrigued by Irene’s weather balloon, and he helps Irene retrieve it by climbing out an attic window and onto the roof.
Danny shows Irene his device for doing homework, but Irene says it doesn’t seem quite honest because it’s basically like copying from someone else. Danny defends his idea, saying it’s not really cheating if the second person actually does know how to do the homework and would give the right answers anyway. He just sees it as a time-saving device. He also says that Professor Bullfinch, an inventor and physicist at the university, says that homework isn’t relevant to the learning kids do in the classroom. Danny’s father is dead, and his mother is Professor Bullfinch’s housekeeper, so Danny and his mother live with him.
Danny is surprised at how much Irene knows about science because he didn’t think girls would be into science. Irene says that there have always been female scientists, like Marie Curie, and she also wants to study physics. Although Danny has learned a lot from Professor Bullfinch, he’s a little intimidated that there are things that Irene knows that he doesn’t.
When Joe returns, he isn’t enthusiastic that Danny has made friends with a girl. When Joe is derisive about women and girls, Danny even defends Irene and how much she knows. Irene confesses to Danny that getting her weather balloon stuck on the roof wasn’t an accident. Her mother had already talked to Danny’s mother, so she knew Danny was interested in science. She purposely got the balloon stuck on the roof to get his attention and give them a reason for meeting. Joe uses that as part of his assertion that women are trouble.
Irene joins Danny and Joe’s class at school, and she starts making some other friends there. There is one boy in class, Eddie, who seems to have a crush on Irene. She’s a little flattered that he thinks she’s pretty, but she begins to feel uncomfortable with his attention because he keeps staring at her. Danny explains to Irene that people call Eddie “Snitcher” because he’s always telling on somebody for things they do, seemingly out of spite.
When Danny invites Irene to come to his house for cookies after school, Professor Bullfinch surprises them by telling them that he’s going on a business trip, and while he’s gone, he’s going to let Danny take care of his new computer. The computer is called Miniac, which is short for “miniature automatic computer.” It’s much smaller than most computers of its time. During the 1950s, computers could take up an entire room. The Miniac is about the side of a large sideboard.
Joe asks Professor Bullfinch how the Minaic works, and he explains that they can ask it questions through a microphone. The computer prints out answers with an electric typewriter. Irene asks if they can ask it a question to see how it works, and she asks the Miniac a question from their homework. Joe is amazed at how quickly the computer answers the question, and Professor Bullfinch explain a little more about how computer work, with a memory unit that stores information. He says that facts are stored on magnetic tape. (This was true at the time this book was written, although 21st century computers are constructed differently, in ways that allow them to be made much smaller than 1950s computers. What he says next about the nature of computer intelligence is still true, although I’m going to have some things to say about AI in my reaction section.)
Irene marvels at how the computer seems almost like something from science fiction (for her time) and how amazing it is to have a device that can give you the answers to everything. Professor Bullfinch explains to her that’s not quite true, and that there’s something more amazing: the human mind.
It is only a kind of supertool. Everything in this machine is inside the human head, in the much smaller space of the human brain. Just think of it — all the hundreds of thousands of switches, core memory planes, miles of wire, tubes — all that’s in that big case and in this console — are all huge and awkward compared to the delicate, tiny cells of the human brain which is capable of doing as much as, or more than, the best of these machines. It’s the human brain which can produce a mechanical brain like this one. … The computer can reason … It can do sums and give information and draw logical conclusions, but it can’t create anything. It could give you all the words that rhyme with moon, for instance, but it couldn’t put them together into a poem. … It’s a wonderful, complex tool, but it has no mind. It doesn’t know it exists.”
Danny’s assignment while the professor is away is to feed data to the computer. The professor has laid out the information and code tables that Danny will need, although the professor says that Danny can add some extra information if he comes across something new and interesting in Scientific American or one of the other science magazines he reads. Irene asks if she can help with this task because she finds it interesting, and the professor gives her permission. Before he leaves, he warns Danny not to get too carry away with his enthusiasm. He knows that Danny likes to experiment, and sometimes, he gets carried away when he has an idea, without stopping to think first. The computer is a tool, not a toy, and the professor wants him to treat it as such.
However, a few days after Professor Bullfinch leaves, Irene has a question about their homework that Danny and Joe can’t answer because they also don’t really understand the subject. Then, Danny gets the idea of asking the computer about it. Inspired by how easily the computer answers the question, Danny suggests to the others that they use the professor’s computer as a “homework machine.” After all, it can answer questions and supply them with information, and Danny thinks he could even program it to write short compositions. Irene is a bit dubious about it, but Danny amends his idea to say that the computer would “help” them with their homework.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Some Spoilers
Advancements in Computer Technology
One of the interesting things about reading a vintage book like this that focuses on the technology of its time is seeing how things have changed and how people’s perceptions of technology have changed. The kids in this book are amazed by the professor’s computer, which is cutting edge for their time, although 21st century children grow up accustomed to computers in their homes that they are allowed to use. Modern children do use computers as toys, playing computer games, and they are also tools for doing homework.
However, even though things have greatly changed in the decades since this book was written, some of the issues surrounding the ethical use of technology are still concerns in the modern world. This story brings up the issue of how much a reliance on technology to do homework borders on cheating and keeps students from gaining the skills they’re supposed to use. This has become a major issue in modern education in the 2020s, with the rise of AI technology. In the story, Professor Bullfinch says that a computer cannot write poetry, which might get a smirk from modern readers because AI has achieved compositional writing skills. What I’d like to point out, though, is that there are still limits on that. As of this writing, the ideal way to use AI in writing is as a starting point for writing and research but not as a replacement for human writers or the human mind to edit and control the content of the writing. AI also uses human writing as the basis for its compositions, not writing everything from scratch:
“… an AI writing tool will gather information based on what other people have said in response to a similar prompt. The bot will search the internet for information about what you’ve asked it to write, then compile that information into a response. While this used to come back as clunky and robotic, the algorithms and programming for AI writers have become much more advanced and can write human-like responses. … AI writers are, so far, limited in their abilities to create emotional and engaging content. Humans, by nature, are storytellers. We have been since the beginning. Robots, however, are not. They are limited by what they’re programmed to do, and AI bots are programmed to gather information and make an educated guess about what you want to hear.”
(AI Writing: What Is It And How Does It Work?, July 2023)
Computers, even those in the 21st century, which are both smaller and more efficient than the ones from the 1950s, still rely on input from human sources to do anything. AI work is not original, it only builds on what humans have given it to use. In spite of the word “intelligence” in the name “artificial intelligence”, it still “has no mind“, as Professor Bullfinch put it. It’s literally artificially intelligent. It knows nothing independently of human beings, and one of the current problems with AI is that, although it can write convincingly and sound almost human, it not only does so only because it’s basing its writing on human writing that has been supplied to it but also, it has no idea whether or not anything it says is true or not. As the Microsoft article points out, it’s only using predictive technology to guess at what you want to hear and just tell you what you want to hear. It still takes a human being to reason out how much sense AI writing actually makes or whether or not it’s accurate.
One of the current problems with AI in the 2020s is AI hallucinations. Sometimes, AI seems to make things up that aren’t true at all because the way it processes information sometimes produces errors, and by itself, AI has no way of knowing when this has occurred. It has no understanding of the subject its writing about. It’s only attempting to predict and supply what it thinks the human who supplied the prompt wants it to supply.
“AI hallucination is a phenomenon wherein a large language model (LLM)—often a generative AI chatbot or computer vision tool—perceives patterns or objects that are nonexistent or imperceptible to human observers, creating outputs that are nonsensical or altogether inaccurate.
Generally, if a user makes a request of a generative AI tool, they desire an output that appropriately addresses the prompt (that is, a correct answer to a question). However, sometimes AI algorithms produce outputs that are not based on training data, are incorrectly decoded by the transformer or do not follow any identifiable pattern. In other words, it “hallucinates” the response.”
There are currently problems with students relying too much on AI to do both their thinking and writing for them, and even professionals who rely too much on AI tools to get through their work faster sometimes fail to notice when the AI writing says things that don’t make sense or are just blatantly untrue. The AI doesn’t know what’s true or not, it’s just telling you what it thinks you want to hear, based on information given to it, put together, and rearranged in its logic programming. Because it doesn’t actually understand the information fed into it, it has no idea when it gets the story wrong. Computers are faster at processing data than a human, but actual understanding of information is still entirely a human quality. A computer cannot understand anything on behalf of a human mind because it “has no mind” of its own to do the understanding.
There have been cases where professional lawyers who have relied on AI writing instead of doing their writing themselves have been sanctioned when AI hallucinations included information that was not only inaccurate but actually fictitious, citing court cases that never actually existed. The lawyers who received disciplinary action about this did not proofread the writing produced by AI, just trusting it to do all of their writing and thinking for them. Yet, the errors jumped out immediately when actual humans read the writing.
The more complex the writing is, the more the limitations of AI become apparent. AI can sound convincing in a short article (especially if you’re not doing any fact checking to see whether it’s talking about something real or not), but it isn’t always consistent or coherent in longer writing. The drama department of one of the local colleges where I lived put on a performance of a play written entirely by AI as a kind of thought experiment, and the results were hilarious. It was a mystery play, and the script was confusingly written. The AI had trouble keeping track of which characters were currently on stage and which were not, so actors who were not actually present in particular scenes had dialogue. At one point, when the detective was questioning everybody, he even talked to the person who was murdered, and the corpse responded. The play didn’t make sense because the AI doing the writing didn’t really understand the story it was telling. It just told a story in the pattern that was requested of it. It was, technically, a complete play, and if you gave it a cursory glance, it would have looked like a fully written play. It’s just that it had absent people and dead people talking. Perhaps at some point in the future, AI can do its own proofreading and learn to catch these types of problems, but for it to do so with the accuracy of an actual human, it would have to have a human level of understanding about the world and the subject matter it writes about. That is, it would have to have real intelligence, not just artificial intelligence.
This video from Wired on YouTube features AI and machine learning professor Graham Morehead from Gonzaga University, answering common questions about the nature of AI. In the video, he explains some of the differences between how AI “thinks” and how a human brain thinks, which help explain why AI can do some things that a human being would find pretty stupid. AI often thinks in terms of two-dimensional images as opposed to the three-dimensional world we live in as humans, and it doesn’t always understand the consequences of actions because, to AI, everything comes down to simple numbers and data as opposed to a physical world where actions have context and consequences.
Overall, I think this story did a good job of evaluating the differences between the human brain and the electronic brain at a point in history where the technology was relatively new and evolving. It also did a surprisingly good job of anticipating some of the developments and problems associated with the use of artificial intelligence, although the form it takes in this story isn’t quite what we’ve seen in the 21st century, and the kids in this story encounter an issue that modern students attempting to use AI to do their homework aren’t likely to encounter.
At the end of this story (spoilers), Danny and his friends come to realize, to their surprise, that they’ve actually been doing more homework than their classmates in order to make their wonderful homework machine function. They had to teach the machine the subjects they’re studying in order to have it do the assignments because the machine doesn’t innately understand the subject matter. The kids have to supply the knowledge base for the machine learning to function, and that ultimately takes more work and study for them than simply understanding the subjects in their own minds and just doing the assignments themselves. Danny’s mother and his teacher allow the kids to continue using the machine once Danny’s mother explains to the teacher how the process works so the kids can experience how a seeming shortcut can actually take more effort.
This is a little different from the 21st century AI tools, where someone else has already done the basic programming work, and students don’t have to actually understand the subjects themselves to use the AI tools. Of course, if the student doesn’t understand the subject matter of the assignment, there’s less chance that they’ll even notice when the AI produces an AI hallucination and says something that isn’t true or doesn’t make sense. There is an incident in the book where the computer messes up and outputs something that makes no sense, and the kids have to figure out why it did that.
The kids also consider the issue of whether or not using the machine to do their homework is cheating or not. Irene has serious reservations about it at first, and their teacher and some classmates think it gives them an unfair advantage when they find out. Danny, on the other hand, defends it, thinking of the computer as just a time-saving tool, like a typewriter, although the computer is doing more for them than a typewriter does. Danny is only focused on the idea of saving time so he can do things other than homework because he’s confident in his own ability to understand the academic subjects and thinks that practicing his skills or proving his knowledge through homework is a waste of his time.
The only reason why the teacher agrees to let them continue using the computer is that Danny’s mother figures out before he does how much extra work he and his friends are doing to teach the computer how to do their homework. This becomes obvious after the teacher gives them a special assignment, beyond what was covered in class, so Danny and his friends have to work extra hard and spend far more time to understand the material themselves and then teach the computer to understand it well enough to do the work. The first assignments weren’t so hard for Danny and his friends to teach the computer how to complete because the kids are at the top of their class, and they do know the material. However, the more difficult the assignments get, and the less familiar they are with the subject matter, the harder it gets to program the computer to handle the assignments. This exposes the flaws in their system and highlights the need for them to understand the material themselves rather than depend on the computer to do their work for them or even necessarily do it more efficiently. The great use of computers is to do tasks more efficiently, but that depends on the task and whether or not the computer has accurate instructions and an efficient knowledge base to draw on to do it. Building the programming and the knowledge base takes the work of a human mind that knows what it’s doing and is willing to put in the effort to do it correctly and to troubleshoot errors.
School in the 1950s
In this book, we get a glimpse of school in the 1950s. Something that stood out to me was when the teacher mentions that the class sizes have grown considerably in recent years, meaning that she has less time to work with individual students than she used to. This was a real problem in the 1950s, due to the effects of the Baby Boom. This generation of children was much larger than previous generations, so there were shortages of teachers and class space, and teachers and students did complain that students got less individual attention. (This documentary on YouTube shows some of the overcrowding.)
The focus on science and technology in the Danny Dunn stories is also important to the 1950s because that was the beginning of the era of the Cold War technology race, exemplified by the Space Race. The capitalistic United States and its allies competed against the USSR and its allies for world supremacy following WWII, and one of the ways they did that was by trying to develop superior technology and technological skills. This need to compete in the areas of science and technology led to changes in the US public education system, emphasizing the skills that we would call “STEM” skills today (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Echoes of those changes still influence the way we think about education in the 21st century.
This technological and scientific focus also influenced children’s entertainment, as adults tried to encourage children to take an interest in science and technology. The Danny Dunn series is one example of this, showing children who are interested in science and new inventions and portraying them as fun and exciting. Another example was the educational tv show Watch Mr. Wizard, which was being broadcast at the time the Danny Dunn books were written and published. Watch Mr. Wizard featured the title character performing experiments in his laboratory and demonstrating scientific concepts to child visitors. It was very popular, and in the 1950s, there were science clubs for children based around this show. This show also helped inspired new generations of shows with a similar premise, such as Bill Nye, the Science Guy, which was popular when I was a kid.
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