The first of these mind-amplifying machines will be descendants of the
devices now known as personal computers, but they will resemble today's
information processing technology no more than a television resembles a
fifteenth-century printing press. They aren't available yet, but they
will be here soon. Before today's first-graders graduate from high
school, hundreds of millions of people around the world will join
together to create new kinds
of human communities, making use of a tool that a small number of
thinkers and tinkerers dreamed into being over the past century.
Nobody knows whether this will turn out to be the best or the worst
thing the human race has done for itself, because the outcome of this
empowerment will depend in large part on how we react to it and what we
choose to do with it. The human mind is not going to be replaced by a
machine, at least not in the foreseeable future, but
there is little doubt that the worldwide
availability of fantasy amplifiers, intellectual toolkits, and
interactive electronic communities will change the way people think,
learn, and communicate.
It looks as if this latest technology-triggered transformation of
society could have even more intense impact than the last time human
thought was augmented, five hundred years ago, when the Western world
learned to read. Less than a century after the invention of movable
type, the literate community in Europe had grown from a privileged
minority to a substantial portion of the population. People's lives
changed radically and rapidly, not because of printing machinery, but
because of what that invention made it possible for people to know.
Books were just the vehicles by which the ideas escaped from the private
libraries of the elite and circulated among the population.
The true value of books emerged from the community they made
possible, an intellectual community that is still alive all over the
world. The printed page has been a medium for the propagation of ideas
about chemistry and poetry, evolution and revolution, democracy and
psychology, technology and industry, and many other notions beyond the
ken of the people who invented movable type and started cranking out
Bibles.
Because mass production of sophisticated electronic devices can lag
ten years or more behind the state of the art in research prototypes,
the first effects of the astonishing achievements in computer science
since 1960 have only begun to enter our lives. Word processors, video
games, educational software, and computer graphics were unknown terms to
most people only ten years ago, but today they are the names for
billion-dollar industries. And the experts agree that the most startling
developments are yet to come.
A few of the pioneers of personal computing who still work in the
computer industry can remember the birth and the dream, when the notion
of personal computing was an obscure heresy in the ranks of the
computing priesthood. Thirty years ago, the overwhelming majority of the
people who designed, manufactured, programmed, and used computers
subscribed to a single idea about the proper (and possible) place of
computers in society: "computers are
mysterious devices meant to be used in mathematical calculations."
Period. Computer technology was believed to be too fragile, valuable,
and complicated for nonspecialists.
In 1950 you could count the people who took exception to this dogma
on the fingers of one hand. The dissenting point of view shared by those
few people involved in a different way of thinking about how computers
might be used. The dissenters shared a vision of personal
computing in which computers would be used to enhance the most creative
aspects of human intelligence--for everybody, not just the
technocognoscenti.
Those who questioned the dogma of data processing agreed that
computers can help us calculate, but they also suspected that if the
devices could be made more interactive, these tools might help us to
speculate, build and study models, choose between alternatives, and
search for meaningful patterns in collections of information. They
wondered whether this newborn device might become a communication medium
as well as a calculating machine.
These heretical computer theorists proposed that if human knowledge
is indeed power, then a device that can help us transform information
into knowledge should be the basis for a very powerful technology. While
most scientists and engineers remained in awe of the giant adding
machines, this minority insisted on thinking about how computers might
be used to assist the operation of human minds in nonmathematical ways.
Tools for Thought focuses on the ideas of a few of the people
who have been instrumental in creating yesterday's, today's, and
tomorrow's human-computer technology. Several key figures in the history
of computation lived and died centuries or decades ago. I call these
people, renowned in scientific circles but less known to the public, the
patriarchs. Other
co-creators of personal computer technology are still at work today,
continuing to explore the frontiers of mind-machine interaction. I call
them the pioneers.
The youngest generation, the ones who are exploring the cognitive
domains we will all soon experience, I call the
Infonauts. It is too early
to tell what history will think of the newer ideas, but we're going to
take a look at some of the things the latest inner-space explorers are
thinking, in hopes of catching some clues to what (and how) everybody
will be thinking in the near future.
As we shall see, the future limits of this technology are not in the
hardware but in our minds. The digital computer is based upon a
theoretical discovery known as "the
universal machine," which is not actually a tangible device but a
mathematical description of a machine capable of simulating the actions
of any other machine. Once you have created a general-purpose machine
that can imitate any other machine, the future development of the tool
depends only on what tasks you can think to do with it. For the
immediate future, the issue of whether machines can become intelligent
is less important than learning to deal with a device that can become
whatever we clearly imagine it to be.
The pivotal difference between today's personal computers and
tomorrow's intelligent devices will have less to do with their hardware
than their software-- the instructions people create to control
the operations of the computing machinery. A program is what tells the
general-purpose machine to imitate a specific kind of machine. Just as
the hardware basis for computing has evolved from relays to vacuum tubes
to transistors to integrated circuits, the programs have evolved as
well. When information processing grows
into knowledge processing, the true personal computer will reach beyond
hardware and connect with a vaster source of power than that of
electronic microcircuitry--the power of human minds working in concert.
The nature of the world we create in the closing years of the
twentieth century will be determined to a significant degree by our
attitudes toward this new category of tool. Many of us who were educated
in the pre-computer era shall be learning new skills. The college class
of 1999 is already on its way. It is important that we realize today
that those skills of tomorrow will have little to do with how to operate
computers and a great deal to do with how to use augmented intellects,
enhanced communications, and amplified imaginations.
Forget about "computer literacy" or obfuscating technical jargon, for
these aberrations will disappear when the machines and their programs
grow more intelligent. The reason for building a personal computer in
the first place was to enable people to do what people do best by using
machines to do what machines do best. Many people are afraid of today's
computers because they have been told that these machines are smarter
than they are--a deception that is reinforced by the rituals that
novices have been forced to undergo in order to use computers. In fact,
the burden of communication should be on
the machine. A computer that is difficult to use is a computer that's
too dumb to understand what you want.
If the predictions of some of the people in this book continue to be
accurate, our whole environment will suddenly take on a kind of
intelligence of its own sometime between now and the turn of the
century. Fifteen years from now, there will be a microchip in your
telephone receiver with more computing power than all the technology the
Defense Department can buy today. All the written knowledge in the world
will be one of the items to be found in every schoolchild's pocket.
The computer of the twenty-first
century will be everywhere, for better or for worse, and a more
appropriate prophet than Orwell for this eventuality might well be
Marshall McLuhan. If McLuhan was right about the medium being the
message, what will it mean when the entire environment becomes the
medium? If such development does occur as predicted, it will probably
turn out differently from even the wildest "computerized household"
scenarios of the recent past.
The possibility of accurately predicting the social impact of any new
technology is questionable, to say the least. At the beginning of the
twentieth century, it was impossible for average people or even the most
knowledgeable scientists to envision what life would be like for their
grandchildren, who we now know would sit down in front of little boxes
and watch events happening at that moment on the other side of the world.
Today, only a few people are thinking seriously about what to do with
a living room wall that can tell you anything you want to know, simulate
anything you want to see, connect you with any person or group of people
you want to communicate with, and even help you find out what it is when
you aren't entirely sure. In the 1990s it might be possible for people
to "think as no human being has ever thought" and for computers to
"process data in a way not approached by the information-handling
machines we know today," as
J.C.R. Licklider,
one of the most influential pioneers, predicted in 1960, a quarter of a
century before the hardware would begin to catch up with his ideas.
The earliest predictions about the impact of computing machinery
occurred quite a bit earlier than 1960. The first electronic computers
were invented by a few individuals, who often worked alone, during World
War II. Before the actual inventors of the 1940s were the software
patriarchs of the 1840s. And before them, thousands of years ago, the
efforts of thinkers from many different cultures to find better ways to
use symbols as tools led to the invention of mathematics and logic. It
was these formal systems for manipulating symbols that eventually led to
computation. Links in what we can now see as a continuous chain of
thought were created by a series of Greek philosophers, British
logicians, Hungarian mathematicians, and American inventors.
Most of the patriarchs had little in common with each other, socially
or intellectually, but in some ways they were very much alike. It isn't
surprising that they were exceptionally intelligent, but what is unusual
is that they all seem to have been preoccupied with the power of their
own minds. For sheer intellectual adventure, many intelligent people
pursue the secrets of the stars, the mysteries of life, the myriad ways
to use knowledge to accomplish practical goals.
But what the software ancestors sought
to create were tools to amplify the power of their own brains--machines
to take over what they saw as the more mechanical aspects of thought.
Perhaps as an occupational hazard of this dangerously self-reflective
enterprise, or as a result of being extraordinary people in restrictive
social environments, the personalities of these patriarchs (and
matriarchs) of computation reveal a common streak of eccentricity,
ranging from the mildly unorthodox to the downright strange.
- Charles
Babbage and Ada, Countess of Lovelace, lived in the London
of Dickens and Prince Albert (and knew them both). A hundred years
before some of the best minds in the world used the resources of a
nation to build a digital computer, these two eccentric
inventor-mathematicians dreamed of building their "Analytical
Engine." He constructed a partial prototype and she used it, with
notorious lack of success, in a scheme to win a fortune at the horse
races. Despite their apparent failures, Babbage was the first true
computer designer, and Ada was history's first programmer.
-
George Boole invented a mathematical tool for future
computer-builders--an "algebra of logic" that was used nearly a
hundred years later to link the process of human reason to the
operations of machines. The idea came to him in a flash of
inspiration when he was walking across a meadow one day, at the age
of seventeen, but it took him twenty years to teach himself enough
mathematics to write The Laws of Thought.
Although Boole's
lifework was to translate his inspiration into an algebraic system,
he continued to be so impressed with the suddenness and force of the
revelation that hit him that day in the meadow that he also wrote
extensively about the powers of the unconscious mind. After his
death Boole's widow turned these ideas into a kind of human
potential cult, a hundred years before the "me decade."
- Alan
Turing solved one of the most crucial mathematical problems
of the modern era at the age of twenty-four, creating the
theoretical basis for computation in the process. Then he became the
top code-breaker in the world--when he wasn't bicycling around
wearing a gas mask or running twenty miles with an alarm clock tied
around his waist. If it hadn't been for the success of Turing's
top-secret wartime mission, the Allies might have lost World War II.
After the war, he created the field of artificial intelligence and
laid down the foundations of the art and science of programming.
He was notoriously disheveled, socially withdrawn, sometimes loud
and abrasive, and even his friends thought that he carried
nonconformity to weird extremes. At the age of forty-two, he
committed suicide, hounded cruelly by the same government he helped
save.
- John von
Neumann spoke five languages and knew dirty limericks in all
of them. His colleagues, famous thinkers in their own right, all
agreed that the operations of Johnny's mind were too deep and far
too fast to be entirely human. He was one of history's most
brilliant physicists, logicians, and mathematicians, as well as the
software genius who invented the first electronic digital computer.
John von Neumann was the center of the group who created the "stored
program" concept that made truly powerful computers possible, and he
specified a template that is still used to design almost all
computers--the "von Neumann architecture." When he died, the
Secretaries of Defense, the Army, Air Force, and Navy and the Joint
Chiefs of staff were all gathered around his bed, attentive to his
last gasps of technical and policy advice.
- Norbert
Wiener, raised to be a prodigy, graduated from Tufts at
fourteen, earned his Ph.D. from Harvard at eighteen, and studied
with Bertrand Russell at nineteen. Wiener had a different kind of
personality than his contemporary and colleague, von Neumann.
Although involved in the early years of computers, he eventually
refused to take part in research that could lead to the construction
of weapons. Scarcely less brilliant than von Neumann, Wiener was
vain, sometimes paranoid, and not known to be the life of the party,
but he made important connections between computers, living
organisms, and the fundamental laws of the physical universe. He
guarded his ideas and feuded with other scientists, writing
unpublished novels about mathematicians who did him wrong.
Wiener's conception of cybernetics was partially derived
from "pure" scientific work in mathematics, biology, and
neurophysiology, and partially derived from the grimly applied
science of designing automatic antiaircraft guns. Cybernetics was
about the nature of control and communication systems in animals,
humans, and machines.
- Claude
Shannon, another lone-wolf genius, is still known to his
neighbors in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for his skill at riding a
motorcycle. In 1937, as a twenty-one-year-old graduate student, he
showed that Boole's logical algebra was the perfect tool for
analyzing the complex networks of switching circuits used in
telephone systems and, later, in computers. During the war and
afterward, Shannon established the mathematical foundation of
information theory. Together with cybernetics, this collection
of theorems about information and communication created a new way to
understand people and machines--and established information as a
cosmic fundamental, along with energy and matter.
The software patriarchs came from wildly different backgrounds. Then as
now, computer geniuses were often regarded as "odd" by those around
them, and their reasons for wanting to invent computing devices seem to
have been as varied as their personalities.
Something about the notion of a
universal machine enticed mathematicians and philosophers, logicians and
code-breakers, whiz kids and bomb-builders. Even today, the worlds of
computer research and the software business bring together an unlikely
mixture of entrepreneurs and evangelists, futurians and utopians,
cultists, obsessives, geniuses, pranksters, and fast-buck artists.
Despite their outward diversity, the computer patriarchs of a hundred
years ago and the cyberneticians if the World War II era appear to have
shared at least one characteristic with each other and with software
pioneers and infonauts of more recent vintage. In recent years, the
public has become more aware of a subculture that sprouted in Cambridge
and Palo Alto and quietly spread through a national network of
fluorescent-lit campus computer centers for the past two decades--the
mostly young, mostly male, often brilliant, sometimes bizarre "hackers,"
or self-confessed compulsive programmers. Sociologists and psychologists
of the 1980s are only beginning to speculate about the deeper motivation
for this obsession, but any later-day
hacker will admit that the most fascinating thing in his own life is his
own mind, and tell you that he regards intense, prolonged interaction
with a computer program as a particularly satisfying kind of dialogue
with his own thoughts.
A little touch of the hacker mentality seems to have affected all of
the major players in this story. From what we know today about the
patriarchs and pioneers, they all appear to have pursued a vision of a
new way to use their minds. Each of them was trying to create a mental
lever. Each of them contributed indispensable components of the device
that was eventually assembled. But none of them encompassed it all.
The history of computation became increasingly complex as it
progressed from the patriarchs to the pioneers. At the beginning, many
of the earliest computer scientists didn't know that their ideas would
end up in a kind of machine. Almost all of them worked in isolation.
Because of their isolation from one another, the common intellectual
ancestors of the modern computer are relatively easy to discern in
retrospect. But since the 1950s, with the proliferation of researchers
and teams of researchers in academic, industrial, and military
institutions, the branches of the history have become tangled and too
numerous to describe exhaustively. Since
the 1950s, it has become increasingly difficult to assign credit for
computer breakthroughs to individual inventors.
Although individual contributors to the past two or three decades of
computer research development have been abundant, the people who have
been able to see some kind of overall direction to the fast, fragmented
progress of recent years have been sparse. Just as the earliest
logicians and mathematicians didn't know their thoughts would end up as
a part of a machine, the vast majority of the engineers and programmers
of the 1960s were unaware that their machines had anything to do with
human thought. The latter day computer pioneers in the middle chapters
of this book were among the few who played central roles in the
development of personal computing. Like their predecessors, these people
tried to create a kind of mental lever. Unlike most of their
predecessors, they were also trying to design a tool that the entire
population might use.
Where the original software patriarchs solved various problems in the
creation of the first computers, the personal computer pioneers
struggled with equally vexing problems involved in using computers to
create leverage for human intellect, the way wheels and dynamos create
leverage for human muscles. Where the patriarchs were out to create
computation, the pioneers sought to transform it:
- J.C.R.
Licklider, an experimental psychologist at MIT who became
the director of the Information Processing Techniques Office of the
U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA),
was the one man whose vision enabled hundreds of other like-minded
computer designers to pursue a whole new direction in hardware and
software development. In the early 1960s, the researchers funded by
Licklider's programs reconstructed computer science on a new and
higher level, through an approach known as time-sharing.
Although their sponsorship was military, the people Licklider hired
or supported were working toward a transformation that he and they
believed to be social as well as technological. Licklider saw the
new breed of interactive computers his project directors were
creating as the first step toward an entirely new kind of human
communication capability.
- Doug
Engelbart started thinking about building a
thought-amplifying device back when Harry Truman was President, and
he has spent the last thirty years stubbornly pursuing his original
vision of building a system for augmenting human intellect. At one
point in the late 1960s, Engelbart and his crew of infonauts
demonstrated to the assembled cream of computer scientists and
engineers how the devices most people then used for performing
calculations or keeping track of statistics could be used to enhance
the most creative human activities.
His former students have gone
on to form a disproportionate part of the upper echelons of today's
personal computer designers. Partially because of the myopia of his
contemporaries, and partially because of his almost obsessive
insistence on maintaining the purity of his original vision, most of
Engelbart's innovations have yet to be adapted by the computer
orthodoxy.
- Robert
Taylor, at the age of thirty-three, became the director of
the ARPA office created by Licklider, thus launching his career in a
new and much-needed field--the shaping of large-scale, long term,
human-computer research campaigns. He became a "people collector,"
looking for those computer researchers whose ideas might have been
ignored by the orthodoxy, but whose projects promised to boost the
state of computer systems by orders of magnitude.
- Alan Kay
was one of television's original quiz kids. He learned to read at
the age of two and a half, barely managed to avoid being thrown out
of school and the Air Force, and ended up as a graduate student at
one of the most important centers of ARPA research. In the 1970s,
Kay was one of the guiding software spirits of PARC's Alto
project (the first true personal computer) and the chief architect
of Smalltalk, a new kind of computer language. He started the
1980s as a director of Atari Corporation's long-term research
effort, and in 1984 he left Atari to become a "research fellow" for
Apple Corporation.
Along with his hard-won credentials as one of
the rare original thinkers who is able to implement his thoughts via
the craft of software design, Kay also has a reputation as a
lifelong insubordinate. Since the first time he was thrown out of a
classroom for knowing more than the teacher,
Kay's avowed goal has been to build
a "fantasy amplifier" that anyone with an imagination could use to
explore the world of knowledge on their own, a "dynamic medium for
creative thought" that could be as useful and thought-provocative to
children in kindergarten as it would be to scientists in a research
laboratory.
Licklider, Engelbart, Taylor, and Kay are still at work, confident that
many more of us will experience the same thrill that has kept them going
all these years--what Licklider, still at MIT, calls the "religious
conversion" to interactive computing. Engelbart works for Tymshare
Corporation, marketing his "Augment" system to information workers.
Taylor is setting up another computer systems research center, this time
under the auspices of the Digital Equipment Corporation, and is
collecting people once again, this time for a research effort that will
bring computing into the twenty-first century. Kay, at Atari, continued
to steer toward the fantasy amplifier, despite the fact that their
mother company was often described in the news media as "seriously
troubled." It is fair to assume that he will continue to work toward the
same goal in his new association with Steve Jobs, chairman of Apple and
a computer visionary of a more entrepreneurial bent.The pioneers,
although they are still at work, are not the final characters in the
story of the computer quest. The next generations of innovators are
already at work, and some of them are surprisingly young. Computer
trailblazers in the past tended to make their marks early in life--a
trend that seems to be continuing in the present. Kay, the former quiz
kid, is now in his early forties. Taylor is in his early fifties,
Engelbart in his late fifties, and Licklider in his sixties. Today,
younger men and, increasingly, younger women, have begun to take over
the field professionally, while even younger generations are now living
in their own versions of the future for fun, profit, and thrills.
The ones I call the "infonauts" are the older brothers and sisters of
the adolescent hackers you read about in the papers. Most of them are in
their twenties and thirties. They work for themselves or for some
research institution or software house, and represent the first members
of the McLuhan generation to use the technology invented by the von
Neumann generation as tools to extend their imagination. From the
science of designing what they call the "user interface"--where mind
meets machine--to the art of building educational microworlds, the
infonauts have been using their new medium to create the mass-media
version we will use fifteen years from now.
- Avron
Barr is a knowledge engineer who helps build the special
computer programs known as expert systems that are apparently
able to acquire knowledge from human experts and transfer it to
other humans. These systems are now used experimentally to help
physicians diagnose diseases, as well as commercially to help
geologists locate mineral deposits and to aid chemists in
identifying new compounds.
Although philosophers debate whether
such programs truly "understand" what they are doing, and
psychologists point out the huge gap between the narrowly defined
kind of expertise involved in geology or diagnosis and the much more
general "world knowledge" that all humans have, there is no denying
that expert systems are valuable commodities. Avron Barr believes
that they will evolve into more than expensive encyclopedias for
specialists. In his mid-thirties and just starting his career in an
infant technology, he dreams of creating an expert assistant in the
art of helping people agree with one another.
- Brenda
Laurel, also in her mid-thirties, is an artist whose medium
exists at the boundary of Kay's and Barr's and Engelbart's
specialties. Her goal is to design new methods of play, learning,
and artistic expression into computer-based technologies. Like Barr,
she believes that the applications of her research point toward more
extensive social effects than just another success in the software
market.
Brenda wants to use an expert system that knows what
playwrights, composers, librarians, animators, artists, and dramatic
critics know, to create a world of sights and sounds in which people
can learn about flying a spaceship or surviving in the desert or
being a blue whale by experiencing space-desert-whale simulated
microworlds in person.
- Ted
Nelson is a dropout, gadfly, and self-proclaimed genius who
self-published Computer Lib, the best-selling underground
manifesto of the microcomputer revolution. His dream of a new kind
of publishing medium and continuously updated world-library
threatens to become the world's longest software project. He's wild
and woolly, imaginative and hyperactive, has problems holding jobs
and getting along with colleagues, and was the secret inspiration to
all those sub-teenage kids who lashed together homebrew computers or
homemade programs a few years back and are now the ruling moguls of
the microcomputer industry.
Time will tell whether he is a prophet
too far ahead of his time, or just a persistent crackpot, but there
is no doubt that he has contributed a rare touch of humor to the
often too-serious world of computing. How can you not love somebody
who says "they should have called it an oogabooga box instead of a
computer"?
Despite their differences in background and personality, the computer
patriarchs, software pioneers, and the newest breed of infonauts seem to
share a distant focus on a future that they are certain the rest of us
will see as clearly as they do--as soon as they turn what they see in
their mind's eye into something we can hold in our hands. What did they
see? What will happen when their visions materialize in our homes? And
what do contemporary visionaries see in store for us next?
