Danny Hillis

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pages: 194 words: 49,310

Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand

Albert Einstein, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Eratosthenes, Extropian, fault tolerance, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, nuclear winter, pensions crisis, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

CHAPTER 9, CLOCK/LIBRARY :48 “In some sense, we’ve run out of our story . . .” Quoted in Po Bronson, “The Long Now,” Wired (May 1998), p. 118. :48 “If you’re going to do something that’s meant to be interesting for ten millennia . . .” Danny Hillis interview with Richard Kadrey, HotWired (5 December 1995). :51 “To me the Clock and the Library capture two different aspects of time.” Danny Hillis in same HotWired interview as above. :53 Historian Daniel Boorstin reports that the Inner Shrine at Ise. . . Daniel Boorstin, The Creators (New York: Random House, 1992), p. 140. CHAPTER 10, BEN IS BIG :56 The monument is named for its biggest bell, Big Ben.

People call it change, and rather than yearn for it, they brace themselves against its force. Technology is treated as something that pushes us around rather than something we create. It’s a bother, it’s a boon, it’s a discipline; it’s a given. “What people mean by the word technology,” says computer designer Alan Kay, “is anything invented since they were born.” Computer designer Danny Hillis counters, “What people mean by the word technology is the stuff that doesn’t really work yet.” Technology is both the problem and its own solution. No wonder it obsesses us. The gathering acceleration of history was noted in the 1790s by Thomas Malthus and in 1909 by Henry Adams, who wrote, The world did not double or treble its movement between 1800 and 1900, but, measured by any standard . . . the tension and vibration and volume and so-called progression of society were fully a thousand times greater in 1900 than in 1800—the force had doubled ten times over, and the speed, when measured by electrical standards as in telegraphy, approached infinity, and had annihilated both space and time.

Later doublings in an exponential sequence, we come to realize, are absolutely ferocious. The changes no longer feel quantitative or qualitative but cataclysmic; each new doubling is a new world. Ad man Regis McKenna calls it “continuous discontinuous change.” Life becomes perpetual transition with no resting point in sight. Danny Hillis explains what motivated him to build a linear Clock in an exponential era: “Some people say that they feel the future is slipping away from them, but to me the future is a big tractor-trailer slamming on its brakes in front of me just as I was pulling into its slipstream. I am about to crash into it.


pages: 433 words: 106,048

The End of Illness by David B. Agus

confounding variable, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, Danny Hillis, discovery of penicillin, double helix, epigenetics, germ theory of disease, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, personalized medicine, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, the scientific method

To Steven Spielberg, for your contagious passion and insight. To Larry Ellison, for your certainty and trust in me. To Marc Benioff, for your true friendship. To Al Gore, for pushing me in the right direction (and first introducing me to Danny Hillis). To Max Nikias, Carmen Puliafito, and Eli Broad, for bringing me to USC, a remarkable academic home. To Sumner Redstone, for your unwavering belief in me. To Larry Norton, Danny Hillis, and Murray Gell-Mann, for making me think beyond my own discipline and putting up with my endless questions. To Lance Armstrong and the late Steve Jobs, for your unending inspiration. To Michael Milken and Stuart Holden for your encouragement over the past decade.

—Dean Ornish, MD, founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute; clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco “David Agus is one of the great medical thinkers of our age. The End of Illness reframes the entire discussion of sickness and health. Instead of thinking about disease, Agus thinks about the system that is the human body, and what we need to do to guide it toward health. Before you take your next vitamin, read this book.” —Danny Hillis, PhD, cofounder, Applied Minds and Thinking Machines “Dr. David Agus has been disrupting medicine as we know it for his entire career. Now he brings his ideas out of the lab and exam room and into the lives of everyone—showing us how to live long, healthy, disease-free lives. Reading this book is the best thing you can do for yourself and your loved ones.

In this regard, DNA is practically accidental; just as accidents happen, so does DNA, without our having much say in the matter. What most people don’t think about, though, is that DNA says more about our risk than our fate. It governs probabilities, not necessarily destinies. As my friend and colleague Danny Hillis (whom we’ll meet later when I cover emerging technologies) likes to describe it, DNA is simply a list of parts or ingredients rather than a complete manual that explains how those parts work together to generate results. To hold your DNA responsible for your health is missing the forest for the trees.


pages: 326 words: 103,170

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

But before we can do that, there is one final question we need to answer about the networks all around us now, the only one that will put us on an even level with the New Caste: What, in the end, are the networks really for? CHAPTER EIGHT “MapReduce”: The Compression of Space and Time In which we learn what networks are really, rather wonderfully, meant for. 1. Starting in the early 1990s, the American scientist and inventor Danny Hillis began what has since become an every-few-months sort of ritual. He packed up from his home in Encino, a short drive over the Hollywood Hills from Los Angeles, and headed off for a desolate corner of the Southwest for a few days that would largely be defined by rock and dynamite. Hillis, who was born in 1956, has spent most of his life working at the electron level of the world, crafting some of the most significant computer processing systems of our age.

But when our committee sat down to talk it over, we knew that the boldfaced names didn’t want or need a prize. They certainly didn’t need a million dollars. As we considered people we all knew who’d made fundamental, essential contributions but had not been as boldfaced as they might have been, Danny Hillis’s name came up immediately. Hillis had developed a revolutionary “massively parallel” computer in the 1980s. The machine had helped create an entire discipline of high-speed computing by tying together tens of thousands of processors to tackle a problem at once. Traditional computers worked problems the way you or I might, step by step.

His centrality in that project was memorialized in a famous speech he once delivered in which he described having one of the very first Internet domain names in history—and then whipped out a sheaf of bound pages that represented the entire Internet address list at the time. It ran about fifty pages. If there were membership cards in the New Caste, Danny’s would have had a very low number. It was an easy decision for our prize committee. No Bill Gates. No Steve Jobs. So here’s how I met Danny Hillis: I called to tell him he had won a million dollars. (I recommend this as a way to start a friendship.) Hillis had been a tinkerer since he was a child and never seemed to have lost the pleasure of a wild intermingling of joy and practice. You can’t tell with him where passion ends and work starts.


pages: 239 words: 70,206

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte

They include Sam Adams, Brooke Barrett, Richard Berner, Patrick Bosworth, Thomas Botts, Erik Brynjolfsson, John Calkins, Murray Campbell, Dennis Charney, Herbert Chase, Jeffrey Chester, Sharath Cholleti, Adam D’Angelo, Arne Duncan, Sue Duncan, Tony Fadell, Edward Felten, David Ferrucci, Rachana Shah Fischer, Brian Gehlich, Jim Goodnight, Nagui Halim, Hendrik Hamann, Glenn Hammerbacher, Lenore Hammerbacher, Danny Hillis, Jeffrey Immelt, Jon Iwata, James Kalina, Kaan Katircioglu, Gary King, Jon Kleinberg, Martin Kohn, Randy Komisar, Patricia Kovatch, Edward Lazowska, and Michael Linderman. They also include Mark Malhotra, James Manyika, Yoky Matsuoka, Andrew McAfee, David McQueeney, Douglas Merrill, Tom Mitchell, Craig Mundie, Arvind Narayanan, Tim O’Donnell, Sharoda Paul, Alex Pentland, Claudia Perlich, Stephanie Pieroni, William Pulleyblank, Tara Richardson, Virginia Rometty, Itamar Rosenn, Jeff Rothschild, Marc Rotenberg, Alex Rubinsteyn, William Ruh, Eric Schadt, Benjamin Scheuer, Neal Sidhwaney, Larry Smarr, Andrew Smeall, Jim Spohrer, Halle Tecco, Menka Uttamchandani, Veronica Vargas, Anil Varma, David Vivero, David Vladeck, Donald Walker, Danny Weitzner, and Michelle Zhou.

In high-stakes decisions like diagnosing cancer, you unquestionably want a human in the loop. But systems like IBM’s Watson will increasingly plumb data, accumulate knowledge, and build models of the world—on their way to sometimes becoming superhuman decision makers. How do you really control them? At a research conference at IBM’s Watson lab, Danny Hillis, an artificial intelligence expert and cofounder of Applied Minds, a technology design and research firm, took up that issue. The ever-smarter systems being made by IBM, Google, and others, Hillis says, will each need its own explanatory assistant—“a storyteller.” A computer system, no matter how clever, he said, will not get very far if it just spouts answers.

Those arguments help, but they do not speak to the issues of trust and comfort with the machines. People are not aggregates; we all experience the world as individuals. So declaring that something will be good for the population, on average, isn’t entirely persuasive. What will be needed is the storytelling that Danny Hillis, the artificial intelligence expert, describes as the machines explaining themselves, giving a simplified account of how they work. What is also needed is time—a threshold of accumulated experience of living with the decision-making machines, in the house or on the road, to reach a level of comfort.


pages: 422 words: 113,525

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

Something was pathological about Yucca Mountain, and the sickness was embedded in its long-term thinking, its ten-thousand-year time frame. Among those on the bus were Danny Hillis, designer of the clock, and Peter Schwartz, cofounder of Global Business Network. I wrote in my trip report that at the entrance to the Repository,a training video informed us that it was important not to trip on anything, and showed how to use a belt-mounted emergency breathing apparatus. Danny Hillis remarked that it is the device which, in event of a mine fire, OSHA demands to find on your body. Outside the tunnel entrance were not one but two brand new ambulances, contextually shrieking “SAFETY, SAFETY, SAFETY!!”

We promoted bioregionalism, restoration, and “reinhabitation” of one’s natural environment. There’s now an insightful book about all that by Andrew Kirk—Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (2007). These days I divide my time between Global Business Network and an idiosyncratic foundation. In the 1990s, when inventor Danny Hillis came up with an idea to help people think long-term by building a monumental ten-thousand-year clock, I responded by cofounding The Long Now Foundation with him in 1996. “Fostering long-term responsibility” is its mission. The “long now” is defined as the last ten thousand years and the next ten thousand years.

We’ll create all kinds of interesting recombinations, we’ll blast seeds with radiation and chemicals to get lots of mutations, and we’ll grow whatever comes up, pick the ones we like, and hope for the best.’ What would people say about the risk of doing it that way?” They would call it genetic gambling, says inventor Danny Hillis, and outlaw it. As for medicine, the panic generated by recombinant DNA back in the 1970s has completely died away. In 1982, a human gene was introduced into the bacterium E. coli so that “bioreactors” of trillions of the engineered organisms could generate vast quantities of human insulin in a way that is safer and far cheaper than the old technique using the pancreases of calves and pigs.


pages: 329 words: 88,954

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

Holland developed his ideas in the sixties and seventies using mostly paper and pencil—even the more advanced technology of that era was far too slow to churn through the thousandfold generations of evolutionary time. But the massively parallel, high-speed computers introduced in the eighties—such as Danny Hillis’s Connection Machine—were ideally suited for exploring the powers of the genetic algorithm. And one of the most impressive GA systems devised for the Connection Machine focused exclusively on simulating the behavior of ants. It was a program called Tracker, designed in the mideighties by two UCLA professors, David Jefferson and Chuck Taylor.

The new paradigm borrows heavily from the playbook of natural selection, breeding new programs out of a varied gene pool. The first few decades of software were essentially creationist in philosophy—an almighty power wills the program into being. But the next generation is profoundly Darwinian. * * * Consider the program for number sorting devised several years ago by supercomputing legend Danny Hillis, a program that undermines all of our conventional assumptions about how software should be produced. For years, number sorting has served as one of the benchmark tests for ingenious programmers, like chess-playing applications. Throw a hundred random numbers at a program and see how many steps it takes to sort the digits into the correct order.

“I’ve been fascinated with adaptive computing for some time now,” he says. “There are some rather hard problems to overcome, however. Some of the most promising technologies seem to also be the most parallel, like genetic algorithms, neural networks. These systems tend to learn by accumulating experience over a wide number of individual cases.” Think here of Danny Hillis’s number-sorting program. Hillis did manage to coax an ingenious and unplanned solution from the software, but it took thousands of iterations (not to mention a Connection Machine supercomputer). No gameplayer wants to sit around waiting for his on-screen characters to finish their simulated evolution before they start acting naturally.


pages: 339 words: 94,769

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

This grand evolutionary loop can now be closed, with atoms arranging bits arranging atoms. Chapter 17 THE FIRST MACHINE INTELLIGENCES W. DANIEL HILLIS W. Daniel “Danny” Hillis is an inventor, entrepreneur, and computer scientist, Judge Widney Professor of Engineering and Medicine at USC, and author of The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work. While Danny Hillis was an undergraduate at MIT, he built a computer out of Tinkertoys. It has around ten thousand wooden parts, plays tic-tac-toe, and never loses; it’s now in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

Heinz was working on his book The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Science of Complexity, which he considered to be a research agenda for science in the 1990s. Through the Reality Club meetings, I got to know two young researchers who were about to play key roles in revolutionizing computer science. At MIT in the late seventies, Danny Hillis developed the algorithms that made possible the massively parallel computer. In 1983, his company, Thinking Machines, built the world’s fastest supercomputer by utilizing parallel architecture. His “connection machine” closely reflected the workings of the human mind. Seth Lloyd at Rockefeller University was undertaking seminal work in the fields of quantum computation and quantum communications, including proposing the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer.

The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World was published in 1983. We had a code name for the project: “It’s coming, it’s coming!” But it didn’t come; it went. From that point on I’ve worked with researchers in nearly every variety of AI and complexity, including Rodney Brooks, Hans Moravec, John Archibald Wheeler, Benoit Mandelbrot, John Henry Holland, Danny Hillis, Freeman Dyson, Chris Langton, J. Doyne Farmer, Geoffrey West, Stuart Russell, and Judea Pearl. AN ONGOING DYNAMICAL EMERGENT SYSTEM From the initial meeting in Washington, Connecticut, to the present, I arranged a number of dinners and discussions in London and Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as a public event at London’s City Hall.


pages: 476 words: 132,042

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

Bacon helped launch the scientific method, which accelerated the speed of invention; thereafter society was in constant flux, as one conceptual seed after another disrupted social equilibrium. Seemingly simple inventions like the clock had profound social consequences. The clock divided an unbroken stream of time into measurable units, and once it had a face, time became a tyrant, ordering our lives. Danny Hillis, computer scientist, believes the gears of the clock spun out science and all its many cultural descendants. He says, “The mechanism of the clock gave us a metaphor for self-governed operation of natural law. (The computer, with its mechanistic playing out of predetermined rules, is the direct descendant of the clock.)

We find the patent office rejects about two-thirds of challenged patents as ‘anticipated.’ Another space, say gaming inventions, about a third are either blocked by prior art or other inventors. But if the invention is a complex system, in an unusual space, there won’t be many others. Look, most invention is a matter of time . . . of when, not if.” Danny Hillis, another polymath and serial inventor, is cofounder of an innovative prototype shop called Applied Minds, which is another idea factory. As you might guess from the name, they use smart people to invent stuff. Their corporate tagline is “the little Big Idea company.” Like Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures, they generate tons of ideas in interdisciplinary areas: bioengineering, toys, computer vision, amusement rides, military control rooms, cancer diagnostics, and mapping tools.

That means that as you embrace new technologies, you are indirectly working for future generations of Amish, and for the minimite homesteaders, even though they are not doing as much for you. Most of what you adopt they will ignore. But every once in a while your adoption of “something that doesn’t quite work yet” (Danny Hillis’s definition of technology) will evolve into an appropriate tool they can use. It might be a solar grain dyer; it might be a cure for cancer. Anyone who is inventing, discovering, and expanding possibilities will indirectly expand possibilities for others. Nonetheless, the Amish and minimites have important lessons to teach us about selecting what we embrace.


pages: 463 words: 118,936

Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, Donald Davies, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, IFF: identification friend or foe, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, launch on warning, low earth orbit, machine readable, Menlo Park, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, phenotype, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, spectrum auction, strong AI, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

Thanks to Esther, I met literary agent John “No Wasted Motion” Brockman in 1984, who, nine years later, with Katinka Matson, helped precipitate this book. William Patrick at Addison-Wesley accepted an ambiguous proposal, and Jeff Robbins had the patience to await a manuscript, followed by the efficiency as editor to produce a book without additional delay. Others, including Danny Hillis, William S. Laughlin, James Noyes, Patrick Ong, and Ann Yow, offered encouragement at different stages along the way. The builders of my boat designs kept me afloat. I owe the last sentence in this book, and more, to David Brower—archdruid, mountaineer, and editor of landmarks from In Wildness . . . to On the Loose.

The big questions—Is human intelligence a computable function? Are there algorithms for life?—may never be answered. But computable functions appear to be doing most of the work. “Non-computable functions may be the most common type of function in theory, but in practice they hardly ever come up,” Danny Hillis has explained. “In fact, it is difficult to find a well-defined example of a non-computable function that anybody wants to compute. This suggests that there is some deep connection between computability and the physical world and/or the human mind.”7 “On Computable Numbers” secured a Proctor Fellowship for its author, who went to Princeton University in 1937 to complete his doctoral thesis under Alonzo Church.

“Perhaps some day in the dim future, it will be possible to advance the computations faster than the weather advances,” hoped Richardson, “and at a cost less than the saving to mankind due to the information gained.”27 Richardson thereby anticipated massively parallel computing, his 64,000 mathematicians reincarnated seventy years later as the multiple processors of Danny Hillis’s Connection Machine. “We had decided to simplify things by starting out with only 64,000 processors,” explained Hillis, recalling how Richard Feynman helped him bring Lewis Richardson’s fantasy to life.28 Even without the Connection Machine, Richardson’s approach to cellular modeling would be widely adopted once it became possible to assign one high-speed digital computer rather than 64,000 human beings to keep track of numerical values and relations among individual cells.


pages: 222 words: 53,317

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Apple II, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, Chekhov's gun, citation needed, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, data science, David Brooks, digital map, discovery of the americas, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Hans Moravec, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, Inbox Zero, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, SimCity, software studies, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, the long tail, Therac-25, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

Howard, “Fixing Broken Government: Put Humans in Charge,” The Atlantic, September 22, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/09/fixing-broken-government-put-humans-in-charge/380309/?single_page=true. the writer Quinn Norton has noted: Quinn Norton, “Everything is Broken,” The Message, May 20, 2014, https://medium.com/message/81e5f33a24e1. Langdon Winner notes in his book: Winner, Autonomous Technology, 290–91. computer scientist Danny Hillis argues: Danny Hillis, “The Age of Digital Entanglement,” Scientific American, September 2010, 93. Take the so-called Flash Crash: Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), 17. It is still not entirely clear, however, what caused the Flash Crash.

Wells came to believe late in life “that the human mind is no longer capable of dealing with the environment it has created.” Wells concluded this in 1945, discussing primarily human organizations and societies. This problem has become even more acute in recent years, through the development of computational technologies to a level that even Wells might have had difficulty imagining. The computer scientist Danny Hillis argues that we have moved from the Enlightenment to the Entanglement, at least when it comes to our technology: “Our technology has gotten so complex that we no longer can understand it or fully control it. We have entered the Age of Entanglement. . . . Each expert knows a piece of the puzzle, but the big picture is too big to comprehend.”


pages: 306 words: 84,649

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, COVID-19, Danny Hillis, Doomsday Clock, European colonialism, Ford Model T, friendly fire, High speed trading, interchangeable parts, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, smart grid, Stewart Brand, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, éminence grise

The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multitasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed—some mechanism or myth that encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where “the long term” is measured at least in centuries.4 Brand, together with the computer designer Danny Hillis and other prominent thinkers, had become increasingly concerned that the year 2000 had progressively acted as a temporal mental barrier to the future. Brand asked, “How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare? How do we make the taking of long-term responsibility inevitable?’

In his book outlining the Clock of the Long Now project, Stewart Brand said, “Ise is the world’s greatest monument to continuity—an unbroken lineage of structure, records, and tradition on a humid, earthquake-prone, volcanic island. Its ancient rites are alive and meaningful.”9 Alexander Rose, Danny Hillis and other Long Now Foundation members attended the 2013 rebuilding ceremony. Afterward, Rose wrote: I watched as Crown Princess Masako led a procession of Shinto priests carrying treasures from the old temple to the new . . . As part of Shinto ritual, this not only keeps the structures intact even when made out of relatively ephemeral materials, but it allows the master temple builder to train the next generation.10 In Osaka, for the 1970 international exposition, the Ise rebuilding ritual helped inspire the time capsule project.

Elsewhere in the time and frequency industry, I have been helped by countless experts, with Bob Cockshott, Charles Curry and John Pottle being particular stars. Moving from fast clocks to the slowest, I must thank the people of the Long Now Foundation for everything they have done for me since we first met in 2000. Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis and Brian Eno ignited in me a new way of thinking, and particular gratitude goes to Alexander Rose, who has been an inspiration throughout. I met Laura Williams in front of the Long Now clock the same year; Aluna, and Laura’s friendship, has helped sustain me ever since. And I am truly grateful to Jem Finer, whose projects—not just Longplayer, though that was how we met—have changed the way I see and experience the world.


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

What Negroponte called the Daily Me, the concept that each person’s newsfeed would be personalized, was seen as an inevitable future with little understanding of the darker reality that would become known as filter bubbles several decades later. One of the people Brand met during his three-month stay was Danny Hillis, a cerebral young supercomputer designer who was a protégé of Minsky’s. Several years earlier Hillis had founded Thinking Machines, a radical supercomputer company based on the idea of linking tens of thousands of small microprocessor chips to work on problems simultaneously. It would be a forerunner of today’s internet-centric computing—now described as cloud computing.

Momentarily, that left him nonplused while he tried to figure out what set his idea apart from a yachting club, or the Masonic Lodge for that matter. His musings would likely have remained fantasies, however, if not for the unexpected email that arrived in Brand’s inbox several months after his visit to the dentist. In it, Danny Hillis sketched out his vision of a mechanical clock designed to run for ten thousand years. Hillis, still making the world’s fastest supercomputers but increasingly frustrated with society’s seemingly ever-shortening time horizon, was searching for some way to encourage humanity to take a long view.

Midway between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, it had everything Brand was looking for—a 4,900-year-old tree, deep caves, and rock that would protect a mechanical clock for millennia. The closest town was Ely, Nevada, which was forty miles from Great Basin National Park. “I’m dying to just jump in a car and go investigate,” Brand wrote the board. At the end of September 1998, he drove his Range Rover across Nevada to Ely, where he met Danny Hillis and his then wife, Patti; Rose; Kennedy; Saffo; and Brewster Kahle. Kahle, a New Yorker who had studied computer science at MIT and then worked for Hillis at Thinking Machines, had come to the West Coast to create Alexa, an early search engine he had sold to Jeff Bezos for $250 million in Amazon stock.


pages: 339 words: 57,031

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

In keeping with Brand and de Geus’s first discussions, the six semiannual Learning Conferences were designed to explore the dynamics of group learning. Brand staged the events in environments that he considered to be “learning systems” in their own right. One meeting took place at Biosphere 2 in the Arizona desert; another involved a visit to Danny Hillis’s Thinking Machines Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts; a third brought participants to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. Like the Media Lab, these sites were meant to be both material and metaphorical. That is, they would allow participants to simultaneously study and engage with a “system” as it learned.

The notion of distributed learning, in which individuals learn together as elements in a system, was simultaneously congenial to Shell executives (“because that’s pretty much how they do their administration”), to cyberneticians such as Francisco Varela (because it seemed to describe his notion of “awakening systems”), to computer engineers like Danny Hillis (because it was a conceptual element of massively parallel computing), and to Brand’s own “‘access to tools’ approach to life.”11 Gradually, Brand later remembered, this rhetoric of distributed learning appeared to offer the answer to the questions that the founders of the conferences had first hoped to address: “We came to feel that the question of how you accelerate learning or adaptivity has already become answered—by distributed adaptivity or learning.

These members had been brought together over a number of years through the entrepreneurial bridging of structural holes by the principals, particularly by Stewart Brand. Early members, such as Douglas Engelbart, Mary Catherine Bateson, biologist Lynn Margulis, and ecologist Peter Warshall, represented Brand’s time at the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly and his journeys to SRI and Xerox PARC. Others, such as computer scientist Danny Hillis and sociologist Sherry Turkle, suggested Brand’s links to MIT. Together, the network members represented a handful of groups: computer technologists, economists and financial analysts, corporate executives, natural scientists, journalists, and technology-oriented artists. They also had a distinctly male and, as journalist Joel Garreau put it with consummate tact, “Anglo-American cast.”


pages: 396 words: 117,149

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Arthur Eddington, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, Black Swan, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, constrained optimization, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, incognito mode, information retrieval, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, large language model, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, off grid, P = NP, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, planetary scale, power law, pre–internet, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, yottabyte, zero-sum game

In this view, organisms are in a perpetual arms race with parasites, and sex helps keep the population varied, so that no single germ can infect all of it. If this is the answer, then sex is irrelevant to machine learning, at least until learned programs have to vie with computer viruses for processor time and memory. (Intriguingly, Danny Hillis claims that deliberately introducing coevolving parasites into a genetic algorithm can help it escape local maxima by gradually ratcheting up the difficulty, but no one has followed up on this yet.) Christos Papadimitriou and colleagues have shown that sex optimizes not fitness but what they call mixability: a gene’s ability to do well on average when combined with other genes.

Chapter One Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future, by John MacCormick (Princeton University Press, 2012), describes some of the most important algorithms in computer science, with a chapter on machine learning. Algorithms,* by Sanjoy Dasgupta, Christos Papadimitriou, and Umesh Vazirani (McGraw-Hill, 2008), is a concise introductory textbook on the subject. The Pattern on the Stone, by Danny Hillis (Basic Books, 1998), explains how computers work. Walter Isaacson recounts the lively history of computer science in The Innovators (Simon & Schuster, 2014). “Spreadsheet data manipulation using examples,”* by Sumit Gulwani, William Harris, and Rishabh Singh (Communications of the ACM, 2012), is an example of how computers can program themselves by observing users.

An evolved robot soccer team is described in “Evolving team Darwin United,”* by David Andre and Astro Teller, in RoboCup-98: Robot Soccer World Cup II, edited by Minoru Asada and Hiroaki Kitano (Springer, 1999). Genetic Programming III,* by John Koza, Forrest Bennett III, David Andre, and Martin Keane (Morgan Kaufmann, 1999), includes many examples of evolved electronic circuits. Danny Hillis argues that parasites are good for evolution in “Co-evolving parasites improve simulated evolution as an optimization procedure”* (Physica D, 1990). Adi Livnat, Christos Papadimitriou, Jonathan Dushoff, and Marcus Feldman propose that sex optimizes mixability in “A mixability theory of the role of sex in evolution”* (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2008).


pages: 380 words: 118,675

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

David Shaw came of age in the dawning era of powerful new supercomputers. He earned a PhD in computer science from Stanford in 1980 and then moved to New York to teach in Columbia’s computer science department. Throughout the early eighties, high-tech companies tried to lure him to the private sector. Inventor Danny Hillis, founder of the supercomputer manufacturer Thinking Machines Corporation and later one of Jeff Bezos’s closest friends, almost convinced Shaw to come work for him designing parallel computers. Shaw tentatively accepted the job and then changed his mind, telling Hillis he wanted to do something more lucrative and could always return to the supercomputer field after he got wealthy.

In the atrium of the building, there is a full-scale steampunk model of a Victorian-era spaceship as it might have been described in the fiction of Jules Verne, complete with a cockpit, brass controls, and nineteenth-century furnishings. Visitors can venture inside, sit on the velvet-covered seats, and imagine themselves as intrepid explorers in the time of Captain Nemo and Phileas Fogg. “To an imaginative child, it would look like an artifact,” says Bezos’s friend Danny Hillis. Like other great entrepreneurs, including Walt Disney, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs, Bezos was turning imagination into reality, the fancies of his youth into actual physical things. “Space for Jeff is not a year 2000 or a year 2010 opportunity,” says Hillis. “It’s been a dream of humanity’s for centuries and it will continue to be one for centuries.

Defects that are invisible to the knowledgeable may be obvious to newcomers. The simplest solutions are the best. Repeating all these anecdotes isn’t rote monotony—it’s calculated strategy. “The rest of us try to muddle around with complicated contradictory goals and it makes it harder for people to help us,” says his friend Danny Hillis. “Jeff is very clear and simple about his goals, and the way he articulates them makes it easy for others, because it’s consistent. “If you look at why Amazon is so different than almost any other company that started early on the Internet, it’s because Jeff approached it from the very beginning with that long-term vision,” Hillis continues.


pages: 245 words: 83,272

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

Minsky-style creative chaos is fun and delightful and inspirational. It’s also dangerous. Minsky and his generation did not have the same attitudes toward safety that we know are important today. There was a kind of casual disregard for radiation safety, for example. Once, a computer scientist and former Minsky graduate student named Danny Hillis showed up to Minsky’s house with a radiation detector in his pocket. (Hillis, a supercomputer inventor, now runs the Long Now Foundation with Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand; the foundation is devoted to building a mechanical clock that will run for ten thousand years in a cave on a Texas ranch owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.)

“Jamming GPS Signals Is Illegal, Dangerous, Cheap, and Easy.” Gizmodo, July 24, 2017. https://gizmodo.com/jamming-gps-signals-is-illegal-dangerous-cheap-and-e-1796778955. Hillis, W. Daniel. “Radioactive Skeleton in Marvin Minsky’s Closet.” Paper presented at the Web of Stories, n.d. https://webofstories.com/play/danny.hillis/174. Holovaty, Adrian. “A Fundamental Way Newspaper Sites Need to Change.” Holovaty.com, September 6, 2006. http://www.holovaty.com/writing/fundamental-change/. Holovaty, Adrian. “In Memory of Chicagocrime.org.” Holovaty.com, January 31, 2008. http://www.holovaty.com/writing/chicagocrime.org-tribute/.


pages: 582 words: 160,693

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

The beginning of something we may never understand"1 -Danny Hillis PREMONITIONS The coming of the year 2000 has haunted the Western imagination for the past thousand years. Ever since the world failed to end at the turn of the first millennium after Christ, theologians, evangelists, poets, and seers have looked to the end of this decade with an expectation that it would bring something momentous. No less an authority than Isaac Newton speculated that the world would end with the year 2000. Michel de Nostradamus, whose prophecies have been read by every generation since they were first 1 Danny Hillis, "The Millennium Clock," Wired, Special Edition, Fall 1995, p.48. 1 published in 1568, forecast the coming of the Third Antichrist in July 1999.2 Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, connoisseur of the "collective unconscious," envisioned the birth of a New Age in 1997.

The growing danger of crime, particularly embezzlement and undetectable theft, will make morality and honor among associates more crucial and highly valued than it was during the Industrial Era, particularly in its waning years. 312 Footnotes Chapter 1. The Transition of the Year 2000: The Fourth Stage of Human Society 1. Danny Hillis, "The Millennium Clock," Wired, Special Edition, Fall 1995,p.48. 2. Ericka Cheetham, The Final Prophecies of Nostradamus (New York: Putnam,1989), p.424. 3. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. E Hopman (London:Penguin Books, 1990), p.172. 4. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1951), p.105. 5.


pages: 100 words: 28,911

A Short Guide to a Long Life by David B. Agus

Danny Hillis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Larry Ellison, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, personalized medicine, placebo effect, risk tolerance, TED Talk, the scientific method

I also have to thank those who continue to support and inspire me on a regular basis, including Jeff Fager, Sandy Gleysteen, Gayle King, Jonathan LaPook, Chris Licht, Norah O’Donnell, Karolyn Pearson, David Rhodes, and Charlie Rose at CBS News, who empower me to be able to educate and inform. To Dominick Anfuso, Marc Benioff, Gerald Breslauer, Eli Broad, Bill Campbell, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, Robert Evans, Murray Gell-Mann, Al Gore, Brad Grey, Davis Guggenheim, Danny Hillis, Walter Isaacson, Peter Jacobs, Clifton Leaf, Max Nikias, Fabian Oberfeld, Howard Owens, Shimon Peres, Maury Povich, Carmen Puliafito, Bruce Ramer, Sumner Redstone, Joe Schoendorf, Dov Seidman, Bonnie Solow, Steven Spielberg, Elle Stephens, Yossi Vardi, Jay Walker, David Weissman, and Neil Young: your mentorship, friendship, and advice are truly appreciated.


Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, barriers to entry, British Empire, business climate, business intelligence, Cape to Cairo, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Babbage, Computer Lib, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, linked data, Livingstone, I presume, lone genius, machine readable, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norman Mailer, out of africa, packet switching, pneumatic tube, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog

Technology alone, it seems, is not enough. Without an administrative operation equal to the task of organizing the world’s knowledge, such an endeavor seems doomed to incompletion. In a 2004 essay for The Edge, an online salon founded in 1996 by author and literary agent John Brockman, supercomputer pioneer Danny Hillis described his own vision for a new learning environment rooted in Semantic Web principles, to create a so-called Knowledge Web in which “humanity’s accumulated store of information will become more accessible, more manageable, and more useful.” The environment would include carefully classified metadata on a wide range of topics, creating a rich universe of links uniting a large corpus of information.

Contemporary evolutionary biologists tend to regard claims for cultural “evolution” with a degree of skepticism. That said, his invocation of an evolutionary paradigm for the propagation of networked information anticipates a stream of rhetoric that characterized the early years of the Web. In a 1998 article for Wired magazine, programmer Danny Hillis described the emergence of the contemporary global network in explicitly evolutionary terms. “We’re taking off,” he wrote. “We are not evolution’s ultimate product. There’s something coming after us, and I imagine it is something wonderful.”27 Kurzweil has suggested that advances in information technology have led humanity to the brink of an evolutionary event: the Singularity, a point at which we will witness “the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence.”28 Otlet’s notion of “collective intelligence” prefigured a great deal of contemporary pro-Internet rhetoric.


pages: 379 words: 109,612

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

A good question encourages answers that are grounded in experience but bigger than any experience alone. I wanted Edge’s contributors to think about the Internet, which includes but is a much bigger subject than the Web or an application on the Internet (or searching, browsing, and so forth, which are apps on the Web). Back in 1996, computer scientist and visionary Danny Hillis pointed out: “A lot of people think the Web is the Internet, and they’re missing something. The Web is the old media incorporated into the new medium.” He enlarges on that thought in the introduction. This year, I enlisted the aid of Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator of the Serpentine Gallery in London, and the artist April Gornik, one of the early members of the Reality Club, to help broaden the Edge conversation—or, rather, to bring it back to where it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when April gave a talk at a Reality Club meeting and discussed the influence of chaos theory on her work, and Benoit Mandelbrot showed up to discuss fractal theory.

All we do is keep close track of what the others are thinking and doing. Often we collaborate directly, but most of the time we don’t. Everyone in my guild has his or her own guild, each of which is largely different from mine. I’m probably not considered a member of some of them. My guild nowadays consists of Danny Hillis, Brian Eno, Peter Schwartz, Kevin Kelly, John Brockman, Alexander Rose, and Ryan Phelan. Occasionally we intersect institutionally via the Long Now Foundation, Global Business Network, or Edge.org. One’s guild is a conversation extending over years and decades. I hearken to my gang because we have overlapping interests, and my gang keeps surprising me.


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

CRACKING THE CODE OF CREATIVITY I wasn’t the only one asking these kinds of questions. By the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, design thinking had become wildly popular. Ironically, it was during a discussion about design thinking and innovation that some of us came to see the limits of focusing on design alone. I had joined Danny Hillis at his Applied Minds studio in Glendale, California, on October 30, 2007, along with the big guns in design, design thinking, and innovation—Larry Keeley from Doblin, Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and Patrick Whitney at the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago.

CHAPTER 2 11 In 1992 BusinessWeek began supporting: Bruce Nussbaum, “The Best Product Designs of the Year,” BusinessWeek, June 7, 1992, http://www.businessweek.com/stories/1992-06-07/ winners-the-best-product-designs-of-the-year. 11 What is now called the International: The IDEA was originally called the Industrial Design Excellence Awards and changed in the late nineties to be more global. 11 In April 2006, the magazine teamed up with: Bruce Nussbaum, “The World’s Most Innovative Companies,” BusinessWeek, April 23, 2006, http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-04-23/ the-worlds-most-innovative-companies. 11 Then, in 2008, my team: Bruce Nussbaum, “S&P/BusinessWeek Global Innovation Index,” BusinessWeek, May 1, 2008, http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-05-01/ s-and-p-businessweek-global-innovation-indexbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice. 11 Between our many lists, the index: Bruce Nussbaum, “BusinessWeek Is Launching INside Innovation,” BusinessWeek, May 13, 2006, http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-05-13/ business-week-is-launching-inside-innovation-dot; http://www.designing-media.com/interviews/BruceNussbaum, accessed October 15, 2012. 13 Frustrated, I began asking around: personal record. 13 from Kaiser Permanente’s shift: Bruce Nussbaum, “The Power of Design,” BusinessWeek, May 17, 2004. 13 to P&G’s development of the Swiffer: Bruce Nussbaum, “Get Creative! How to Build Innovative Companies,” BusinessWeek, August 1, 2005. 13 Years after I initially began these conversations: personal record. 14 I had joined Danny Hillis: I’d been covering design for more than a decade by the time of this meeting and was on a first-name basis with most of those attending it. They were what management consultants called “thought leaders” in innovation and design. They were, in fact, among the leading thought leaders of the field in the world.


pages: 481 words: 125,946

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

Following this logic, we might conclude that there’s a primitive global brain, consisting not just of all connected devices but also of the connected humans using those devices. The senses of that global brain are the cameras, microphones, keyboards, location sensors of every computer, smartphone, and “Internet of Things” device. The thoughts of that global brain are the collective output of millions of individual contributing cells. Danny Hillis is said to have remarked, “Global consciousness is that thing responsible for deciding that decaffeinated coffeepots should be orange.” The meme spread—not universally, to be sure, but sufficiently that the pattern propagates. News, ideas, and images now propagate across the global brain in seconds rather than years via search engines and social media.

THOUGHT-STEALING MACHINES MAXIMILIAN SCHICH Art historian; associate professor for art and technology, University of Texas, Dallas Machines increasingly do things we previously considered thinking, but that we don’t do anymore because now machines do them. I stole this thought more or less accurately from Danny Hillis, father of the Connection Machine and the Knowledge Graph. Stealing thoughts is a common activity in the thought processes of both humans and machines. Indeed, when we humans think, much of the content of our thoughts comes from past experience or the documented experience of others. Very rarely do we come up with something completely new.


pages: 158 words: 46,353

Future War: Preparing for the New Global Battlefield by Robert H. Latiff

Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, CRISPR, cyber-physical system, Danny Hillis, defense in depth, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, failed state, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, Internet of things, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Nicholas Carr, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, VTOL, Wall-E

Ubiquitous personal electronics have already changed behavior in fundamental ways. What will be the societal impact of self-driving automobiles, or artificial intelligence? Do our choices have environmental consequences? If the situation of dizzying complexity weren’t already bad enough, we have been moving steadily into an era that computer scientist Danny Hillis refers to as “entanglement.” As he defines it, entanglement refers to the fact that our systems are becoming ever more complex as well as ever more connected to one another. While the behavior of individual components may be computable and respond in predictable ways, that of the collection is too complicated to calculate.


pages: 846 words: 232,630

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

Many others answered crucial questions, and clarified my thinking in {14} dozens of conversations: Ron Amundsen, Robert Axelrod, Jonathan Bennett, Robert Brandon, Madeline Caviness, Tim Clutton-Brock, Leda Cosmides, Helena Cronin, Arthur Danto, Mark De Voto, Marc Feldman, Murray Gell-Mann, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Steve Gould, Danny Hillis, John Holland, Alastair Houston, David Hoy, Bredo Johnsen, Stu Kauffman, Chris Langton, Dick Lewontin, John Maynard Smith, Jim Moore, Roger Penrose, Joanne Phillips, Robert Richards, Mark and Matt (the Ridley conspecifics), Dick Schacht, Jeff Schank, Elliot Sober, John Tooby, Robert Trivers, Peter Van Inwagen, George Williams, David Sloan Wilson, Edward O.

To them, this gift from outer space will exhibit an utterly mysterious regularity, totally beyond all analytic probes, unless they hit upon the idea that each box contains a description of a world, and that the descriptions are of the same world. It is the fact that each box bears multifarious semantic relationships to the same things, though expressed in different "terminology" and differently axiomatized, that grounds the regularity. When I tried this thought experiment out on Danny Hillis, creator of the Connection Machine, he thought immediately of a cryptographic "solution" to the puzzle, and then granted that my solution could be profitably viewed as a special case of his solution: "Al and Bo were using the world as a 'one-time pad!'" — an apt allusion to a standard technique of encryption.

Eigen suggests that there is a reason why there are four letters, not two, but I am not going to pass it on. Perhaps you can figure out for yourself what it might be before seeing what Eigen says. You already have at your fingertips the relevant principles of engineering to give it a good shot. 5. Danny Hillis, the creator of the Connection Machine, once told me a story about some computer scientists who designed an electronic component for a military application (I think it was part of a guidance system in airplanes). Their prototype had two circuit boards, and the top one kept sagging, so, casting about for a quick fix, they spotted a brass doorknob in the lab which had just the right thickness.


pages: 200 words: 60,987

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson

Albert Einstein, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, Danny Hillis, discovery of DNA, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kevin Kelly, planetary scale, seminal paper, side project, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

First, NYU’s School of Journalism, for letting me teach a graduate seminar on Cultural Ecosystems, and my students there who contributed so many helpful ideas (and who, I’m thankful to report, shot down more than a few of my less helpful ones). My friends at the Long Now Foundation—Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Brian Eno, Danny Hillis, and Alexander Rose—were kind enough to invite me to discuss the “long zoom” approach to cultural history at one of their seminars in long-term thinking in 2007. I was also lucky enough to be invited to discuss these issues onstage with Brian at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. I’m also indebted to Larry Lessig for the Jefferson quote at the beginning of this book, an early link that led me to one of the book’s major themes.


pages: 243 words: 65,374

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

We know from carbon dating (and tree rings) that some of them are more than five thousand years old—the oldest living things on the planet. At some point, several years from now, a clock will be buried in the soil beneath those pines, a clock designed to measure time on the scale of civilizations, not seconds. It will be—as its primary designer, the computer scientist Danny Hillis, puts it—“a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium.” It is being engineered to keep time for at least ten thousand years, roughly the length of human civilization to date. It is an exercise in a different kind of time discipline: the discipline of avoiding short-term thinking, of forcing yourself to think about our actions and their consequences on the scale of centuries and millennia.


Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive History's Most Iconic Extinct Creature by Ben Mezrich

butterfly effect, CRISPR, Danny Hillis, double helix, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, General Motors Futurama, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, life extension, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, microbiome, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Recombinant DNA, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology

The Whole Earth Catalogue had been the launch of a revolution, and no less a tech luminary than Steve Jobs had once likened it to “Google in print.” Brand’s current project, the Long Now Foundation, was no less ambitious. A philanthropic think tank, which Brand had created with computer scientist Danny Hillis, Long Now’s goal was to look forward over the next ten thousand years. Instead of focusing on problems in the present, the idea was to see the world on a much longer time frame. One of the Long Now’s initiatives was to create a permanent database of the world’s seven thousand known languages. Another was “The Clock of The Long Now”—a three-hundred-foot-tall timepiece built in a mountain on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Texas property, to keep exact track of the next ten thousand years.


pages: 274 words: 75,846

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

There’s plenty to be said for this approach, but it’s worth remembering the downside: Machines may be able to see results without models, but humans can’t understand without them. There’s value in making the processes that run our lives comprehensible to the humans who, at least in theory, are their beneficiaries. Supercomputer inventor Danny Hillis once said that the greatest achievement of human technology is tools that allow us to create more than we understand. That’s true, but the same trait is also the source of our greatest disasters. The more the code driving personalization comes to resemble the complexity of human cognition, the harder it’ll be to understand why or how it’s making the decisions it makes.


pages: 369 words: 80,355

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room by David Weinberger

airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, book scanning, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, David Brooks, Debian, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of journalism, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, P = NP, P vs NP, PalmPilot, Pluto: dwarf planet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, semantic web, slashdot, social graph, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

Some facts and ideas in Carr’s book inevitably came from similar sorts of interchanges. Thought is never private. Nor should it be. When Carr’s initial article came out in The Atlantic, there was some wonderful discussion of it among the elite set of thinkers—including Carr—who converse at Edge.org.14 Danny Hillis, a computing pioneer, agrees that something is making us stupid, but thinks that the “the flood of information” is the culprit. He also points to the role of politics. The writer Kevin Kelly wonders whether Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms” because he started using a typewriter, as Carr says, or if it was because “Nietzsche was ill and dying.”


pages: 294 words: 81,292

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

We’re now using programs to make much faster computers so the process can run much faster. That’s what’s so confusing—technologies are feeding back on themselves; we’re taking off. We’re at that point analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms. We are amoebas and we can’t figure out what the hell this thing is that we’re creating. —Danny Hillis, founder of Thinking Machines, Inc. You and I live at an interesting and sensitive time in human history. By about 2030, less than a generation from now, it could be our challenge to cohabit Earth with superintelligent machines, and to survive. AI theorists return again and again to a handful of themes, none more urgent than this one: we need a science for understanding them.


pages: 283 words: 85,906

The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time by Joseph Mazur

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, computer age, Credit Default Swap, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Pepto Bismol, quantum entanglement, self-driving car, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, twin studies

So what, then, is the meaning of time? 2 RINGING BELLS, BEATING DRUMS (USE OF TIME) I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years. —Danny Hillis, inventor of the 10,000 Year Clock By the end of the twentieth century clocks were everywhere. If you walked along any busy city street, you were never far from scanning glances of clocks. Subway clocks in New York City were centrally calibrated, as were many street clocks of Paris and London.


pages: 346 words: 92,984

The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health by David B. Agus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, autism spectrum disorder, butterfly effect, clean water, cognitive dissonance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Marc Benioff, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, microcredit, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, nocebo, parabiotic, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Salesforce, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

Thank you for pushing my thinking forward and your work in figuring out better ways to understand and treat disease. To my science mentors, collaborators, and friends Andrea Armani, Anthony Atala, Anna Barker, Paul Davies, Scott Fraser, Sam Gambhir, Murray Gell-Mann, Inderbir Gill, Dana Goldman, Danny Hillis, Cliff Hudis, Carl Kesselman, Parag Mallick, Franziska Michor, Vincent Miller, Larry Norton, Carmen Puliafito, Michael Quick, Chris Rose, Howard Scher, P. K. Shah, Jeff Trent, and Yannis Yortsos. I have the privilege of seeing the breaking health and technology information daily through my involvement with CBS News.


pages: 292 words: 81,699

More Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Build a better mousetrap, business process, call centre, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, Dennis Ritchie, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, functional programming, George Gilder, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, lolcat, low cost airline, Mars Rover, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, price discrimination, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Oldenburg, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, The Great Good Place, The Soul of a New Machine, Tragedy of the Commons, type inference, unpaid internship, wage slave, web application, Y Combinator

Think about what happened to poor Marimba. They launched their company with infinite VC in the days of hyper-Java hype, having lured the key developers from the Java team at Sun. They had a 260 More from Joel on Software CEO, Kim Polese, who was brilliant at public relations; when she was marketing Java, she had Danny Hillis making speeches about how Java was the next step in human evolution; George Gilder wrote these breathless articles about how Java was going to completely upturn the very nature of human civilization. Compared to Java, we were to believe, monotheism, for example, was just a wee blip. Polese is that good.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

When a supercomputer defeats a man in a game of chess or Go, the man is using maybe fourteen watts of power, while the computer and its networks are tapping into the gigawatt clouds on the Columbia. In the age of Big Data, the von Neumann bottleneck has philosophical implications. The more knowledge that is put into a von Neumann machine, the bigger and more crowded its memory, the further away its average data address, and the slower its functioning. Danny Hillis, of the erstwhile Thinking Machines, writes, “This inefficiency remains no matter how fast we make the processor, because the length of the computation becomes dominated by the time required to move data between processor and memory.” That span, traveled in every step in the computation, is governed by the speed of light, which on a chip is around nine inches a nanosecond—a significant delay on chips that now bear as much as sixty miles of tiny wires.


pages: 323 words: 95,939

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Or throwing a plastic bottle into the trash because the recycle bin is thirty seconds out of our way—even though the plastic will become part of the planet’s landfill for hundreds of years until it decomposes into toxic chemicals for hundreds or thousands more. For Brand, the solution is to expand our awareness of the larger, slower cycles. He is working with inventor Danny Hillis to build a 10,000-year clock—a clock of the “long now” that changes our orientation to time. His hope is that by beholding this tremendous time-keeping structure in the desert (itself the product of a multigenerational effort), we will be able to experience or at least perceive the bigger cycles that evade us in our daily schedules.


pages: 411 words: 98,128

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

The clock will tick once a year, its century hand will advance once every one hundred years, and a cuckoo will come out on the millennium. A mechanical computer will calculate more than 3.5 million different melodies that the clock’s chimes will play over the centuries. The clock project, which the foundation says has no public completion date, is the brainchild of Bezos’s friend Danny Hillis, a pioneer in parallel supercomputers and the creative force at Disney’s Imagineering division—he once designed a full-sized dinosaur to saunter around Disney’s theme parks. In 1996, he and Stewart Brand, a biologist, cultural pioneer, and the editor of the 1960s bible Whole Earth Catalog, launched a nonprofit to build the clock.


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Fred Turner describes how individuals such as Stewart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalog fame) brought together people from the corporate world, academia, the military, and the media around themes of self-organization, cybernetic control, networks, and distributed learning: “The notion of distributed learning, in which individuals learn together as elements in a system, was simultaneously congenial to Shell executives (‘because that’s pretty much how they do their administration’), to cyberneticians such as Francisco Varela (because it seemed to describe his notion of ‘awakening systems’), to computer engineers like Danny Hillis (because it was a conceptual element of massively parallel computing), and to Brand’s own ‘access to tools’ approach to life.” Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 183.


pages: 468 words: 233,091

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

Once captured, pages visited by users would then be “donated” to the related nonprofit Internet Archive, to help build a history of the Web. Alexa was acquired by Amazon in 1999. Kahle continues to run the Internet Archive. Livingston: You were one of the first members of the Thinking Machines team. What number employee were you? Kahle: I was not one of the two founders—they were Danny Hillis and Sheryl Handler. I was on the project team at MIT, so when we started the company, anybody from that team that wanted to come came. There were three or four of us. We had been working on it for a couple years before there was a company. Livingston: Tell me about some big things back in the Thinking Machines days that helped pave the way for WAIS.

Most people don’t have mentors. They say, “Well, I’ve had influential teachers. I’ve learned a lot from this person.” But they don’t think of it as a mentor. A mentor is a life guide, somebody that you might work with, but somebody who is helpful toward watching bigger issues about things that guide your life. Danny Hillis, who was 4 years older and whom I worked for at MIT and Thinking Machines, has been a guide and a help ever since. The other was Bill Dunn. I found those two men, both being very kind and smart, had the ability to know what was going to happen—even though they had way too little information. I’d always sort of note down their wild ideas and think, “Did they come about?”


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

“If a flush is not enough, a wireless button on the door activates a bidet and drying.” Tacked up beside that button, apparently for entertainment purposes, is a sheet of paper with “a geek quiz that changes every few weeks and asks technical questions about testing programming code for bugs.” I’m reminded of what Danny Hillis, the distinguished computer scientist whose work on parallel processing paved the way for Google’s computer system, once said about the human race: We’re the metabolic thing, which is the monkey that walks around, and we’re the intelligent thing, which is a set of ideas and culture. And those two things have coevolved together, because they helped each other.


The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

There is also no distinction between software and hardware in neural networks. Learning takes place by making changes to the hardware. Starting in the 1980s, when clusters of computers were assembled in one rack, digital computers have become massively parallel. One of the earliest parallel computers was the Connection Machine, designed by Danny Hillis in 1985 and sold by Thinking Machines, Inc. An engineer and inventor, Hillis trained at MIT when it was becoming clear that much more computational power would be needed to make artificial intelligence achieve solutions to immensely complex real-world problems. As the number of transistors on a computer chip continued to increase according to Moore’s law in the 1990s, it became possible to put many processing units on the same chip, many chips on the same board, many boards in the same cabinet, and many cabinets in the same room—with the result that today the fastest computers on the planet have millions of cores and can achieve many millions of billions of operations per second.


pages: 402 words: 110,972

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

But they all do it using wetware that we understand well enough to appreciate the crucial lessons for the next generation of AI paradigms. There is massive parallelism. Computation is going on all over the place, not in one instruction stream. Brains do not have accumulators. AI went parallel. Thinking Machines, founded by computational superstar Danny Hillis (son-in-law of Marvin Minsky, the pope of symbolic AI), gathered some of the leading lights to build and program massive machines with up to 64K (65,536) processors. That is a lot more than one, but still a lot less than the 100 billion neurons in the brain. You don’t need a machine with a billion processors to try out solutions that would use them.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

During the 1990s, in addition to writing his second book, he took two sabbaticals in an effort to hurry the process of perfecting the ability to permit machines to see and understand their environments so they could navigate and move freely. The first sabbatical he spent in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Danny Hillis’s Thinking Machines Corporation, where Moravec hoped to take advantage of a supercomputer. But the new supercomputer, the CM-5, wasn’t ready. So he contented himself with refining his code on a workstation while waiting for the machine. By the end of his stay, he realized that he only needed to wait for the power of a supercomputer to come to his desktop rather than struggle to restructure his code so it would run on a special-purpose machine.


pages: 353 words: 355

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

Collyns and O'Brien also gave feedback to the manuscript, along with Katherine Fulton, a GBN principal, and Steven Weber, a professor of political science at the University of California Berkeley and an independent consultant with GBN. The Global Business Network of interesting minds also contributed directly or indirectly. Those who were especially helpful include Eric Drexler, founder of the Foresight Institute; Amory Lovins, of the Rocky Mountain Institute; Bo Ekman, Chairman of Nextwork; Danny Hillis, Disney Fellow; Doug Carlston, founder of Broderbund Software; and Brian Eno, musician and artist. Individuals from several GBN member companies were especially supportive of the ideas: Johan nic Void of Statoil, Goren Lindahl of ABB, the European-based energy firm, Doug Glen of Mattel, and Goren Collert of Swedbank.


pages: 523 words: 143,139

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, cognitive load, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, constrained optimization, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Sedaris, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, double helix, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, first-price auction, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google Chrome, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Lao Tzu, Leonard Kleinrock, level 1 cache, linear programming, martingale, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, NP-complete, P = NP, packet switching, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert X Cringely, Sam Altman, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, sorting algorithm, spectrum auction, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman, Turing machine, urban planning, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

So there’s a lot to look forward to in being that late-afternoon restaurant regular, savoring the fruits of a life’s explorations. 3 Sorting Making Order Nowe if the word, which thou art desirous to finde, begin with (a) then looke in the beginning of this Table, but if with (v) looke towards the end. Againe, if thy word beginne with (ca) looke in the beginning of the letter (c) but if with (cu) then looke toward the end of that letter. And so of all the rest. &c. —ROBERT CAWDREY, A TABLE ALPHABETICALL (1604) Before Danny Hillis founded the Thinking Machines corporation, before he invented the famous Connection Machine parallel supercomputer, he was an MIT undergraduate, living in the student dormitory, and horrified by his roommate’s socks. What horrified Hillis, unlike many a college undergraduate, wasn’t his roommate’s hygiene.


pages: 696 words: 143,736

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

Hey, I don’t have one, remember I’m stuck in 1999. TOO BAD. I GUESS I’LL JUST HAVE TO VISIT YOU MYSELF THEN. “Smaller, more powerful chips allow me to have a smaller head.” CHAPTER ELEVEN 2029 I’m as fond of my body as anyone else, but if I can be 200 with a body of silicon, I’ll take it. —Danny Hillis The Computer Itself A $1,000 unit of computation (in circa-1999 dollars) has the computing capacity of approximately 1,000 human brains (1,000 times 20 million billion—that is, 2 times 1019—calculations per second). Of the total computing capacity of the human species (that is, all human brains) combined with the computing technology humans initiated the creation of, more than 99 percent is nonhuman.1 The vast majority of “computes” of nonhuman computing is now conducted on massively parallel neural nets, much of which is based on the reverse engineering of the human brain.


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

This harmonic resonance between magic and code is why teenaged nerd programmers of the early ’80s hybridized so fluently with Dungeons & Dragons (a game that merged fantasy with probabilistic dice-rolling math), or the spell-uttering wizards of Tolkien’s epics. In the ’60s, when programmers invented a type of code that would constantly run in the background, they called it a “daemon.” When he created the computer language Perl, Larry Wall, the computer scientist, included a function called “Bless.” As the coder Danny Hillis once noted, “A few hundred years ago in my native New England, an accurate description of my occupation would have gotten me burned at the stake.” This sense of magical control can be intoxicating and fun; it lends itself frequently to a sort of starry-eyed idealism. And it can also lead, particularly in younger coders—who’ve yet to be humbled by life and their own screw-ups—to some epic hubris.


The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, back-to-the-land, Claude Shannon: information theory, correlation does not imply causation, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Danny Hillis, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, domesticated silver fox, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, invisible hand, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, phenotype, precautionary principle, Thomas Malthus

Detailed DNA comparisons will fill in all the gaps in our knowledge about the actual evolutionary relatedness of every species to every other: we shall know, with complete certainty, the entire family tree of all living creatures.* Goodness knows how we’ll plot it; it won’t fit on any practical-sized sheet of paper. ‘Hodgkin’s Law’ The largest-scale attempt in that direction so far has been made by a group associated with David Hillis, brother of Danny Hillis who pioneered one of the first supercomputers. The Hillis plot makes the tree diagram more compact by wrapping it around in a circle. You can’t see the gap, where the two ends almost meet, but it lies between the ‘bacteria’ and the ‘archaea’. To see how the circular plot works, look at the greatly stripped-down version tattooed on the back of Dr Clare D’Alberto of the University of Melbourne, whose enthusiasm for zoology is more than skin deep.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

This led to a qualitative difference in how quickly information was transmitted, and magnified its impact. Now news, ideas, and images propagate across the global brain in seconds rather than weeks or months. In one sense, this is nothing new. There has always been a global brain. As recounted by Jeff Bezos in a 2005 talk at my Emerging Technology Conference, computer scientist Danny Hillis once said to him that “global consciousness is that thing that decided that decaffeinated coffeepots should be orange.” The idea that “orange means decaffeinated” originated during World War II, when Sanka promoted its decaffeinated coffee brand by giving away orange-rimmed coffeepots to restaurants across America.


Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, dark matter, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Ford Model T, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, IFF: identification friend or foe, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, SETI@home, social graph, speech recognition, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

Gabriella Bollobás translated a large body of correspondence, interpreting not only the nuances of the Hungarian language, but also the emotional and intellectual context of Budapest at that time. Belá Bollobás, Marion Brodhagen, Freeman Dyson, Joseph Felsenstein, Holly Given, David Alan Grier, Danny Hillis, Verena Huber-Dyson, Jennifer Jacquet, Harris Mayer, and Alvy Ray Smith offered comments on early drafts. Akrevoe Kondopria Emmanouilides, who typed and proofread the Institute for Advanced Study Electronic Computer Project’s progress reports as a teenager in 1946, found errors that might otherwise have been missed.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

., Transcription of “Information and Communications,” Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future, Chautauquas for Congress, March 1979, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, June 12, 1979; Cindy Skrzycki, “The Tekkie on the Ticket,” The Washington Post, October 18, 1992, H1; Interview with W. Daniel Hillis, “Al Gore, ‘the Ozone Man,’” Web of Stories, https://www.webofstories.com/play/danny.hillis/173, archived at https://perma.cc/KGK5-NKWB. 15. High Performance Computing Act of 1991, P.L. 102-194. A decade later, as a sitting Vice President running against George W. Bush for the top job, Gore inelegantly declared that he “took the initiative in creating the Internet,” precipitating widespread mockery by political opponents, pundits, and late-night comedians.


pages: 945 words: 292,893

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

Apollo 13, Biosphere 2, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Danny Hillis, digital map, double helix, epigenetics, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, kremlinology, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, machine readable, microbiome, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, phenotype, Potemkin village, pre–internet, random walk, remote working, selection bias, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, statistical model, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tunguska event, VTOL, zero day, éminence grise

Thus by late 2006 I had come up with the basic premise of Seveneves. So the first acknowledgment goes to Blue Origin, which was founded circa 2000 by Jeff Bezos under the name Blue Operations LLC and where I had many interesting early conversations with him and other people involved with the company, including Jaime Taaffe, Maria Kaldis, Danny Hillis, George Dyson, and Keith Rosema. It was from Keith that I first heard the idea for the multilayered emergency shelter bubble that appears in this book under the name of Luk. Some of the Baikonur material is very freely adapted from the reminiscences and photographs of George Dyson, Esther Dyson, and Charles Simonyi.


pages: 1,087 words: 325,295

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

anthropic principle, cellular automata, Danny Hillis, double helix, information security, interchangeable parts, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, phenotype, selection bias, Snow Crash, Stewart Brand, trade route

“It makes you wonder about the Cousins,” I said, thinking back to a wild notion that Arsibalt had raised last night: that the Cousins might have come, not just from another solar system, but from another cosmos. “Yes,” Criscan said, “it makes you wonder about the Cousins.” ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ANATHEM COULD NOT HAVE been written had the following not come first: the Millennium Clock project being carried out by Danny Hillis and his collaborators at the Long Now Foundation, including Stewart Brand and Alexander Rose. a philosophical lineage that can be traced from Thales through Plato, Leibniz, Kant, Gödel, and Husserl. the Orion project of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The author is, therefore, indebted to many more people than can comfortably be listed on a traditional acknowledgments page.


pages: 1,178 words: 388,227

Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

Danny Hillis, dark matter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Free Software Foundation, gentleman farmer, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, retrograde motion, short selling, short squeeze, Snow Crash, the scientific method, trade route, urban planning

Why put the information on such a complicated system, when a simple FAQ is easier? Because we are hoping that the annotations of the book on this site will seed a body of knowledge called the Metaweb, which will eventually be something more generally useful than a list of FAQs about one and only one novel. The idea of the Metaweb was originated by Danny Hillis. My own view of the Metaweb is pretty straightforward: I don’t think that the Internet, as it currently exists, does a very good job of explaining things to people. It is great for selling stuff, distributing news and dirty pictures, and a few other things. But when you need to get a good explanation of something, whether it is a scientific principle, a bit of gardening advice, or how to change a tire, you have to sift through a vast number of pages to find the one that gives you the explanation that is right for you.