If Doug Lenat Made Movies: Driving Son of HAL Crazy
Author: Bill H. Ritchie, Jr.
Subject: Turning points are features of a written script for a movie or
plays that carry the audience from one event to another. The sequence is a
combination gives us Acts I, II, and III. An Internet company, Cycorp, likewise
develops dramatically along a course.
Statistics: 1725
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Copyright 2000 Bill H. Ritchie, Jr.
Turning points in the careers of computer business owners read like plots
in the movies. For example, take Doug Lenat, the man who walked away from
Stanford University 15 years ago and now owns Cycorp, the newly formed Internet
Company. He lives in Texas now, and gets visitors from all over the country who
are seeking to partner with him and his company.
Lenat, in turn, is visiting other Internet businesses. Where he is going
from one week to the next is unpredictable, but one thing I think I can count
on is that his basic concept for the company is going to stay. Like the light
bulb, the automobile and the telephone, his idea is hard to accept by
traditional conservative, old-time folks but even more difficult to understand.
The reason is because the heart of his company depends on something called Artificial
Intelligence, and takes on metaphoric and symbolic names like engine and
foundations when, in fact, no such things exist as we know them.
The real world of engines and foundations is that of places, even if an engine
is something speeding down a highway at seventy miles an hour. We get to our
destination--a camping ground or a racetrack—and the meaning of foundation
is apparent: bricks and mortar, or the stay-put for buildings, signposts and
high rise towers. Even an underground tunnel has some kind of foundation. The
nearest thing to commonplace experiences without foundations is air and
sea travel. In a curious way, these are connected to Lenat’s vision that made
him jump ship, as it were, and leave academia. It was a turning point in his
career. He saw a network that was independent of time and place.
The turning point in Lenat’s story reads like a Robin Williams script (Dead
Poets Society, Patch). According to an essay in Hal’s Legacy by
David Stork, Lenat’s first turning point came in 1984—a year that stands for
many people as a memory of an Orwellian infamous Big Brother mind-makeover. In
Lenat’s words:
“In the
fall of 1984, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman convinced me that if I was serious about
taking that first step, I needed to leave academia and come to his newly formed
MCC (Microelectronics and Computer Consortium) in Austin, Texas, and assemble a
team to do it. The idea was that over the next decade dozens of individuals
would create a program, CYC, with common sense. We would "prime the
knowledge pump" by handcrafting and spoon-feeding CYC with a couple of
million important facts and rules of thumb. The goal was to give CYC enough
knowledge by the late 1990s to enable it to learn more by means of natural
language conversations and reading (step 2). Soon thereafter, say by 2001, we
planned to have it learning on its own, by automated-discovery methods guided
by models or mini-theories of the real world (step 3).”[i]
I picture Lenat and his team as powering up a kind of “Baby HAL,” a solar
powered toy-like inference engine loose in cyberspace. It wanders among the Web
sites and other nodes of the World Wide Web, noting turning points on the
Information Superhighway. Its engine would make notes methodically taking
snapshots of the sites, collecting data as it went along until it resembled--on
a computer display--the mind of a common-sensed human being.
One day I pictured myself looking up from my artist’s workbench and
noticing Lenat’s obedient robot peering in the window of my art studio and
gallery. But now my studio is different, because of what happened to me in
1985. Instead of a real window, an opening in the foundation of my old home, I
open Microsoft Windows. In CYC-simulated, plain talk, common sense English,
Baby HAL asks, “What are you doing?” And I answer: “I am making a print.” It’s
like the Mr. Science and Jimmy scenario (or Bill Nye, the Science Guy),
where the unschooled ask for answers from the authority on an art, craft or
design technique. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, in a less scholarly fashion,
snitched a piece of the Wizard’s trade secrets, techniques and instrumentation.
The common sense belief that I find challenging is the statement that you
cannot teach and learn, research and practice hands-on experiences with a
computer. That might drive Baby HAL crazy, because learning how to do prints is
based on pure information.
From art to dentistry, they say it can’t be done, anyway. But I’ve seen it
too many times: Welding courses, for example, required of airplane mechanics
that are computer and laser-optical data based, and a woodcut course I was part
of that was carried on in different parts of the world. As early as 1980 I
witnessed telemedicine developments that linked the University Hospital with a
surgery procedures taking place thousands of miles away. If these can be
conceived and believed, they can be, and have been, achieved.
A turning point came for
me at Seattle’s UW Hospital video studios, where a satellite uplink to Omak,
Alaska originated, I learned that a teaching hospital practiced, research and
taught all at once, under the same roof. I reasoned that art education
could—and should—be handled in the same way. To a large extent, that's just
what I started doing in 1970 with a special class called “A Printmaking
Seminar.” After 30 years, at the end of 1999, the Emeralda game method of play
was mature enough to spin off from a spare bedroom in my condo to the backroom
of Lake Union Dentistry. Emeralda Works (my new company) will test the concept
and proceed to commercialize the method of play.
I began a narrowly aimed
deployment the way they built the Boeing 777: Concurrently marketing,
designing, producing and selling it. The Boeing Company wanted help airline
companies market and sell passenger seats and fill cargo holds. My purpose was
to build nothing more nor less than to sell lodging in multimedia arts
colonies, taking a nuts-and-bolts economic engineering approach to the whole
project and connecting with the intellectual capital of artists, crafts people
and designers.
Driving Son of HAL Crazy
Doug Lenat said the first
problem he faced was what knowledge to represent. In the arts, crafts and
design sector, it was printmaking knowledge. Art encyclopedias play an
important role, but they contain is almost the negative of common sense about
art. And they’ve got printmaking listed all wrong. I assume that users already
have a rich database of what art is and they possess common sense. They can
read, copy pictures and text with machines, and even provide the next level of
detail for reference purposes.
Lenat said he couldn't
use encyclopedias for their content directly, but he could still use their
information indirectly when he built CYC on the HAL model. I could use what I
knew directly, videotape it and then use it to teach indirectly. I could take
any sentence from a tape and turn it into an article. I had to think about what
the reader already knows about the world of art and printmaking. Then I felt I
had something worth telling students, art collectors and other teachers.
Then came another turning
point in my story when I learned hypertext, I learned to take a word or a
paragraph and leap from one process to another. I learned to think about what
the artist, scholar, publisher, printer and curator assume the art collector
will infer about the artwork. It took me several years of teaching drawing,
systems theory and design and printmaking to know that the old ways I had been
taught would not continue for long.
For instance, back in
1967 my first encounter with the art of Rolf Nesch’s print Snake Eater excited
me because it was alive. I thought I had to connect with him, meet him face to
face in his own studio. After all, he was the last living member of the German
Expressionist printmakers and Edvard Munch. But how could I meet him? And, if I
succeeded, then what good would it do for my students? If they could not access
an in depth knowledge base of my experience, I might as well invest in
something else.
It was in this way, for
many years, that I was largely driven by bottom-up, grassroots examples of this
sort. I worked with beginners and pioneers in classrooms, studios, workshops,
community projects, and so on. I was young, after all, fresh out of Graduate
School and the same age as my students. Then, since 1969, a turning point came
when I worked in a more top-down fashion, treating entire topics one at a time
and in increasing detail and interconnections.
After my first trip to
Europe to see Nesch, I wrote this turning point in my journal:
“Back in Seattle, Saturday, June 21, 1969: Now I am also
planning to use a transmitting device to transmit my work to other parts of the
world. Ours will be a corporation of artists working thus, and for a small fee
people may subscribe for these materials, and literally hundreds of works will
pour through their receivers each week--many of which are discarded--like old
newspapers. And the subscribers will be at his leisure to choose and pick whichever
he likes of it. The earliest ones will be sent via wire photo and by related
devices, which are appearing, and the intention of which is to transmit
truth.
“Heretofore the media of news have been exploiting
transmitted images and television (in some forms) for their purpose, but this
will not exclude artists and others to get in on the medium too; indeed, their
introduction to these perfected systems will undoubtedly lead to improvements
on the devices.”
By 1985, I had told my
students about hundreds of ways their art, craft and design would matter in the
future, and how these would be represented (or transmitted) to the whole wide
world. It was a kind of Perfect Studios, built the way teaching hospitals were
built. That brought up the next issue: When and where in the world would it
happen? And, if so, then how should that knowledge, today, be acquired and
represented?
After the first phase of
the project—laying the foundation-building technique for virtual multimedia
arts colonies—we had the answer in the form of our first turning point: An
online, interactive, hyper linked computer game. It started out as Art
Student: Everything you need to know. Today it is Emeralda: The Games
for the Gifts of Life.
(To be continued)