Book: The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
Quotes of Book: The Innovators: How a Group of
a harbinger of a third wave of computing, one that blurred the line between augmented human intelligence and artificial intelligence. "The first generation of computers were machines that counted and tabulated," Rometty says, harking back to IBM's roots in Herman Hollerith's punch-card tabulators used for the 1890 census. "The second generation involved programmable machines that used the von Neumann architecture. You had to tell them what to do." Beginning with Ada Lovelace, people wrote algorithms that instructed these computers, step by step, how to perform tasks. "Because of the proliferation of data," Rometty adds, "there is no choice but to have a third generation, which are systems that are not programmed, they learn."27 But even as this occurs, the process could remain one of partnership and symbiosis with humans rather than one designed to relegate humans to the dustbin of history. Larry Norton, a breast cancer specialist at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, was part of the team that worked with Watson. "Computer science is going to evolve rapidly, and medicine will evolve with it," he said. "This is coevolution. We'll help each other."28 This belief that machines and humans will get smarter together is a process that Doug Engelbart called "bootstrapping" and "coevolution."29 It raises an interesting prospect: perhaps no matter how fast computers progress, artificial intelligence may never outstrip the intelligence of the human-machine partnership. Let us assume, for example, that a machine someday exhibits all of the mental capabilities of a human: giving the outward appearance of recognizing patterns, perceiving emotions, appreciating beauty, creating art, having desires, forming moral values, and pursuing goals. Such a machine might be able to pass a Turing Test. It might even pass what we could call the Ada Test, which is that it could appear to "originate" its own thoughts that go beyond what we humans program it to do. There would, however, be still another hurdle before we could say that artificial intelligence has triumphed over augmented intelligence. We can call it the Licklider Test. It would go beyond asking whether a machine could replicate all the components of human intelligence to ask whether the machine accomplishes these tasks better when whirring away completely on its own or when working in conjunction with humans. In other words, is it possible that humans and machines working in partnership will be indefinitely more powerful than an artificial intelligence machine working alone? book-quotewere creating crawlers that would serve as search tools for the Web. These included the WWW Wanderer built by Matthew Gray at MIT, WebCrawler by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington, AltaVista by Louis Monier at the Digital Equipment Corporation, Lycos by Michael Mauldin at Carnegie Mellon University, OpenText by a team from Canada's University of Waterloo, and Excite by six friends from Stanford. All of them used link-hopping robots, or bots, that could dart around the Web like a binge drinker on a pub crawl, scarfing up URLs and information about each site. This would then be tagged, indexed, and placed in a database that could be accessed by a query server. Filo and Yang did not build their own web crawler; instead they decided to license one to add to their home page. Yahoo! continued to emphasize the importance of its directory, which was compiled by humans. When a user typed in a phrase, the Yahoo! computers would see if it related to an entry in the directory, and if so that handcrafted list of sites would pop up. If not, the query would be handed off to the Web-crawling search engine. The Yahoo! team believed, mistakenly, that most users would navigate the Web by exploring rather than seeking something specific. "The shift from exploration and discovery to the intent-based search of today was inconceivable," recalled Srinija Srinivasan, Yahoo!'s first editor in chief, who oversaw a newsroom of more than sixty young editors and directory compilers.114 This reliance on the human factor meant that Yahoo! would be much better than its rivals over the years {and even to the present} in choosing news stories, although not in providing search tools. book-quoteBy the time I got to work, I had this realization that I didn't have any more goals."26 For the next two months, he assiduously tended to the task of finding for himself a worthy life goal. "I looked at all the crusades people could join, to find out how I could retrain myself." What struck him was that any effort to improve the world was complex. He thought about people who tried to fight malaria or increase food production in poor areas and discovered that led to a complex array of other issues, such as overpopulation and soil erosion. To succeed at any ambitious project, you had to assess all of the intricate ramifications of an action, weigh probabilities, share information, organize people, and more. "Then one day, it just dawned on me-BOOM-that complexity was the fundamental thing," he recalled. "And it just went click. If in some way, you could contribute significantly to the way humans could handle complexity and urgency, that would be universally helpful."27 Such an endeavor would address not just one of the world's problems; it would give people the tools to take on any problem. book-quoteIn 1907 the American Telephone and Telegraph Company faced a crisis. The patents of its founder, Alexander Graham Bell, had expired, and it seemed in danger of losing its near-monopoly on phone services. Its board summoned back a retired president, Theodore Vail, who decided to reinvigorate the company by committing to a bold goal: building a system that could connect a call between New York and San Francisco. The challenge required combining feats of engineering with leaps of pure science. Making use of vacuum tubes and other new technologies, AT&T built repeaters and amplifying devices that accomplished the task in January 1915. On the historic first transcontinental call, in addition to Vail and President Woodrow Wilson, was Bell himself, who echoed his famous words from thirty-nine years earlier, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you." This time his former assistant Thomas Watson, who was in San Francisco, replied, "It would take me a week."1 book-quote
