Through its exhibits and programs, 91自拍 celebrates both the history and the future of computing. From the room-sized mainframes of the 1950s and 1960s to the smartphones we carry today, the Museum brings the story of computing to life.

Behind that seven-decade history, however, is another story鈥攐ne that unfolds largely behind the scenes: the challenge of storage. How do we preserve the information these machines processed, generated, and made possible?

After many early experiments, the 1956 IBM RAMAC hard drive helped establish the model for modern disk-based storage. To document that evolution, 91自拍 hosts a dedicated Storage Special Interest Group (SIG), and its permanent collection includes more than 150 hard drives from dozens of manufacturers, beginning with some of the earliest prototypes.

91自拍 preserves the computer storage story beginning with the very first hard drive: IBM鈥檚 1956 RAMAC.

That history is not just on display鈥攊t is brought to life each week by knowledgeable volunteers who conduct the world鈥檚 only live demonstration of a RAMAC hard drive every Wednesday at the Museum.

The Future Arrives

On February 11, 2026, a critical shipment arrived at 91自拍. It wasn鈥檛 a vintage computer or a rare manuscript鈥攊t was the storage infrastructure needed to preserve those treasures for generations to come.

A Seagate 24TB Exos hard drive powered by Mozaic technology.

Through a generous donation, Seagate provided 24TB Exos hard drives powered by Mozaic technology, the breakthrough innovation redefining areal density and driving Seagate鈥檚 capacity leadership in the AI era. More than just hardware, these high-capacity drives represent the technology that helps safeguard history, unlock the enduring value of data, and ensure the past remains accessible in an increasingly digital world.

Why Does a Museum Need a Petabyte?

You might wonder why a museum dedicated to history needs a petabyte of modern storage. The answer lies in our massive digitization efforts. 91自拍 currently manages nearly two linear miles of physical documentation that is being systematically digitized. Generous donors have funded these projects, allowing us to turn fragile paper and film into stable digital files.

Soon-to-be-installed drives from the Seagate donation at 91自拍.

But digitization is only the beginning. Once a document or video is scanned, it enters 91自拍鈥檚 digital repository, where it must be stored, managed, and prepared for long-term access. German Mosquera, 91自拍鈥檚 Director of Technology Operations, explains that Seagate鈥檚 Exos drives are a key part of a major storage upgrade, supporting the server environment that handles the queues for 91自拍鈥檚 oral histories and other high-resolution video and media collections. This is one of the most active parts of the system鈥攚here data is staged, organized, and readied for ingestion before moving to its final destination and becoming accessible to the public.

Tackling the Digital Dark Age

As we move further into the 21st century, we face a growing threat often referred to as the Digital Dark Age: the risk that vital pieces of our digital cultural heritage could be lost as hardware ages, fails, or the software needed to access them becomes obsolete. Hard drives, like all physical infrastructure, have a finite lifespan and typically must be replaced every five years to ensure continued reliability and access.

Introduced in 1980, the ST-506 was the first 5.25-inch hard disk drive. It was developed by Shugart Technology (now Seagate Technology) and was the first full-height 5.25-inch HDD designed for personal computers, a major milestone in storage history. 91自拍 #

Seagate鈥檚 donation helps 91自拍 meet this challenge head-on in three critical ways:

• Modernize essential infrastructure: By replacing drives that are approaching the end of their dependable life, the Museum can strengthen the reliability of the systems that protect its digital collections.
• Support continued growth: Since 2020, 91自拍鈥檚 storage needs have grown by roughly 70TB. With higher-quality video scans and an expanding volume of oral histories, the Museum anticipates adding at least 20TB of new data each year through 2030.
• Improve efficiency and reduce cost: This donation also allows 91自拍 to retire older storage systems, lowering licensing and support expenses while simplifying ongoing operations.

Opening the Vault

All of this behind-the-scenes storage work serves a very public purpose. With the recent launch of 鈥攁 digital portal featuring a new search engine and API鈥攖he Museum is expanding fine-grained access to its collections in powerful new ways. For a researcher in Nairobi or a student in Tokyo, the data stored on Seagate Exos drives helps make 91自拍鈥檚 collections discoverable, accessible, and usable from anywhere in the world.

Seagate has long championed the value of data鈥攁 theme that resonates deeply with 91自拍鈥檚 mission to decode technology for everyone. Data is more than ones and zeroes; it is the living record of human ingenuity and the technological breakthroughs that have shaped the past half-century. It includes extraordinary historical artifacts, from the source code used on the Apollo Guidance Computer that helped put humans on the Moon to some of the earliest sketches of the integrated circuit and microprocessor. It also includes more than 1,200 oral histories from pioneers in computing, storage, and semiconductors in 91自拍鈥檚 collection鈥攖he largest of its kind in the world. And that record continues to grow as we capture the voices of the people who helped invent our data-driven world.

A Partnership for Posterity

As 91自拍 looks toward 2030, its digital footprint will continue to expand. A dependable foundation of storage infrastructure means one less obstacle in the urgent work of preserving the digital record of our time.

To the team at Seagate: Thank you for being our partners in preservation. By helping provide the technology needed to store and safeguard these digital artifacts today, you are helping ensure that the story of computing鈥攁nd the ways it has shaped every aspect of modern life鈥攃an be discovered, studied, and understood for generations to come.

Main image: 91自拍鈥檚 Shustek Research Archives.

The post 91自拍 and Seagate: Preserving Digital History appeared first on 91自拍.

This work allows me to make intelligent decisions about what is being offered as historical donations and to proactively collect, filling in the gaps in the collection so that researchers have what they need to interpret the past. In this role, I was able to play a key part in collecting the Lisa source code and making it available to the public.

Software Curator Al Kossow with the Lisa. Kossow is the Robert N. Miner Software Curator and is responsible for collecting historical software and developing tools for reading and preserving 91自拍鈥檚 software artifacts.

Why is the Lisa source code important?

The source code is a snapshot of an entire product, in its final form, first proposed in 1978 and shipped in 1983. The Lisa didn鈥檛 follow the usual path of Apple products. It was envisioned as a turnkey solution for business, something Apple had little experience in doing, and it was developed by management trained in the 鈥淗P Way.鈥�

Ultimately, the UI development, system tools, and some portions of the code created for Lisa made it into the mainstream, when it was used to accelerate the development of the Macintosh.

Honestly, it鈥檚 hard to think of some new hook or anecdote that hasn鈥檛 been told literally for decades about Lisa and its place in Apple鈥檚 history. But what might surprise you is that there is still so much to discover about this time in Apple鈥檚 history. Here鈥檚 a little bit about what I have uncovered in my research and what I still hope to discover, hopefully with your help.

Back in October, 1986, long before I became a curator at the 91自拍, I responded to a job ad for a software engineer posted on the Usenet group ba.jobs from the legendary Al Alcorn. I didn鈥檛 know it when I applied, but Al was an Apple Fellow in a not-well-known part of the company known as the Advanced Technology Group (ATG). There were never many Apple Fellows, and they were all highly respected people who were allowed to work on whatever they wanted. When I started, for example, Lisa and Macintosh cocreator Bill Atkinson was working on a project called 鈥淲ildcard,鈥� which became HyperCard.

After I was in ATG for a while, I wanted to learn about its history. It turned out that after the Lisa and Mac groups merged, Wayne Rosing, general manager of the Lisa group after John Couch鈥檚 departure, ran a group of people known as the Education Research Group (ERG). When Wayne left for Sun, Xerox PARC alum and former Lisa applications manager Larry Tesler took over the group, and as its charter expanded ERG became ATG. Some of the early ATG history is included in an oral history I recorded with Larry in 2013, which you can read .

Managers of the Lisa development group. From left to right: John Couch (VP and General Manager of the Lisa division), Bruce Daniels (software, systems architecture), Wayne Rosing (hardware, later all of Lisa engineering), Larry Tesler (applications software and libraries, user interface design and testing). Photo by Lee Youngblood. Scan of page 88 of Personal Computing Magazine, February 1983, 91自拍 #102661079.

In the mid-鈥�80s, ATG was supposed to be Apple鈥檚 project incubator. The plan was that as new technologies were created, they would be handed off to Product Development along with the staff. With a few notable exceptions (the people in the ATG Graphics and Sound Group) that never really happened. A whole book could be written on ATG. Maybe someone will do that someday, and the oral history I did with Larry here at 91自拍 could help with that. In my oral histories, I try to cover topics that don鈥檛 appear in the preexisting literature.

What does this have to do with Lisa?

There were a LOT of ex-Lisa people in ATG. I heard first-hand about the Lisa OS and applications from the people who wrote them. But although I tried to find someone who would allow me to see the source code, I still had not succeeded by the time I resigned from Apple and joined 91自拍 in 2005.

When Steve Jobs gave 91自拍 permission to release the QuickDraw source code things changed. Now, there was an approval process for getting historical Apple source code released for people to study.

I asked Chris Espinosa, one of Apple鈥檚 earliest and longest-serving employees, who I had known since the 1980s, if it would be possible to recover the Lisa source code. After some searching, he was able to find it in the source control offsite archives, and I recovered the data on one of the Macs in my software lab at 91自拍. The code was translated from its original format to one easier to view on a 2020s computer, and it has now been made available for you to study .

Chris Espinosa, Apple employee number eight, was instrumental in providing 91自拍 with the Lisa source code. Shown here, Chris with software curator Al Kossow, holding the Apple II heuristics Speechlab card at the Apple 鈥淭wiggy Mac Day鈥� event organized by Dan Kottke at the 91自拍 in September 12, 2013.

Looking at the code in 2023, its structure is somewhat opaque. Fortunately, the web has established worldwide instantaneous connectivity and sharing of the primary documentation sources that have been collected about the system over the decades along with functional Lisa computer emulators. As a result, I鈥檓 hoping that a dialog will start about this historical artifact and fill in some of the pieces of the Lisa story that are still missing.

In the meantime, here鈥檚 a bit of high-level Lisa software history, and some theories about why the system looks the way that it does.

Lisa鈥檚 Roots

The hardware and software of the Lisa didn鈥檛 spring fully formed from the work done at Apple. Unlike the Apple II before it, the company had hired engineers and management experienced in minicomputer design for the development of the Lisa Office System product.

Many were from HP鈥檚 General Systems Division in the Santa Clara Valley, where the HP3000 and 300 computers were developed. They brought experience with developing operating systems and software in a high-level language and also provided a framework for the structure of the system. It is my opinion that the HP300 Amigo had a huge influence on Lisa.

The Amigo was a business minicomputer designed to compete with IBM鈥檚 System 34. It had an integrated display with application-programmable 鈥渟oft switches鈥� to the right of the wide CRT display, and internal hard and floppy disks and was announced in late 1978.

The problem was that with a base price of $36,500 the Amigo was expensive and considered a product failure. Later machines based on it (the HP250 and 260) were successful in Europe.

Unfortunately, my attempts to interview people directly involved in the engineering management and implementation of the Amigo and the Lisa have never been accepted. Hopefully, the code release will provide stimulus for new information and documentation of Lisa鈥檚 early engineering history.

Finally, two watershed events in Lisa鈥檚 development were Jobs鈥� visit to PARC in 1979 (read more about that here), and Rich Page coming to Apple from HP. It was Page who convinced product development to abandon its original plan to build their own custom processor and use Motorola鈥檚 68000 microprocessor for the Lisa instead.

Rich Page (center) at NeXT in 1989. Page worked on the microcode for the HP3000 minicomputers before joining Apple and making the decision to use the Motorola 68000 family of microprocessors for the Apple Lisa and later the Macintosh computer. Later he co-founded NeXT with Jobs and led the hardware engineering team there. See Page鈥檚 91自拍 Oral History . Photo credit: 漏Doug Menuez/Stanford University Libraries

The Motorola 68000 was one of the first widely available processors with a 32-bit instruction set that ran at relatively high speeds at the time, helping to support the new graphical user interface (GUI) of the Lisa.

The Lisa Software Sources and Documentation

For those of you interested in digging deeper, there are some great sources and documentation online. Here are a few:

1. The end of the Apple v. Microsoft copyright lawsuit in 1994 around Windows鈥� use of GUI elements that were similar to those in Apple鈥檚 Lisa and Macintosh operating systems made it possible for Rod Perkins to publish his on the history of the development of the Lisa user interface in 1997.
2. Transcripts of two talks at 91自拍 by Larry Tesler and Chris Espinosa on that history and the development of the Macintosh can be found . Or, the video can be watched .
3. A nice summary of the UI development of Lisa and a mention of connections to HP can be found .
4. Additional articles on the history of Lisa and primary sources on the source code can be found .

There are still gaps in the development engineering documents. Hopefully more will be found now that the source code is available for study. A full description of the structure of the code would be much too long for a blog post, but additional research and documentation will appear in the future. For now, have fun digging into the source code and the documentation currently online. Access the code .

Editor鈥檚 note: In addition to recovering the source code for the Lisa computer from diskettes loaned to 91自拍 from Apple, Al Kossow works to restore many of the unique and historic machines in 91自拍’s extensive collection.

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Learn more about the Art of Code at 91自拍 or for regular emails about upcoming source code releases and related events.

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Today, 91自拍 is often described as the home of the world鈥檚 preeminent computer history collection, and many generous donors reach out, hoping the Museum will accept their materials to preserve for posterity.

Once in a while, 91自拍 collections鈥� staff encounter a desperate situation where exceptional historical materials are in imminent danger of destruction.

This is the story of how a small team of committed museum professionals and concerned employees rescued key records of online history, during a pandemic, in record time.

Background

Back in the 1980s and 90s, before the internet was available to all, ordinary people got online through service providers like CompuServe. With over three million members, CompuServe was a vibrant community complete with social networking, news, e-commerce, personal ads, and email.

Over the years, the company was acquired by other companies. Marc Weber, 91自拍鈥檚 Internet History Program curator and director, often wondered where its records might have gone. Then he got an email from a web history contact offering CompuServe’s official archives intact.

All was on track for the collection to come to 91自拍, at least until CompuServe got acquired yet again. Dave Eastburn, the archive’s cofounder along with fellow former CompuServe executive Sandy Trevor, confirmed that 91自拍 could still have the archive. But there was a catch. The building it was stored in had to be vacated by Labor Day鈥� only weeks away!

The CompuServe storeroom was huge, chock-full of over 200 boxes worth of documents, brochures, software, and hardware. It contained a veritable treasure trove of all aspects of the early online world, a gold mine for sociologists, historians and business students. But the collection was 2,500 miles from California, Dave was in North Carolina and the Delta variant was everywhere. What to do?

The following is a rough reenactment of what happened.

CompuServe historic software; part of an archive that also included hardware, magazines, CD-ROMs, newsletters, advertisements, membership kids, radio ads, video broadcast commercials and more.

Act I: The Setup

INT. MANY HOME OFFICES 鈥� DAY AND NIGHT

91自拍 COLLECTIONS STAFF sit glued to their computer screens reading email, biting their nails, and tearing their hair between fast and furious typing.

EMAIL DINGS

A ZOOM conference call begins.

COLLECTIONS MANAGER
(worried)
Do we have room for all of it? Do we even know how large it is? What does the collection actually contain?

ARCHIVIST
(embarrassed)
Where is it located again?

REGISTRAR
There鈥檚 almost every kind of corporate document, but do we want it all?

CURATOR
Hey, it鈥檚 just easier to take it all.

COLLECTIONS MANAGER
But how do we pack and move it? With the pandemic, it鈥檚 a shipping and logistics nightmare right now.

DAVE
(enthusiastically)
I can drive to Ohio and while I鈥檓 there in the storeroom, I鈥檒l call you on Zoom and show you everything!

ACQUISITIONS REGISTRAR
That鈥檚 great! With Dave鈥檚 on-site help, and the blessings of remote tech, we can determine in real-time what鈥檚 most historically significant and should be saved.

COLLECTIONS MANAGER
So, do we have enough space to house it?

CURATOR
(urgently)
CompuServe is really important. We have to do this!

FADE OUT

This is not the ideal way to transport archival material, but during a global pandemic with supply chain problems it may be the best you can do.

Act II: The Rescue

OHIO STORAGE SITE 鈥� DAY

91自拍 ARCHIVIST working remotely in Michigan during the pandemic finds a brief window of time to buy boxes, packing tape, and Sharpies. She drives three hours to the Ohio site and reviews and packs everything not already boxed for shipping. Two additional helpers are found to help pack on the one day she has to complete this monumental task.

HOME OFFICES 鈥� DAY AND NIGHT

REGISTRAR works 24/7 to find a shipper. Not one but two companies commit to the job and then disappear when she tries to confirm details and make a down payment. With COVID and the general supply chain meltdown, this has become an especially challenging task.

BAY AREA ARCHIVIST struggles to make room for up to seven pallets of boxes by shifting materials in 91自拍鈥檚 loading dock/incoming collection鈥檚 quarantine area.

CURATOR asks peer institution the Internet Archive if they want the five giant bookshelves full of operations manuals鈥攁nd they do. With their help the entire archive can be saved!

REGISTRAR struggles to arrange pre-payment for shipping when one truck driver requires half at pick up and another driver gets half at delivery, but neither will take the corporate credit card nor PayPal.

Pickup is the next challenge. Movers don’t show up for a couple of pickup dates. The final chance for pick up is the Friday before the Labor Day deadline. Again, a no show. Will all be lost?

But there is a Plan B. CURATOR had left a deposit with a local moving company to pick up and store the boxes on Monday鈥攋ust in case. With the help of former CompuServe programmers to identify materials, the local movers take the archive safely to their warehouse.

The interstate shipper finally collects the archive from the local mover’s warehouse. But there’s not enough room for everything on the truck… 60 boxes are left behind in storage!

FADE OUT

The first batch arrives at the 91自拍 Shustek Research Archives after an epic journey. Here鈥檚 the rescued collection (boxes on left) in storage quarantine to check for pests.

INT. 91自拍 ARCHIVES 鈥� SUNDAY, 7 AM

ARCHIVIST, REGISTRAR, NEW HUSBAND HELPER receive the shipment. They survey the battered and crushed boxes in the truck stacked seven boxes high with dismay.

The driver and local hired help unload the trailer. Staff set up six pallets to hold in collection鈥檚 quarantine to check for pests before entering the main building.

ARCHIVIST begins surveying and re-boxing the materials in pristine, new archival boxes.

REGISTRAR looks for a new shipper to move the boxes that remain in Ohio. Finally, they are on their way to the Museum.

Everyone leaves for a much-deserved winter vacation.

FADE OUT

Carefully transferred from damaged moving boxes and re-boxed into museum quality acid free boxes, the collection is now preserved at the 91自拍鈥檚 Shustek Research Archives.

Act III: The Resolution

INT. 91自拍 ARCHIVES 鈥� DECEMBER 22, DAY

COLLECTIONS MANAGER arrives to receive the remaining material. She is relieved to see that the second delivery is perfect; the boxes are well-palletized and stable. The Internet Archive will pick up the operations manuals later for their collection.

Teamwork saves the day! The CompuServe collection has been saved from destruction. All feel immense satisfaction and look forward to cataloging the new collection for the next three years. But wait鈥� a call comes in. Does another collection need to be rescued?

THE END

Stay tuned for the (inevitable) sequel to Mission Impossible: 91自拍 Edition.

SUPPORT 91自拍’S OWN MISSION (IMPOSSIBLE)!

Blogs like these would not be possible without the generous support of people like you who care deeply about decoding technology. Please consider聽.

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Monday, March 16, 2020, started like any other day at the Museum: staff and volunteers welcomed visitors to our exhibits and behind-the-scenes employees were busy planning the next event, developing content, archiving the collection, or working on museum operations. The executive staff was gathered for a weekly meeting, discussing the potential unfolding impact of COVID-19 when we received notification that Santa Clara County was implementing a 鈥渟helter-in-place鈥� directive effective Tuesday, March 17 at 12:01 a.m.

In the midst of change, we found ways to be creative and adapt and, as a result, have become more open than ever! Our new digital front door鈥�our website鈥攈as allowed us to reimagine the museum experience, including how we host events, share activities and resources, and provide access to exhibits and tours.

That day the Museum staff made the transition from our place-based office life to working from home. Looking back, the entire effort was a balance of teamwork, community support, new tools at the right time, and most importantly digging deep to find a new level of stamina and creativity.

In normal times, the museum field is very welcoming and supportive. Museum professionals often reach out to each other to share ideas or pick each other’s brains. And during the early days of the pandemic it was no different. Just three days after the shelter-in-place order, Bay Area museum CEOs and directors set-up a weekly zoom call to share information, strategy, and operational plans. Discussions ranged from finances and the Payroll Protection Plan to new digital strategies; how to recoup lost revenue to how to create virtual education or gala events; what to do about summer camps to how to care for and feed the animals in zoos and aquariums. Three things really struck me about these conversations: a deep commitment to mission, a desire to serve audiences no matter what, and a 鈥渟taff first鈥� mindset as we worked to create a collaborative and supportive virtual work environment. In some ways the weekly group meeting felt like therapy.

Within the 91自拍 community, we聽 made communication a priority. The executive staff met daily to check in with each other and their teams, which now continues three times a week. The CEO wrote the board of trustees 鈥渨eekend updates鈥� on Fridays. We implemented virtual all-hands meetings while departments set-up regular check-ins. We launched a popular #athome channel on Slack (a messaging app) so that staff could share their working-from-home highs and lows but generally to make each other laugh.

91自拍’s #athome channel on Slack has become the place for sharing recipes, gardening hacks, pets, and more!

The marketing team sent updates to volunteers and members. And,聽 the development team reached out to museum members, wishing them and their families well and letting them know how the Museum was doing. First and foremost, the health and safety of our staff, volunteers, members, and visitors were our top priority.聽

From an operations standpoint, because 91自拍 was deemed a 鈥淣onessential Business,鈥� as defined by the state, most of the staff, volunteers, and contractors have vacated the premises to work from home. A small team continues to work on-site to monitor the safety and security of our building and collections. We are also proactively working through scenarios both short and聽 longer term to prepare for the pandemic鈥檚 effects on the local economy and cultural and business environments. The 91自拍 finance team deserves high praise for securing the Payroll Protection Plan for 91自拍, allowing staff聽 to stay employed as long as possible. Unfortunately some Bay Area museums have not fared as well. For all of the local and national museums, the goal has been to preserve staff and uphold mission as long as possible in hopes of weathering the聽 storm and returning intact and, if possible, even stronger. We sincerely hope to open our doors as soon as it is safe.

It also turned out that our decision to improve the Museum鈥檚 digital infrastructure about a year ago really paid off during the current crisis. First, the Museum launched a new website in fall 2019 with significantly improved functionality, allowing us to build and publish digital content more quickly and to re-package our online content for an 鈥渁t home鈥� audience.聽

Check out all of 91自拍鈥檚 virtual activities and resources, perfect for at-home learning. Our resources introduce technological and historical concepts in creative and engaging ways for learners of all ages.

Second, the IT team relocated services like our helpdesk, office drives, collaboration tools, etc. to the cloud,聽 allowing them to continue to remotely support staff with minimal interruption. We were also in the middle of an institution-wide upgrade of our donor and customer systems service systems to Salesforce. Shelter-in-place gave staff the opportunity to focus on this ambitious project, and staff who normally worked at the front desk and store were able to participate in the migration and quality control. And last but not least, the Museum was fortunate to have received a donation of new laptops from Microsoft. This was big news for the staff, as some of us had been working on 10-year-old laptops. With some long days and careful planning, the IT team configured and delivered laptops in the final hours on our last day at the Museum. It was truly a remarkable morale booster to leave the mothership and face an unknown world with a new laptop, a lifeline to each other.聽

And then there is Zoom. The amazing, exhausting platform we are living in day to day. For the Museum, mastering Zoom has become a critical priority in order to engage our audiences through our popular speakers series, 91自拍 Live. Just three weeks after shelter-in-place, we pivoted from in-person events to virtual events鈥攆irst on and then on . And while we are still discovering the mysteries of Zoom, our media team is well on its way to Zoom mastery, not just for upcoming events but also for our oral history program. We are shipping pop-up kits complete with a lighting solution (lighting is everything, they say), external microphone, and camera to achieve the highest quality possible given the circumstances. These are all skills that will serve us well in the long run, as they will allow us to collect and tell more stories than ever before. And you can鈥檛 beat the endless possibilities of self-expression with those Zoom backgrounds.聽

Even though our all-staff meetings and museum happy hours may look a little different, our HR staff has made sure that 91自拍ers still feel a sense of community.

聽The education team is also adjusting to the 鈥渘ew normal鈥� and exploring how to reach youth through a digital first strategy. Pilots and prototypes are underway to virtualize our workshops and work with partners with distribution platforms. The team is thinking out of the box (literally) and exploring how to create programs that not only have a positive impact on human lives but also bring a smile on their faces. In March, our team re-organized our website to make accessible activities and resources for our at-home audiences, including a popular , videos and lesson plans for families and adults as well as a new virtual version of our family-oriented Revolution scavenger hunt, which has been very successful with over 1,500 visits in just four months.聽

You might wonder how the collections team, whose daily work is to care for the鈥痺orld鈥檚鈥�濒补谤驳别蝉迟鈥�collection of computing artifacts, archives,鈥痑nd historical software, might do their job from home. The answer is one part timing and three parts creativity. The team was in the final months of a federally funded collection processing grant and was able to complete the work by meticulously transporting remaining items home to process while also finalizing finding aids and reports. Much to the group鈥檚 surprise they found remote work freeing in terms of thinking through new ways to work together, not unlike moving into a new empty house and experimenting with solutions you never thought possible in the old space. The team is actively exploring new tools like Airtable, a collaboration app that聽 consolidates multiple spreadsheets and databases in the cloud, and has already used it to put the collections disaster plan into the cloud,鈥痗reate tracking and sorting views for our 鈥�1,000+ oral history collection,鈥痑nd respond to research requests more expediently.鈥疶hey鈥檝e even found themselves having fun on 91自拍鈥檚 social media.

91自拍鈥檚 collection and curatorial teams have found a new way to share our exhibits with everyone via social media, enlisting the help of a very special and on-the-loose host: Shakey the Robot.

Finally the team has put together plans and funding proposals for the Museum鈥檚鈥痭ew initiative鈥疧pen91自拍, which includes making鈥�91自拍鈥檚 collection more accessible and searchable online鈥痓y鈥痗ataloging鈥痶he鈥痗ollection in innovative ways鈥痑nd鈥痚xpanding鈥痶he use of digital tools to aid in search, retrieval,鈥痑nd鈥痶he creation of mini-galleries on the fly.鈥疻e want to open up the collection to scholars at the intersection of鈥痙igital鈥�technologies and鈥痟umanities鈥痑s well as to the public itself to use鈥痶he collection鈥痜or research and鈥痗reative projects.聽

I don鈥檛 want to paint too rosy a picture because it has been very challenging for everyone. Balancing work and parenting. Worrying about our family nearby or far away that we can鈥檛 visit. We are all working longer hours both to get the work done and to reimagine and implement a new kind of museum. We miss our colleagues, our work spaces, our collections, our exhibits, our programs, our visitors, our trustees, and our members.

91自拍 Staff celebrates the opening of its new Learning Lab in 2019.

We miss all these things we have built together over the course of time. But these cherished spaces, objects, and people are not gone; they are merely in suspended animation. For now we must turn our attention to the digital world and new ways of thinking. It鈥檚 an opportunity, really.聽 And we are embracing it. It’s a mindset shift that is fitting for a museum that explores how technology can shape a better future. And some time, in that beautiful future we are all longing for, we will bring together our physical treasures and our shiny new digital world and be a better museum for it. Special thanks to our hard working staff, dedicated volunteers and trustees, museum colleagues and members and donors and those we have lost. Thank you all for your camaraderie and support.聽

Virtual 91自拍 Live Events

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Pamela McCorduck may be one of the few people qualified to make a prediction about where the development of artificial intelligence will lead. But, as a true humanist, she avoids an invitation to hubris. Instead, in the excerpt below from the end of her 2019 book, This Could Be Important: My Life and Times with the Artificial Intelligentsia, she reminds us that humans have always quested into the unknown, that it鈥檚 part of being human. She says, 鈥淭he search for AI parallels our innate wish to fly, to roam over and beneath the seas, to see beyond our natural eyesight. The quest takes us out of the commonplace, along a dark and perilous way, beset with tasks and trials, a collective hero鈥檚 journey that all humans must undertake.鈥�

When it comes to the future of AI, McCorduck does not have answers, only questions. Perhaps her principled refusal to land on either the side of salvation or destruction, and to maintain a clear view and an open mind, is a reminder of what the best of human intelligence has to offer.

We can鈥檛 now say what living beside other, in some ways superior, intelligences will mean to us. Will it widen and raise our own individual and collective intelligence? In significant ways, it already has. Find solutions to problems we could never solve? Probably. Find solutions to problems we lack the wit even to propose? Maybe. Cause problems? Surely. AI has already shattered some of our fondest myths about ourselves and has shone unwelcome light on others. This will continue.

The future. It鈥檚 been easy to resist writing breathless scenarios. Nothing ages faster nor makes the prophet seem so time-bound. As Jack Ma, the co-founder of the Chinese online service, AliBaba says, 鈥淭here are no experts for the future. Only experts for yesterday.鈥�

When people ask me my greatest worry about AI, I say: what we aren鈥檛 smart enough even to imagine.

You might also recognize in all this ferment the two customary opposing views about AI鈥攁 catastrophe or a welcome blessing鈥攁n early theme from my own “Machines Who Think”: what I鈥檝e called the Hebraic and the Hellenistic views of intelligence outside the human cranium. The Hebraic tradition is encoded in the Second Commandment: 鈥淵ou shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.鈥�¹ We fear entertaining god-like aspirations, of calling down divine wrath for our overweening, illicit ambition. The Hellenistic view, on the contrary, welcomes (with cheer and optimism) outside help, the creations of our own hands鈥攏ot that the dwellers in Olympus and their progeny didn鈥檛 have problems.²

We already have a bitter taste of the dark side of AI. Russian bots and other software simulated human influencers and interfered with the U.S. national elections in 2016; our telecommunications and social media apps know our lives in granular, even embarrassing detail. The Chinese government, along with the Chinese army, runs deep learning algorithms over the search engine data collected about the users of Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google. Every Chinese citizen receives a Citizen Score, to determine whether they can get loans, jobs, or travel abroad (Helbing et al., 2017).³ China is selling these systems to other countries. With all of us under surveillance, whether by our government or by firms, whether by manipulative individuals or scheming terrorists, how the economy and society are organized must change fundamentally. Kai-Fu Lee says we need to rewrite the social contract (2018). We do. Certainly we need to talk.

Let us talk too about the grand ideas in the Western tradition. What is thought? What is memory? What is self? What is beauty? What is love? What are ethics? Answers to these questions have up to now been assertions or hand-waving. With AI, the questions must be specified precisely, realized in executable computer code. Thus eternal questions are being examined and tested anew.

From the beginning, pioneering researchers in the field expected the machines would eventually be smarter than humans (whatever that meant), but they saw this as a great benefit. More intelligence was like more virtue. These early researchers were firmly in the Hellenistic tradition. They believed鈥攁nd I do too, if you haven鈥檛 guessed鈥攖hat if we鈥檙e lucky and diligent, we can create a civilization bright with the best of human qualities: enhanced intelligence, which is wisdom; with dignity, compassion, generosity, abundance for all, creativity, and joy, an opportunity for a great synthesis of the humanities and the sciences, by the people who specialize in each. Herb Simon liked to say that we aren鈥檛 spectators of the future; we create it. A better culture, generously life-centered, ethically based yet accommodating infinite human variety, is a synthesizing project worthy of the best minds, human and machine.

We long to save ourselves as a species. For all the imaginary deities throughout history who鈥檝e failed to save and protect us from nature, from each other, from ourselves, we鈥檙e finally ready to substitute the work of our own enhanced, augmented minds. Some worry it will all end in catastrophe. 鈥淲e are as gods,鈥� Stewart Brand famously said, 鈥渁nd might as well get good at it (1968).鈥� We鈥檙e trying. We could fail.

Win or lose, we鈥檙e impelled to pursue this altogether human quest. Some mysterious but profound yearning has led us here from the beginning. This is the deep truth of our legends, our myths, our stories. (It wants some explanation. This isn鈥檛 exactly the joy of sex.) The search for AI parallels our innate wish to fly, to roam over and beneath the seas, to see beyond our natural eyesight. The quest takes us out of the commonplace, along a dark and perilous way, beset with tasks and trials, a collective hero鈥檚 journey that all humans must undertake.

The tasks and trials we already see include the destruction of whole business models, the transformation of work (and thus for many, life鈥檚 meaning), and faster-than-thought applications with unforeseen consequences. We face a possible, if unlikely, subjugation to the machines; a possible, if unlikely, destruction of the human race by AI. These seem to me remote, but trials we can鈥檛 yet foresee will surely emerge. We hardly know how to meet the trials we can see. I quoted Herb Simon above: 鈥淲e aren鈥檛 spectators of the future; we create it.鈥� But often he also slightly misquoted Proverbs: 鈥淚f the leaders have no vision, the people will perish.鈥�

For years I had these calligraphed words framed above my desk, a gift from my husband: 鈥�And wherefore was it glorious?鈥�

I knew the rest of the passage by heart:

Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror, because at every new incident your fortitude was to be called forth and your courage exhibited, because danger and death surrounded it, and these you were to brave and overcome. For this was it a glorious, for this was it an honourable undertaking. You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your species, your names adored as belonging to brave men who encountered death for honour and the benefit of mankind.

These are the words of the dying Dr. Victor Frankenstein, near the end of Mary Shelley鈥檚 essential novel, “Frankenstein.” He cries out to a ship鈥檚 crew that, during a hunt for the Northwest Passage, has been paralyzed with terror by the menacing ice. Yes, the words reflect ironically on his repudiation of his own creation of an extra-human intelligence. The deeper urgency, I believe, is his, and our, struggle to be brave, as we go where we must.

Notes

1. From Exodus 20:4, King James Version.
2. The same division is evident in biological enhancement of human faculties. Some fear this very much; others think it would be a benefit. The combination of much smarter humans and much smarter machines is something to think about.
3. Helbing, et al. should certainly be one of the texts we talk about.

More from This Series

• AI Is Already Here, For Good Or Bad
• The Promise of the Doctor Program: Early AI At Stanford
• Panic and Privilege

91自拍 “This Could Be Important”

Pamela McCorduck was present at the creation. As a student working her way through college at Berkeley, she was pulled into a project to type a textbook manuscript for two faculty members in 1960, shortly before she was set to graduate. The authors, Edward Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman, happened to be two of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence. For McCorduck, it was the start of a life-long quest to understand鈥攁nd document for the rest of us鈥攖he key players, underlying ideas, and critical breakthroughs in this transformative technology.聽

Part memoir, part social history, and part biography, McCorduck鈥檚 2019 book, , shares both personal anecdotes of the giants of AI and insightful observations from the perspective of a humanities scholar. Brought to readers by Carnegie Mellon University Press, 91自拍 is thrilled to provide a series of four telling excerpts from the book.

91自拍 Pamela McCorduck

Pamela McCorduck is the author of eleven published books, four of them novels, seven of them non-fiction, mainly about aspects of artificial intelligence. She lived for forty years in New York City until family called her back to California where she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The post The Future: Humans and AI appeared first on 91自拍.

Science and technology and traditional 鈥渉umanities鈥� topics such as language, government, ethics, and writing, influence and inform our daily lives. We鈥檙e often unaware of how they intersect, although our educational system places a clear dividing line between the two different 鈥渃ultures鈥�: the hard sciences and the humanities. A literature scholar and novelist, Pamela McCorduck transcends those conceptual boundaries and turns a critical eye on the divide. In her 2019 book, This Could Be Important: My Life and Times with the Artificial Intelligentsia, McCorduck relates how she鈥檚 seen the two cultures converge in the field of artificial intelligence. Humanists and computer scientists alike ask questions about what exactly 鈥渋ntelligence鈥� is and what it means to be human.聽

In the excerpt below, McCorduck explores how privileged white males鈥� dominance of Western culture is challenged by the idea of an artificial intelligence. Unlike women and people in less powerful positions, they aren鈥檛 used to having their worldview unconsidered, undervalued, or superseded. Interestingly, McCorduck notes that IBM鈥檚 Watson is characterized as a 鈥渉e.鈥� We should all be wary of attributing a male gender to a new type of non-human intelligence with potentially superior abilities lest we perpetuate existing stereotypes and harmful power dynamics.聽

We must also apply a humanistic lens to the ongoing development of AI and machine learning, thinking deeply about incorporating in them 鈥渢he FATES鈥�: fairness, accountability, transparency, ethics, security, and safety. If we don鈥檛, the 鈥渁utonomous revolution鈥� of AI could indeed lead to the dystopian world decried by threatened white males. But if we do, it just might bring a new kind of utopia, one with equal promise for all human beings.

In the mid-teens of the 21st century, a startling efflorescence appeared of declarations, books, articles, and reviews. (Typical titles: 鈥淭he Robots Are Winning!鈥� 鈥淜iller Robots are Next!鈥� 鈥淎I Means Calling Up the Demons!鈥� 鈥淎rtificial Intelligence: Homo sapiens will be split into a handful of gods and the rest of us.鈥�) Even Henry Kissinger (2018) tottered out of the twilight of his life to declare that AI was the end of the Enlightenment, a declaration to give pause for many reasons.

The profound, imminent threat AI made to privileged white men caused this pyrexia. I laughed to friends, 鈥淭hese guys have always been the smartest one on the block. They really feel threatened by something that might be smarter.鈥� Because most of these privileged white men admitted AI had done good things for them (and none of them so far as I know was willing to give up his smartphone), they brought to mind St. Augustine: 鈥淢ake me chaste, oh Lord, but not yet.鈥�

Very few women took this up the same way (you鈥檇 think we don鈥檛 worry our pretty heads). One who did, Louise Aronson, a specialist in geriatric medicine (2014), dared to suggest that robot caregivers for the elderly might be a positive thing, but Sherry Turkle (2014), another woman who responded to Aronson鈥檚 opinion piece in The New York Times with a letter to the editor, worried that such caregivers only simulated caring about us. That opened some interesting questions about authentic caring and its simulation even among humans, but didn鈥檛 address the issues around who would do this caregiving and how many of those caregivers society could afford.

As I read this flow of heated declarations about the evils of AI, ranging from the thoughtful to the personally revealing to the pitifully derivative鈥攁 Dionysian eruption if ever there was one鈥擨 remembered the brilliant concept, described and named by the film critic, Laura Mulvey, in 1975: the male gaze. She coined it to describe the dominant mode of filmmaking: a narrative inevitably told from a male point of view, with female characters as bearers, not makers, of meaning. Male filmmakers address male viewers, she argued, soothing their anxieties by keeping the females, so potent with threat, as passive and obedient objects of male desire. (The detailed psychoanalytic reasoning in her article you must read for yourself.)

In many sentences of Mulvey鈥檚 essay, I could easily substitute AI for women: AI signifies something other than (white or Asian) male intelligence and must be confined to its place as a bearer not a maker of meaning. To the male gaze, AI is object; its possible emergence as autonomous subject, capable of agency, is frightening and must be prevented, because its autonomy threatens male omnipotence, male control (at least those males who fret in popular journals and make movies). Maybe that younger me who hoped AI might finally demolish universal assumptions of male intellectual superiority was on to something.

The much older me knows that if AI poses future problems (how could it not?) it already improves and enhances human intellectual efforts and has the potential to lift the burden of petty, meaningless, often backbreaking work from humankind. Who does a disproportionate share of that petty, meaningless, backbreaking work? Let a hundred Roombas bloom.¹

But the handwringing said that people were at last taking AI seriously.

Another great change I鈥檝e seen is the shift of science from the intellectual perimeters of my culture to its center. (Imagine C. P. Snow presenting his Two Cultures manifesto now. Laughable.) These days, not to know science at some genuine level is to forfeit your claims to the life of the mind. That shift hasn鈥檛 displaced the importance of the humanities. As we saw with the digital humanities鈥攕ometimes tentative, sometimes ungainly, the modest start of something profound鈥攖he Two Cultures are reconciling, recognizing each other as two parts of a larger whole, which is what it means to be human. Not enough people yet know that a symbol-manipulating computer could be a welcome assistant to thinking, whether about theoretical physics or getting through the day.

AI isn鈥檛 just for science and engineering, as in the beginning, but reshapes, enlarges, and eases many tasks. IBM鈥檚 Watson, for instance, stands ready to help in dozens of ways, including artistic creativity: the program (鈥渉e鈥� in the words of both his presenter and the audience) was a big hit at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival when it was offered as eager colleague to filmmakers (Morais, 2015).

At the same time, AI also complicates many tasks. If an autonomous car requires millions of lines of code to operate, who can detect when a segment goes rogue? Mary Shaw, the Alan J. Perlis professor of computer science and a highly-honored software expert, worries that autonomous vehicles are moving too quickly from expert assistants beside the wheel and responsible for oversight, to ordinary human drivers responsible for oversight, to full automation without oversight. She argues that we lack enough experience to make this leap. Society would be better served by semi-autonomous systems that keep the vehicle in its lane, observe the speed limit, and stay parked when the driver is drunk. A woman pushing a bike, its handles draped with shopping bags, was killed by an autonomous vehicle because who anticipated that? If software engineering becomes too difficult for humans, and algorithms are instead written by other algorithms, then what? (Smith, 2018). Who gets warned when systems 鈥渓earn鈥� but that learning takes them to places that are harmful to humans? What programming team can anticipate every situation an autonomous car (or medical system, or trading system, or. . .) might encounter? 鈥淢achine learning is inscrutable,鈥� Harvard鈥檚 James Mickens says (USENIX, 2018). What happens when you connect inscrutability to important real-life things, or even what he calls 鈥渢he Internet of hate鈥� also known as simply the Internet? What about AI mission creep?²

Columbia University鈥檚 Jeanette Wing has given thought to these issues and offers an acronym: FATES. It stands for all the aspects that must be incorporated into AI, machine learning in particular: Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, Ethics, Security, and Safety. Those aspects should be part of every data scientist鈥檚 training from day one, she says, and at all levels of activity: collection, analysis, and decision-making models. Big data is already transforming all fields, professions, and sectors of human activity, so everyone must adhere to FATES from the beginning.

But fairness? In real life, multiple definitions exist.

Accountability? Who鈥檚 responsible is an open question at present, but policy needs to be set, compliance must be monitored, and violations exposed, fixed, and if necessary, fined.

Transparency? Assurances of why the output can be trusted are vital, but we already don鈥檛 fully understand how some of the technology works. That鈥檚 an active area of research.

Ethics? Sometimes a problem has no 鈥渞ight鈥� answer, even when the ambiguity might be encoded. Microsoft has the equivalent of an institutional review board (IRB) to oversee research (Google鈥檚 first IRB fell apart publicly after a week), but firms aren鈥檛 required to have such watchdogs, nor comply with them. According to Wing, a testing algorithm for deep learning, DeepXplore, recently found thousands of errors, some of them fatal, in fifteen state-of-the-art data neural networks in ImageNet and in software for self-driving cars. Issues around causality versus correlation have hardly begun to be explored.

Safety and security? Research in these areas is very active, but not yet definitive.

This could be important.

So I said again and again over my lifetime. Now we know. AI applications arrive steadily. Some believe we鈥檒l eventually have indefatigable, smart, and sensitive personal assistants to transform and enhance our work, our play, our lives. Researchers are acting on those beliefs to bring such personal assistants about: the Guardian Angel, Maslow, Watson. With such help, humans could move into an era of unprecedented abundance and leisure. Others cry halt! Jobs are ending! Firms and governments are spying on our every move! The machines will take over! They want our lunch! They lack human values! It will be awful!³

Which will it be?

Notes

1. Journalist Sarah Todd wrote 鈥淚nside the surprisingly sexist world of artificial intelligence鈥� (Quartz, October 25, 2015) about the sexism and lack of diversity in AI. The piece suggests women won鈥檛 pursue AI because it de-emphasizes humanistic goals. Maybe public fears about the field are because of the homogeneity of the field, she went on. To close the gap, schools need to emphasize the humanistic applications of AI. And so on. Although many applications of AI grow out of a sexist culture and reflect that, readers of this history can also see the fallacies in Todd鈥檚 argument. AI started out as a way of understanding human intelligence. That continues to be one of its major goals, which is why it partners with psychology and brain science. Its humanistic goals are central, whether to understand intelligence or to augment it. But all scientific and technological fields save, perhaps, the biological sciences, could use more women practitioners and more people of color. That is being addressed in many places and many ways, beyond the scope of this book, but one example is the national nonprofit AI4All, launched in 2017 by Stanford鈥檚 Fei-Fei Li and funded by Melinda Gates, which aims to make AI researchers, hence AI research, more diverse. The 2019 report from NYU says this is not enough (West et al., 2019).
2. The video in which Mickens鈥� quote appears is mostly about the perils of machine learning, especially the hilariously sad story of Tay, Microsoft鈥檚 chatbot, which had to be taken down from the Internet after 16 hours because of what it was learning from its training set, the gutter of the Internet.
3. The cries of pain and alarm are too numerous to list. Privacy, meddling, reshaping our sense of ourselves as unique, and more. 91自拍 the future job market, for example, books and articles abound. See, for example, the relatively optimistic book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Ditigal Frontier Press, 2011) or the careful quantitative study from the University of Oxford by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, 鈥淭he Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?鈥� (September 17, 2013 and available via https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf). But later economists question these findings as mere extrapolation, with no allowance for new jobs that will be created. For example, Forbes.com鈥檚 Parmy Olson wrote about a PwC report on AI in 鈥淎I won鈥檛 kill the job market but keep it steady, PwC report says鈥� (July 17, 2018).

Look for the final excerpt from This Could Be Important on April 22.

More from This Series

• AI Is Already Here, For Good Or Bad
• The Promise of the Doctor Program: Early AI At Stanford
• The Future: AI and Humans

91自拍 “This Could Be Important”

Pamela McCorduck was present at the creation. As a student working her way through college at Berkeley, she was pulled into a project to type a textbook manuscript for two faculty members in 1960, shortly before she was set to graduate. The authors, Edward Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman, happened to be two of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence. For McCorduck, it was the start of a life-long quest to understand鈥攁nd document for the rest of us鈥攖he key players, underlying ideas, and critical breakthroughs in this transformative technology.聽

Part memoir, part social history, and part biography, McCorduck鈥檚 2019 book, , shares both personal anecdotes of the giants of AI and insightful observations from the perspective of a humanities scholar. Brought to readers by Carnegie Mellon University Press, 91自拍 is thrilled to provide a series of four telling excerpts from the book.

91自拍 Pamela McCorduck

Pamela McCorduck is the author of eleven published books, four of them novels, seven of them non-fiction, mainly about aspects of artificial intelligence. She lived for forty years in New York City until family called her back to California where she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The post Panic and Privilege appeared first on 91自拍.

Pamela McCorduck was AI pioneer Ed Feigenbaum鈥檚 assistant in 1965 when she had an epiphany that changed her life. World-famous Russian computer scientist Andrei Yershov visited Stanford and wanted to see the Doctor program, one of the earliest interactive computer programs. In her 2019 book, This Could Be Important: My Life and Times with the Artificial Intelligentsia, McCorduck describes what happened when Yershov sat down in front of the teletype machine that would allow him to communicate with the computer by text.聽

Yershov responded to the computer鈥檚 opening pleasantries by writing that he was tired from traveling and being away from home. The computer wrote back: 鈥淭ell me about your family.鈥� While McCorduck and others watched, Yershov confided to the machine his intimate worries about his wife and children. Witnessing how the Doctor program evoked such an emotional response from a computer scientist even though he knew it was just a machine, McCorduck realized that something important was happening: there had been a connection between two minds, one human and one artificial.

In the excerpt below, McCorduck describes how the early Doctor program illustrates many issues that still surround artificial intelligence. There鈥檚 the dream of harnessing AI for a better future, concerns about ethics at the intersection of AI and human behavior, and the clash of personalities and perspectives in a new field with both unprecedented power and unknown risk.聽

Today, , descendants of the Doctor program, are used to monitor patients, answer questions, and coach people to take their medications. has shown that people even reveal more about their health conditions, and their lapses in following doctors鈥� orders, to computers than they do to the doctors themselves because they don鈥檛 feel judged. McCorduck takes us back to the past where the future began.

At Stanford, I was learning by osmosis again, the way I鈥檇 learned from the graduate students at Berkeley. I was mainly learning about AI, deeply important at Stanford, which, along with Carnegie Mellon and MIT, was then one of the three great world centers of AI research. All three were undisputed world centers of computing research generally, and it鈥檚 no coincidence that AI was centrally embedded in that wider, pioneering research.

Ed Feigenbaum had come to Stanford hoping that he and John McCarthy could collaborate. They remained personally friendly but realized their destiny was to pursue different paths in AI research. When I arrived at Stanford, McCarthy was in the process of moving his research team to a handsome, low-slung semicircle of a new industrial building in the Stanford hills, perhaps five miles from Polya Hall. A now defunct firm called General Telephone and Electric, seeing the new structure didn鈥檛 fit their research plans after all, had given it to Stanford, and it became the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, SAIL.¹

Among the research projects that had moved from Polya Hall to SAIL was Kenneth Colby鈥檚 Doctor program. Colby was an MD and psychiatrist who thought there must be some way to improve the therapeutic process鈥攑erhaps by automating it. Patients in state psychiatric hospitals might see a therapist maybe once a month if they were lucky. If instead they could interact with an artificial therapist anytime they wanted, then whatever its drawbacks, Colby argued, it was better than the current situation. In those prepsychotropic drug days, Colby wasn鈥檛 alone in thinking so. Similar work was underway at Massachusetts General Hospital. Colby had collaborated for a while with Joseph Weizenbaum, an experienced programmer, who鈥檇 come from a major role in automating the Bank of America and was interested in experimenting with Lisp. Weizenbaum would soon create a dialect of Lisp called Slip, for Symbolic Lisp, though it really had no symbolic aspirations as AI understood the term.

Doctor was the program that the visiting and eminent Soviet scientist, Andrei Yershov, asked to see. His encounter with Doctor was the moment that artificial intelligence suddenly became something deeper and richer for me than just an interesting, even amusing, abstraction.

But Doctor raised questions. Should the machine take on this therapeutic role, even if the alternative was no help at all? The question and those that flowed from it deserved to be taken seriously. Arguments for and against were fierce. Weizenbaum warned that the therapeutic transaction was one area where a machine must not intrude, but Colby said machine-based therapy was surely preferable to no help at all.

Thus Doctor was the beginning of a bitter academic feud between Weizenbaum and Colby, which I would later be drawn into when I published “Machines Who Think” and made for myself a determined enemy in Weizenbaum.

At the time Yershov was playing (or not) with the Doctor demonstration, Weizenbaum was already beginning to claim that Colby had ripped him off鈥擠octor, he charged, was just a version of Weizenbaum鈥檚 own question-answering program, called Eliza (after Eliza Doolittle). Eliza was meant to simulate, or caricature, a Rogerian therapist, which simply turned any patient鈥檚 statement into a question. I鈥檓 feeling sad today. Why are you feeling sad today? I don鈥檛 know exactly. You don鈥檛 know exactly? Feigenbaum, who鈥檇 taught Lisp to Weizenbaum, says that Eliza had no AI aspirations and was no more than a programming experiment.

Colby objected strenuously to Weizenbaum鈥檚 charges. Yes, they鈥檇 collaborated for a brief period, but putting real, if primitive, psychiatric skills into Doctor was Colby鈥檚 original contribution and justified the new name. Furthermore, Colby was trying to make this a practical venture whereas Weizenbaum had made no improvements in his toy program.

Maybe because Weizenbaum seemed to get no traction with his claims of being ripped off, he turned to moralizing. Even if Colby could make it work, Doctor was a repulsive idea, Weizenbaum said. Humans, not machines, should be listening to the troubles of other humans. That, Colby argued, was exactly his point. Nobody was available to listen to people in mental anguish. Should they therefore be left in anguish?²

I agreed with Colby. Before this, I might not, and based only on first feelings, have sided with Weizenbaum.

But at Stanford, I was learning to think differently. One day, I tried to explain to Feigenbaum how I鈥檇 always groped my way fuzzily, instinctively into issues, relying on feelings. Now I began to think them through logically. Ed laughed. 鈥淲elcome to analytic thinking.鈥�

I鈥檇 entered university hoping to learn 鈥渢he best which has been thought and said in the world,鈥� as I read in Matthew Arnold鈥檚 “Culture and Anarchy” in my eager freshman year. But Arnold said more: the purpose of that knowledge was to turn a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.

For me, meeting artificial intelligence did exactly that.

Notes

1. Read an autobiography of SAIL at http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/AIlab/SailFarewell.html
2. By 2018, online therapy was thriving. One project, a joint effort between Stanford psychologists and computer scientists, and called Woebot, offered cheap but not free therapy to combat depression. It was a hybrid鈥攐ne part interaction with a computer, and one part interaction with human therapists, this for people who couldn鈥檛 afford the high cost of conventional therapy. Earlier projects included one at the Institute for Creative Technologies in Los Angeles, called Ellie, to assist former soldiers with PTSD. Ellie鈥檚 elaborate protocols seem to have overcome the problem that many patients resist telling the truth to a human therapist but feel freer with a computer. (We saw this with Soviet computer scientist Andrei Yershov.) Some decades ago, the Kaiser Foundation discovered the same reaction to ordinary medical questions鈥攑eople felt judged by human doctors in ways they didn鈥檛 by computers and could thus be more candid.聽

Look for the next excerpt from This Could Be Important on April 8.

More from This Series

• AI Is Already Here, For Good Or Bad
• Panic and Privilege
• The Future: AI and Humans

91自拍 “This Could Be Important”

Pamela McCorduck was present at the creation. As a student working her way through college at Berkeley, she was pulled into a project to type a textbook manuscript for two faculty members in 1960, shortly before she was set to graduate. The authors, Edward Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman, happened to be two of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence. For McCorduck, it was the start of a life-long quest to understand鈥攁nd document for the rest of us鈥攖he key players, underlying ideas, and critical breakthroughs in this transformative technology.聽

Part memoir, part social history, and part biography, McCorduck鈥檚 2019 book, , shares both personal anecdotes of the giants of AI and insightful observations from the perspective of a humanities scholar. Brought to readers by Carnegie Mellon University Press, 91自拍 is thrilled to provide a series of four telling excerpts from the book.

91自拍 Pamela McCorduck

Pamela McCorduck is the author of eleven published books, four of them novels, seven of them non-fiction, mainly about aspects of artificial intelligence. She lived for forty years in New York City until family called her back to California where she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The post The Promise of the Doctor Program: Early AI At Stanford appeared first on 91自拍.

鈥淎I is us,鈥� writes Pamela McCorduck in her 2019 book, This Could Be Important: My Life and Times with the Artificial Intelligentsia. From the smartphone in your pocket to the car that helps you park and the robot that cleans your floors, we鈥檝e assimilated AI into our lives. But many of us still fear that the machines will 鈥渢ake over鈥� and find the idea of non-human intelligence deeply disturbing. Steeped in the history of AI, McCorduck understands those concerns and the very real dangers inherent in AI in terms of security and privacy and algorithms that reflect their creators鈥� bias, but she remains optimistic.聽

In the excerpt below, McCorduck explores the promise and perils of AI and robots as new forms of intelligence that will be even smarter than humans. This doesn鈥檛 have to be scary. Since the dawn of AI, humans鈥� understanding of the intelligence of other living things has expanded to include 鈥減rimates, cetaceans, elephants, dogs, cats, racoons, parrots, rodents, bumblebees, and even slime molds.鈥� There are trees that send to each other when beetles attack, arguably a form of intelligence. 鈥淓ntire books appear on comparative intelligence across species, trying to tease out what鈥檚 uniquely human. It isn鈥檛 obvious,鈥� McCorduck writes.

How should we consider our new understanding of entities other than humans that appear intelligent? Isn鈥檛 it possible our knowledge has made us ever more aware of and concerned about protecting our fellow creatures and the environment we all share? And so, why wouldn鈥檛 an exponentially smarter artificial intelligence make better decisions for our welfare than those we are capable of making ourselves?

It will ask questions we don鈥檛 even know how to ask. It will think the things we are incapable of thinking. It will experience and feel the things that we aren鈥檛 capable of. Yes, I believe that will happen eventually. We think of AI in terms of personal gadgets鈥攎y search engine will be better, my car will drive itself, my doctor will be better able to heal me, my grandma can be safely left home alone as she ages, a robot will finally do the housework. But greater contributions of AI will be planetary, teasing out how the environment and human wellbeing are subtly intertwined. Al鈥檚 greatest contribution might be its fundamental role in understanding and illuminating the laws of intelligence, wherever it manifests itself, in organisms or machines.

聽For a long time, I鈥檝e been comfortable with such ideas. Unduly optimistic, maybe, but I look forward to having other, smarter minds around. (I鈥檝e always had such minds around in the form of other humans.) I don鈥檛 much worry they鈥檒l want my niche鈥攖hough that presupposes a planet that won鈥檛, in one of Bostrom鈥檚 scenarios, be tiled over entirely with solar panels to supply power for the reigning AI. Humans will endure, but possibly not as the dominant species. Instead, that position might belong someday to our non-biological descendants. But really, the scary future scenarios sound as if humans have no agency here. We certainly do, and as we鈥檒l see, it鈥檚 already at work.

A search (powered by AI techniques, of course) will quickly show how we鈥檝e already woven AI around and inside our lives, turning scientific inquiry into human desire, even stark necessity. When we did not鈥攖he nuclear catastrophe of Fukushima Daiichi, for example鈥攚e wished we had. AIs fly, crawl, inhabit our personal devices, connect us with each other willingly or not, shape our entertainment, and vacuum the living room.

Robots, a particularly visible form of AI (embodied, in the field鈥檚 term), occupy a significant space in our imaginations, their very birthplace. Books, movies, TV, and video games provoke us to conjecture about some of the ways we might behave and the issues embodied AIs will raise when they become our companions. But this visible embodiment, humanoid or otherwise, is only one form AIs will take. The disembodied, more abstract intelligences, like Google Brain, AlphaZero, and Nell¹ at Carnegie Mellon are hidden inside machines invisible to the human eye, scoffing at human boundaries. Their implications are even more profound.

Distributed intelligence and multiagent software inhabit electronic systems all over the globe, seizing information that can be studied, analyzed, manipulated, redistributed, re-presented, exploited, above all, learned from. Human knowledge and decision-making are rapidly moving from books and craniums into executable computer code. But fair warnings and deep fears abound: algorithms that take big data at face value reinforce the bigotries those data already represent. Bad enough that data about you you鈥檙e aware you鈥檙e volunteering (submitted for drivers鈥� licenses for example) are collected, aggregated, and marketed; much worse that involuntary data collected from your on-line behavior (your purchases, your use of public transportation) is also a profit center and a spy on you. Horrors have crawled up from the dark side: bots that lie and mislead across social media, trolls without conscience, and applications whose unforeseeable consequences could be catastrophic.

Larry Smarr, founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, on the campus of the University of California at San Diego, calls this distributed intelligence and multiagent software the equivalent of a global computer. 鈥淧eople just do not understand how different a global AI will be with all the data about all the people being fed in real time,鈥� he emailed me a few years ago. By sharing data, he continued, the whole world is helping to create AI at top speed, instead of a few Lisp programmers working at it piecemeal. The next years will see profound changes. In short, AI already surrounds us. Is us.

The industrialization of reading, understanding, and question-answering is well underway to be delivered to your personal device. Some of these machines learn statistically; others learn at multiple, asynchronous levels, which resembles human learning. They don’t wait around for programmers but are teaching themselves. Understanding the importance of this, many conventional firms like Toyota or General Electric are reinventing themselves as software firms with AI prominent.

Word- and text-understanding programs particularly interest me, partly because I鈥檓 a word and text person myself, and partly because words, spoken or written, at the level of complexity humans do them, seem to be one of the few faculties that separate human intelligence from the intelligence of other animals. (Making images is another.) Other animals communicate with each other, of course. But if their communication is deeply symbolic, that symbolism has so far evaded us. Moreover, humans have means to communicate not only face to face, but also across generations and distances, and we do so orally, then by pictorial representations, by speaking, creating pictures, writing, print, and now by electronic texts and videos.

For a long time, we were the only symbol-manipulating creatures on the planet. Now, with smarter and smarter computers, we at last have symbol-manipulating companions. A great conversation has begun that won鈥檛 be completed for a long time to come.

Notes

1. In this book, I will not capitalize most program acronyms or abbreviations, except for initial caps. It鈥檚 unnecessary and tiring to the reader鈥檚 eye.

Look for the next excerpt from This Could Be Important on March 25.

MORE FROM THIS SERIES

• The Promise of the Doctor Program: Early AI At Stanford
• Panic and Privilege
• The Future: AI and Humans

91自拍 “This Could Be Important”

Pamela McCorduck was present at the creation. As a student working her way through college at Berkeley, she was pulled into a project to type a textbook manuscript for two faculty members in 1960, shortly before she was set to graduate. The authors, Edward Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman, happened to be two of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence. For McCorduck, it was the start of a life-long quest to understand鈥攁nd document for the rest of us鈥攖he key players, underlying ideas, and critical breakthroughs in this transformative technology.聽

Part memoir, part social history, and part biography, McCorduck鈥檚 2019 book, , shares both personal anecdotes of the giants of AI and insightful observations from the perspective of a humanities scholar. Brought to readers by Carnegie Mellon University Press, 91自拍 is thrilled to provide a series of four telling excerpts from the book.

91自拍 Pamela McCorduck

Pamela McCorduck is the author of eleven published books, four of them novels, seven of them non-fiction, mainly about aspects of artificial intelligence. She lived for forty years in New York City until family called her back to California where she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The post AI Is Already Here, For Good Or Bad appeared first on 91自拍.