Preface
Originally published by Henry Holt and Company 1999. Published on KurzweilAI.net May 15, 2003.
I have a vested interest in the future, because I plan on living
there. I want to help create one in which machines can meet the
needs of people, rather than the other way around. As more and more
gadgets demand our attention, the promises of the Digital Revolution
start to sound more like those of a disinformation campaign. A counterrevolution
seeks to protect our freedom to not be wired. But rather than ask
whether reading is better done with a book or a computer, I want
to show how to merge the best features of each.
This modest aim has radical implications, and regrettably little
precedent. Putting ink on paper, and data on a CD-ROM, are separated
by a divide between the old analog world of atoms and the new digital
world of bits. The existing organization of industry and academia,
of scientific research and product development, serves to enforce
rather than dismantle that distinction. I've spent my life being
gently and not-so-gently steered away from the equally great problems
and opportunities that lie neglected at the boundary between the
content of information and its physical representation.
In high school I fell in love . . . with the machine shop. This
was the one class in which I showed some promise. Then the curriculum
split, with the college-bound students sitting in classrooms, and
the vocational students going off to a trade school where they could
use an even better machine shop, and make circuits, and assemble
engines, and build houses. There was no competition—that's
what I wanted to do. With some effort I was persuaded to stick with
the college track, but I couldn't understand why making things had
to be separated from learning about things. I still don't. At Bell
Labs I was threatened with a grievance for daring to leave my lab
and approach the machine tools in the unionized shop, which was
intended for the trade school graduates rather than the college
graduates.
As an undergraduate I migrated from studying philosophy in order
to ask deep questions about the universe, to studying physics in
order to answer deep questions about the universe, and eventually
ended up back in the machine shop in the basement of the engineering
building rediscovering the joys of manipulating things rather than
ideas. In physics grad school I figured out that theorists weren't
allowed in the machine shop, but experimentalists were allowed to
do theory, so the only way to do both was to claim to be an experimentalist.
I was officially a physicist by the time I visited the Media Lab
to develop sensors to interface Yo-Yo Ma's cello to a computer.
This prompted some people to ask me a question I never understood:
"That's fine, but is it physics?" I could answer it, explaining
where the traditional physics occurred. But I didn't want to, much
preferring to discuss the remarkable consequences of connecting
Yo-Yo to a computer.
When I arrived at the Media Lab I didn't see it as a place to do
"real" science, but it was only there that I was able to bring together
these disconnected pieces. This was finally a place where I could
set up a lab that put machine tools, theoretical physicists, and
musicians in the same room at the same time. As it began filling
with students and sponsors, I was delighted to find that I was not
alone in struggling to bridge rather than bound the digital and
physical worlds.
Emerging from this effort is a vision of a future that is much
more accessible, connected, expressive, and responsive, as well
as many of the ingredients needed to realize the vision. This book
tells that story. I feel safe in making these predictions about
the future because they're really observations about the present.
In the laboratory and in product development pipelines, information
is moving out of traditional computers and into the world around
us, a change that is much more significant than the arrival of multimedia
or the Internet because it touches on so much more of human experience.
Much of the book revolves around the Media Lab, because much of
my life does. Although this book is a personal statement, it owes
a deep debt to the dear community of colleagues, students, and sponsors
there who have shaped these ideas. I describe global changes that
still have too few local environments that are as supportive of
bringing bits and atoms together. My hope is that the book's focus
will come to appear to be parochial, as the Media Lab's role becomes
less unique.
This book reflects recurring conversations that I've had with ordinary
people about how the world around them does and will work, with
industrial managers trying to navigate through coming business threats
to reach these new opportunities, and with researchers struggling
with emerging questions in new areas along with declining interest
and support in old ones. I've written for all three because I've
never been able to separate these parts of myself.
I will have succeeded if a shoe computer comes to be seen as a
great idea and not just a joke, if it becomes natural to recognize
that people and things have relative rights that are now routinely
infringed, if computers disappear and the world becomes our interface.
WHEN THINGS START TO THINK by Neil Gershenfeld. ©1998 by
Neil A. Gershenfeld. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and
Company, LLC.
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