MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium - Fifty Years After 'As We May Think' (Part 5/5)

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MODERATOR: I believe too few serious scholars are studying the social impact of computers, the way they affect us as individuals in groups and in society at large, as we learn, as we work, and even as we play. Now, that's strange to me. Because here we have the most powerful tool mankind has ever known. And we've hardly begun to analyze how it is affecting us, let alone how it is shaping us and how we can shape it so that we get what we want in the way of affects.

Lee Sproull is one of those few individuals who has devoted her entire professional life to this all-important area. After 15 years as a professor of social sciences at CMU, she's now a professor of Management at Boston University. And she's published seven books and many research papers in this area. And it's a special pleasure for me to have someone address this key topic, someone who has devoted her entire life to it. Thank you, Lee.

SPROULL: I feel so old.

[LAUGHTER]

I'm not a computer science pioneer. I hope that was at least implicit in what Andy said. Although some of my best friends certainly are.

[LAUGHTER]

For the past 25 years, I have been pleased and privileged to be an observer of the community making parts of Bush's vision real. When Doug was talking yesterday about how human systems and computer tools need to evolve together, I was actually reminded of one of my early experiences as a user of this technology in 1977.

I'm trained as a sociologist. My doctoral dissertation had absolutely nothing to do with computing. But I typed it on an Alto computer at Xerox PARC. I printed the final document on EARS. And I think there may be a few people in this room who know about EARS, one of the earliest laser printers. I collected the signatures on the signature page of my dissertation. I took my dissertation to the registrar's office at Stanford to be certified, bound, blessed, whatever it is that happens to these things.

Now, this was in the days when the production requirements for dissertations were extremely stringent. The requirements specified a certain kind of rag paper, black carbon ribbon, no erasures. So I handed in my thesis, my laser-printed thesis. The dragon lady in the registrar's office flipped through the pages, ran her fingers over the words, fixed me with a steely eye, and said, you can't turn this in. It isn't the original.

[LAUGHTER]

I was highly evolved. My computing tools were highly evolved for that time. But the social system in which I was doing my work had a ways to go. Still true today. I'm delighted to be here to celebrate the technology vision that we are all pleased to honor.

Actually though, mostly what I want to do is talk about the human vision or models of human beings that are associated with Bush's technology vision, and also other visions that we're hearing about today. Every technology vision that really captures people's imagination is accompanied by a view of human beings using the technology, who they are, what they do, how their lives are changed, improved, we hope, by the technology. The human vision that is associated with the memex with Bush's paper is a view of a person working alone.

Could I have the first slide, please? Working alone, not doing housework or manual labor, but doing intellectual work. The technology, of course, is envisioned to support that solo work, to make it more productive, to make it even more creative. Now, in Bush's paper, we have evoked the view of the scholar, seated at a wonderful desk, interacting with the world scientific literature, alone.

Licklider, in his 1960 paper, "Man, Machine, Symbiosis," evokes a view of the scientist or an engineer solving problems more productively with a machine doing the clerical and mechanical activities. The scientist or engineer is alone with the machine. Alan Kay evokes a view of a person of any age, especially a child, interacting with a dynamic medium for creative thought, a Dynabook, to work and play more productively and creatively, alone. Now, of course, we have to note that Doug Engelbart has always been the exception to this fairly common view of the human being associated with the personal computer. As early as 1968, of course, he was describing computer support for people working together, sharing files, working in real-time meetings.

This technology vision of personal computing, of course, is extraordinarily important, extraordinarily worthwhile. There's a whole lot more to be done, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But science, and Bush, after all, was speaking about the scientific community. Science and most other productive work in modern society is inherently a social enterprise.

Could I have the next slide, please? Lick was an empiricist, and therefore dear to my heart. He reported real data in his 1960 paper. He reported, in fact, that 85% of his thinking time was devoted to clerical or mechanical activities-- searching, calculating, plotting, transforming. He used his data on human behavior-- data on himself, but still, data on human behavior-- to justify his technology vision. What he didn't point out though, is that while 85% of his thinking time was devoted to clerical or mechanical activities, probably only 15% of his day was devoted to thinking. The rest was probably spent in meetings.

[LAUGHTER]

You've been there? Face-to-face interaction with other human beings-- I don't mean only formal meetings, conferences, symposia. Hallway conversations count, as well. There have been many, many time allocation studies of people working in a variety of fields, including scientists-- bench scientists, technical supervisors and managers, people across all of these studies, all of this kind of work-- spend between 50% to 85% of their day in meetings. And in addition to that, they spend some fraction of their alone time recovering from meetings. I mean during followup work, but I guess there's other kinds of recovery, too.

Let me give you just some more evidence and reminders of something that we all know very well, that science is a social enterprise, one indicator of growth in team size over time. It took two people to build the first airplane. It took 7,302 people to build the Boeing 777.

Author lists for papers and journals have certainly been growing over the years. In the past 40 years, the mean number of authors for papers published in scientific journals across all disciplines has doubled. The mean number of authors per paper in 1955 was 1.8, in 1994 was 3.5. Last year, in '94, there were more than 700 papers published in scientific journals that had more than 50, 5-0, authors listed on the title page. The, I think, record so far, last year, the two papers announcing the discovery of the top quark last year, each listed over 400 authors on the title page.

Now, even in academic computer science-- computer science is not known as a big science field-- the mean size of work teams is increasing. If you look at the proceedings of SIGGRAPH, the computer graphics conference, the mean number of authors per paper at SigGraph in 1975 was 1.7. In '94, it was 2.4.

If you look at the ACM Computer Chess Championship, the mean number of people associated with the winning program from '74 to '84 was two. The mean number associated with the winning program from '85 to '94 was 3.8. These are fairly formal indicators of the fact that science is not a solo enterprise.

Here's a livelier one. This is from Lewis Thomas's description of the marine biological laboratory at Woods Hole, a human institution that, as Lewis Thomas says, is possessed of a life of its own, with an extraordinary influence on the growth and development of biologic science. Lewis Thomas suggests that, to learn more about the marine biological laboratory, you might begin at Stony Beach.

He says, "It's the most minor of beaches, hardly big enough for a committee, but close enough to the laboratories so that the investigators can walk down for a sandwich lunch with their children on sunny weekdays. On weekends in hot midsummer, it is so crowded that one must pick one's way on tiptoe to find a hunching place. But there is always a lot of standing up anyway. Biologists seem to prefer standing on beaches talking at each other, gesturing to indicate the way things are assembled, bending down to draw diagrams in the sand.

By the end of the day, the sand is criss-crossed with a mesh of ordinance, abscesses, curves to account for everything in nature. You can hear the sound from the beach at a distance before you see the people. It is that most extraordinary noise, half shout, half song, made by confluent, simultaneously raised human voices explaining things to each other."

Now that's what science is about. Personal computing, fortunately, has evolved to allow interpersonal communication, to allow people to explain things to each other, to talk with each other using computers. Could I have the next slide, please.

You might just do a little thought experiment. What would the world be like today if there were 100 million personal computers and no interactive communication, no ability to contact people or create and sustain human relationships with other people through these machines? Actually, I'm not sure we would be having this meeting. And I don't mean just, we wouldn't have gotten the logistics of it organized. I'm not so sure we would be here to celebrate the way the vision has come to be played out.

Of course, we shouldn't feel sorry for Bush that he didn't predict the power or importance of interpersonal communication in the context of his technology vision. He's in good company. Not only the history of personal computing, but even the history of computer communications features technologists who underestimated the lure and importance of human communication using this technology.

Everyone in this room is familiar with the ARPANET and email story. In fact, some of the people in this room were the heroes or villains or something in that story. But the conventional wisdom, anyway, has it that the ARPANET was conceived to link computers. And of course, we all know it turned out to link people, too, initially through email, distribution lists, and bulletin boards populated by members of the same intellectual community, who were housed in a small number of universities, industrial labs, a fairly homogeneous bunch of folks, truth to tell. Although they might not be pleased to hear me say that.

More recently, as internet access has soared, the human links have been formed through mechanisms, like newsgroups or usenet groups, that are populated by people who may have absolutely nothing in common with one another except for internet access and a shared interest in the topic of the particular group. Commercial electronic services providers, like CompuServe and Prodigy, also didn't anticipate the importance of the human communication services, like email, chat rooms.

Now, scientists certainly don't just process information alone in their offices. Moreover, they don't just communicate either, generically. They do these things within social contexts. That is, through multiple ongoing relationships with other people and organizations.

I must say, I have been struck by the serious observation made by all the speakers thus far that people are important and social issues are important. And obviously, I'm glad to hear the speakers say that. But there's a sort of funny gap between how the previous speakers talk about people-- by which they mean individual human beings who speak into a microphone or type with fingers on keys or whatever-- and society, which is big forces that are good or evil or something, but they're huge.

There's a very large middle ground that's very important. And it's the middle ground where most of the productive work gets done in society, through multiple ongoing relationships with people in organizations. Could I have the next one?

Each relationship, every one of them, is structured by roles. Roles have formal responsibilities and obligations associated with them, norms, accepted rules for behavior. Each relationship is shaped through reciprocated action of people working together. Each relationship is sustained through trust-- trust, by the way, doesn't have to mean liking-- but sustained through trust, obligation, and affiliation.

Now, people may complain that they spend too much time in meetings, often because meetings aren't always an efficient information exchange mechanism. But information exchange isn't the only reason for going to a meeting or for participating in an ongoing social context. People like to talk with other people. People go to a workshop, even when the papers are online. Showing up signifies the importance of the occasion and the importance of the community.

Let me give you an example of a scientist doing productive work through multiple ongoing relationships. And by the way, I apologize for the sort of wishy-washy relationship word. I couldn't figure out a nice, crisp alternative, so we're going to have to go with it.

Think of a scientist at the weekly meeting of his research group who's critiquing the research presentation of one of his doctoral students. This scientist is simultaneously helping to create new scientific knowledge, perhaps describing additional analyses that the student could do in order to refute the claims made by a competing lab, in addition, reminding the student to verify the analytic techniques he's just been describing with the new postdoc, who has recently arrived from a colleague's lab where these techniques were first developed.

That's one thing that the scientist is doing, helping to create new scientific knowledge. At the same time, the scientist is training the next generation of scientists through suggesting the additional analyses, through, perhaps, critiquing the format of the student's slides, through asking the student to present his results in the professor's graduate survey course, helping to create new scientific knowledge, training the next generation of scientists, deciding which of his colleagues labs to recommend as a good postdoc placement for the student when he finishes his thesis, deciding which journal to submit the student's research to, and remembering that he still owes the editor of that journal reviews on three papers.

Thinking about how these results are going to affect the next round of studies, and deciding he's going to have to apply for new funds sooner than he had hoped, realizing that he's going to have to say yes to the provost's request that he chair the university task force on graduate education, if he's going to have any hope of getting the provost to approve his request for additional lab space.

Now, the manifest task, when we're thinking about this scientist, the scientist's manifest task is to critique a research project. But all of the other tasks are equally necessary to being a productive scientist. They all entail information processing, absolutely. But each of these information processing tasks is embedded in a particular social context, a particular social structure of reciprocal human interdependence, a structure that's sustained through trust, obligation, and affiliation. Furthermore, the contexts the scientist is operating in simultaneously operate at different levels of social aggregation. Let me see if I can explain a little bit what I mean by that. Could I have the next one, please.

The social enterprise of science operates at three levels of aggregation. At the institutional level, we have the human conventions and organizations that certify knowledge and allocate resources. We have the Nobel Prize committees. We have the scientific journals with their editors and editorial boards. We have the research funding agencies.

At the middle range, we have the distributed colleagues and competitors working in a single area. These play themselves out in conferences, summer studies, postdoc exchanges, pre-print mailing lists. The third level of aggregation is the close in level, the day-to-day interaction with colleagues and students. This is the place, this is the level of aggregation, where the apparatus is built, where the measurements are taken, where results are initially puzzled over and discussed, and where the next generation is socialized. This is also the place where, as some people would say, if you don't have to get on an airplane to go somewhere, this is where you go, the close in level.

The productive scientist has to work simultaneously at all three levels of aggregation and has to process information and manage relationships at all three levels. So what can we say about what computer support for interdependent actors looks like today? What are the systems and applications that acknowledge interdependence? Next slide.

I think the big success stories are electronic mail and file transfer. I don't know if there's anyone in this room who would think they're glamorous or represent research frontiers for today. But they certainly, in terms of numbers of people who use them to get productive work done, are the success stories, unstructured general tools. People can and do use them in any social context-- well, probably not yet to the Nobel committees, but in most other social contexts. They require very little social and cognitive overhead to use. But of course, they're just the beginning of what we need.

What are people working on today? I feel a bit audacious telling this audience about what computer scientists are doing today. But I think some of these kinds of work are not ones that would be particularly visible or perhaps even particularly interesting to you, so let me just say a very brief word.

At the other end of the spectrum from unstructured email and file transfer is workflow, something that, unfortunately, business organizations are quite enamored of today. I don't want to dwell on it, but it does acknowledge interdependence. It does things, like attempts to automate things, like administrative processes, like travel requests or payroll or some business processes, like approving loan applications.

It's sort of a transaction processing thing. The focus is on the flow of transaction tasks across processors. Some of the processors may be human beings. But the focus isn't at all on all of an individual human being's responsibilities, obligations, and tasks as they're structured in roles in an organization.

Another kind of work that a bit of which is going on today, there is something called CSCW, which stands for computer supported co-operative work. And there is groupware, allegedly support for people doing intellectual tasks. CSCW, the acronym, was created, I think, in 1986. So this is certainly not an old and venerable subfield. But at any event, some of the examples of things that people are working on include working with shared files, shared design spaces, shared document editors, group awareness tools, group meeting rooms, to support face-to-face meetings or geographically distributed meetings.

Now typically, in much of this work, the focus is on a small group. I suspect a part of the reason is it's sort of hard enough to get the technology to work for a small number of people. I'm not clear that people working in this area believe that the small group is the only useful or important level at which people do work. But at any event, much of the work going on now focuses on groups from size, say, two to 10.

Also, much of this work takes a single task focus. For instance, there's work on the task of collaborative design. There's work on the task of brainstorming in meetings. These applications are often highly structured. They may force people to state assumptions or to specify commitments and to state their binary choices. You're either in a meeting room or you're not. You're either present for the video conference or you're not.

You're either explicitly making a commitment or you're not. I think that computer support for the productive scientist, who doesn't just process information but who works through relationships with other people and organizations, needs to have a whole different flavor. Could I have the next slide, please?

It shouldn't just support a task, a manifest task. Because the scientist, of course, is doing multiple different tasks simultaneously, only one of which is the manifest one. It should not just support a group, because the scientist is simultaneously participating in multiple groups at different levels of social aggregation.

So what should this computer support do? It should support the scientist who works in multiple groups simultaneously, who works at different levels of social aggregation simultaneously. It should move with the scientist as he or she physically and cognitively moves from group to group throughout the day. And it should allow the scientist to map his information environment to his social contexts, not to arbitrary physical locations like a meeting room or temporal constraints.

Now, since I'm not a technologist, it would be extraordinarily silly for me to tell you what the technology should look like. Instead, what I'd like to do is describe some social facts that, if we had technology support for them, could lead to more productive behavior. Your assignment is going to be to invent the technology to support the social facts.

Let me offer you three examples. Could I have the next one? The first collection of social facts has to do with the absent meeting participant. People have multiple ongoing responsibilities. Their responsibilities obligate them to participate in particular real-time meetings. Conflicting obligations mean that not everyone who should attend a given meeting will be able to do so.

In fact, I'll bet that every one of you who is sitting in this room today is missing one or more meetings back in your home spot that you should be attending. I think we need technology support for the partially present meeting participant. Now, I have to tell you, I've been in a number of meetings where the people in the room were partially present, but that's not what I mean. What I mean is for the person who should be at the real-time meeting but can't be.

There should be easy ways to review the meeting after the fact. And I think, actually, in Raja's videotape of earlier today, I caught a glimpse of how that might be able to happen. But that's only half of the story. That's good for the person who can't be at the meeting. But for the people who are present at the real-time meeting, it should be just as easy for them to signal the attention of an absent member as a present one, to ask questions of the absent member at particular points, to request action. The only difference will be that the partially present participants will be delayed for a bit. So I hope you can invent technology support for the partially present meeting participant.

Second social fact-- the meeting isn't over when it's over. Most meetings are embedded in an ongoing social context. A meeting doesn't end when it's over. People figure out, after they walk out the door, what they wish they had said. They think of new ideas to contribute. They do what they said they would do during the meeting, or they don't and they have to be reminded.

And so I want you to invent technology support for the post-meeting meeting. After the face-to-face meeting is over, it should be easy for participants to slide new ideas, insights, clarifications, contributions, into the ambient information environment of the meeting. These could be from fully present participants or partially present participants.

Third social fact-- group membership is dynamic. Groups add new members. These members not only come with a different set of skills, which presumably is why you put groups together in the first place, but they also arrive with different obligations, different ways of doing business. Bringing a new member up to speed is necessary for the member to function productively in the group and for the group to function productively.

Creating a new group is simply a special case of adding members to an initially empty group. I know that Marjory Blumenthal had been invited to attend this meeting and was unable to be present. Marjorie runs the panels that are associated with one of the National Academy of Sciences committees. And I think Marjory will particularly appreciate your invention of technology to support the dynamic group member, technology to support adding members to an initially empty group.

The process of convening these advisory committees is one that she certainly handles with expertise. But it takes a lot of time and energy. The rest of us who have to convene groups of people from time to time I think could certainly appreciate that.

So what would technology support for the dynamic group member look like? Well, one of the things that we certainly would want to have is a "who are these people" button. When a new person enters a group, he or she can easily learn about the accomplishments, skills, social circles of other members, and vice versa. Of course, it will be easy to go deeper if you wish by reading papers or examining other work products that are referenced in the first level of the "who are these people" display. So that's one piece of it.

Second piece is automatic configuration of group communication protocols. Now, Nick was telling us this morning that, in some number of years, we'll be able to shake hands and all of that stuff will pass automatically. That's one way of doing it. I guess I don't know that I always want to shake hands with everybody.

But it would be nice to have other way-- well, it would be nice to have other ways, maybe that computers, without having to get your hands involved, could exchange information about email addresses, video conferencing connections, the conventions for producing work products that each individual person brings with him or her into the particular group. What versions of what software do people use? I don't know. Maybe in the future, there won't be versions. But I sort of think there will be.

And all of that information should get exchanged automatically. That's automatic configuration. Then there should be easy ways to configure at least some of the relationship protocols. What do I mean by that? How open or closed is the group? When and in what form can its work products be sent outside the group? Are drafts confidential? Can drafts be circulated to colleagues outside the membership or the particular group? Who must review work products before they can be shared more broadly? Who's in charge? What's the calendar?

Now, these are [? gizzies. ?] I think that's a technical term. And I hope it's clear that I'm not asking you just to build [? gizzies. ?] Can I have the next slide, please? These are just examples of what we could hope to find in a technology that supports a scientist who is not simply a solo information processor, not simply a generic communicator to the galaxy, but a person who works through simultaneous relationships, structured relationships, with other people and other organizations.

I also hope it's clear that my vision will require new social inventions, too. For example, the partially present meeting participant is a social role. We'll have to develop norms and beliefs about this role, ways of proceeding. The "who are these people" button requires-- I can imagine this being used with [? Avida ?] for academic people. But for non-academic people, people who do not work in an academic organization, we need useful ways of summarizing a person's accomplishments, skills, social circle, and so on.

Although I have explicitly tried to focus on science and the doing of productive scientific work, I'd like to look beyond that domain for a moment and suggest that technology that can support scientists, who already are working in multiple simultaneous relationships, may also support people who need but do not have a multiplicity of ongoing relationships. Many human beings are physically alone or feel socially isolated. They perhaps could benefit from having more people in their ambient information environment.

Some usenet groups, as I suspect all of you in this room know, already serve this function to some extent for some people today. There is a newsgroup or listserv for practically every malady or misfortune of the human condition. And some of these have been extraordinarily important in the lives of people who participate in them.

Now, technology to support the dynamic group member could be used to help manage electronic support groups. Support for the post-meeting meeting could be useful perhaps after a parent-teacher conference, when the parents think of additional questions they should have asked during their 15 minutes allocated with the teacher. Support for the partially present meeting participant could be useful for someone who is unable to attend a spouse's medical appointment, but who needs to be involved in the treatment plan.

I think that the vision of the solo individual made more powerful, more creative, more productive through technology will continue to be beguiling, seductive, important, fundamentally important. New inventions for personal computing based on that vision will and should continue. Could I have the next slide, please?

What I've been trying to do, though, is ask you to think about how the person embedded in multiple social contexts can be made more creative and more productive. Perhaps the real challenge for the web is to support social context through socially structured information. I think that the challenge for technologists, more generally, is to invent support for people who are not just solo information processors, not just generic communicators, but who are embedded in and accomplish work through interdependence with other people. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

That was sort of different, wasn't it?

MODERATOR: Thank you very much.

SPROULL: You're welcome.

ENGELBART: Folks, question time. Let's see, can we have the house lights a bit so that Lee can see you?

SPROULL: Hello, Michael. Yes, sir.

AUDIENCE: Michael Lesk. Garrison Keillor writes about the rise of the shy, this feeling that, as computer technology means that interaction at a distance replaces or supplements face-to-face interaction, the personality type that I guess we associate with automobile salesmen will become less important in society, and the type associated with the wimp sitting at a typewriter will become more important and dominant. Do you think this is accurate or that anything like it will happen?

SPROULL: Actually, I've done some research documenting the rise of the shy. And since I am one of those folks, I'm delighted to report that computer communication does, in fact, bring with it benefits for folks like me. I guess, though, I think we'll always still have automobile salesmen. So I don't see it as one becomes more influential or present and one less. I don't see it as a 0 sum game, necessarily. Nor do I think that real human beings are going to stop talking to real human beings face-to-face.

Stu.

AUDIENCE: Stuart Card. As communication becomes easier with larger and larger numbers of people around the world, and, in fact, as we succeed in being able to collect more and more information from the net and so on, there is more stuff to do. But the amount of time somebody has remains constant. So one of the real issues seems to me is the management of attention among all of these things. So can you conceive of ways to support the scientists to get less communication or to have more time, to be more solo. [LAUGHS]

SPROULL: No.

[LAUGHTER]

No, Stu, I didn't make my point clear. The scientist doesn't do science solo. The scientist does science in a socially structured group. And the group may be able to figure out ways to sustain its boundaries so that information, or stuff, data, isn't totally swamping them.

I think that graduate students are wonderful information filter retrieval devices for professors. And I don't want to propose that we get rid of them or replace their functions with computing technology. I really was trying to make the point that, if you try to invent technology for the solo information processor or the generic society, you miss out on a lot of the helpful stuff that social organizations are already doing for us, structuring people's attention already and providing mechanisms and roles for helping manage information flow.

AUDIENCE: Samuel Epstein with Sense Media. We operate something called the sprawl. Over a little a year and a half ago, we took some technology developed at Xerox PARC called LambdaMOO. And we modified it enhanced it-- that's what we call it, some people think we defiled it-- to support hypermedia, by adding support for hypertext and being able to inline graphics and things like that. And right now as a result over a year and a half, we now over 4,000 people on our server in Hawaii. And we call it a collaborative hyper media server. And it integrates together text and graphics and chat and mail and news posts.

And what I'm wondering is if you've done any research into some of the social interactions that are going on there. It's a very rich and diverse society with a bunch of people really working together all over the world to create hypermedia presentations. And this technology is now spreading out into lots of servers all over. There's some stuff being done at Brown University, as well. And I was wondering if you studied any of these new societies are starting up. They're mostly populated with people under the age of 20, but they're doing some incredible work.

SPROULL: Let's see. The short answer to your question is no. I haven't yet studied these communities. I'm certainly looking forward to doing so. I mentioned, when I was talking about the inventions that I hope you folks will do, the fact that there have to be new social inventions as well. And at the moment, I'm not sure that we have good social inventions for how to have 4,000 people work together productively on anything. People that you're describing are doing that invention now. At the same time, you're inventing or modifying or whatever the technology tools. So I look forward to having the chance to try to systematically understand some of these kinds of things that are going on.

However, let me return for a moment to productive science. Whereas there may have been 400 authors on the top quark papers, there certainly were 4,000 people involved in some way the production of the research that led to those papers. And those organizations are highly socially structured. And I think it would be interesting to learn from how-- to take the best of how those organizations work-- and lord knows they do not work perfectly-- but to take the best of that and to try to understand how that can also be useful in your kind of new world. Ron.

AUDIENCE: Ron Becker, University of Toronto. Lee, I'd like to thank you for a very interesting presentation. And it strikes me, though, that the scientific communities, in general, are resistant to understanding and appreciating and believing in the social context of science. And I go back to Bush. It strikes me that he probably should have seen some of that, in terms of the Manhattan Project, which was sort of one of the first examples of big science. And I wonder whether, first of all, you agree that communities are resistant to believing this and appreciating this and why this is. Is it something about the way we educate scientists or whatever?

SPROULL: Thank you for the thank you. I think it's partly a function of how we educate scientists. I think it's partly a function of how scientists are. It's important that there be a hubris, that there be a belief that the solo inventor, thinker can change the world. Usually, it doesn't work out, but you have to have that belief. It's fundamentally important to the survival of the scientific enterprise.

So I'm not discouraged or unhappy when I see that. It's natural. I think that often, as scientists filled with hubris, age, they come a bit more to appreciate the importance and necessity of the social structure and the social enterprise that supports their work. Unfortunately, that sometimes happens too late for them to then proselytize for the funding of social science research.

[LAUGHTER]

Peter.

AUDIENCE: Peter Denning. There is a book that I always like to take inspiration from to combat the solo scientist. And that's the book by Bruno Latour, Science in Action. Many of the other scientists I've given that to to read loved the book. But when they get back to their own academic departments and start considering merit and promotion, they always look for the solo contribution.

And they have all sorts of ways to dig and see if they can find it. So we really do have kind of a contradiction between where your heart wants to go-- your heart wants to appreciate the social context. But when you put it in action, you want to find the solo inventor contribution. Do you have any suggestions on how to change that?

SPROULL: No. And I don't think, actually, that we need to worry about changing that. I think what you need to do is continue to push, to invent the technologies, to invent the technology environments that will make it obvious to one and all that scientific collective work is where the productive work of science occurs. But again, I don't want to stamp out hubris. I mean, it's kind of obnoxious in faculty meetings. [LAUGHTER] But it's very important for the scientific enterprise to continue.

AUDIENCE: Another question for you-- you named a few names that are more on the solo inventor side. What are some of the names that you would hold up as examples to look at for some of the other parts that you were talking about there-- for example, workflow or CSCW?

SPROULL: Well, Doug Engelbart, Doug Englebart, and Doug Engelbart, to begin.

[LAUGHTER]

And I hope you heard that I did acknowledge him initially. All the work that all of the people in computer communications and shared files are doing today-- I guess since I'm not a technologist, I never feel the need to put down anybody's stuff. I say, yeah, do more of that, but let's do some other things, too. I want to expand your world, not stamp out some things. But let's add more people and more ways of thinking about inventing technology support for interdependent people.

MODERATOR: Thank you. You getting hungry?

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you, again.

SPROULL: Thank you.

MODERATOR: Terrific.

What's been really fun about this symposium for me is that I've been able to introduce so many insanely great people, in the words of the late great Steve Jobs. And certainly one of the very topmost of those people is Alan Kay. Most of you identify him with personal computers and personal computing, and at a time when that idea was still embryonic or, as some of us thought, lunatic fringe.

He's made seminal contributions to object-oriented programming, graphical user interfaces, and window managers via the Smalltalk language and its programming environment. He's always been interested in the appropriate use of computer technology, and especially in the area that appeals most to me, education.

Alan is also, as most of you probably know, a very serious musician. He was a professional musician. And I try to characterize him-- I first thought of him as a polymath. But many people don't know what that is. So then I thought about interdisciplinarian. And Alan didn't like that. So we came up together with calling him-- Alan, what was the word? Trans--

[LAUGHTER]

Then we had to fish for that.

AUDIENCE: [? Transcendalist. ?]

MODERATOR: So trans everything that I know about, here is Alan to finish up for us.

KAY: Thanks. Thank you. We had to use the trans prefix somehow since Ted is here. Well, when I was thinking about what to do for this talk, when I kept on thinking back to the period when I think that Bush was most influential in the ARPA world, and I was thinking that it might make a nice talk to just think about the '60s, just to cut it off at the end of 1969. It just happened that 1970 is when Xerox PARC started up. So cut it off before Xerox PARC. And when I was thinking back, the more I thought back, the more I thought of some of the interesting people who influenced that very, very interesting and exciting decade.

So I thought to start off with a little trip down memory lane. And as a kind of a context for the talk, I thought I'd start off by showing you Arthur Koestler's-- Arthur Koestler was a great novelist who, in the last years of his life, became a psychologist doing research in creativity at Stanford. And one of his characterizations of creativity sort of goes as follows. He said that, our minds are kind of constrained to think within contexts or within systems of belief. Sometimes they're called paradigms.

But he was thinking of something perhaps larger, that we have a set of commonsensical things that we accept as reality. And our thought patterns sort of jog along, staying in this particular, here, a pink plane. Every once in a while, we have little outlaw thoughts that are regarded as lies by the pink plane. And they're usually just suppressed and pushed back. And every once in a while, when you're taking a shower or out jogging or something, you are relaxed enough to let one of these outlaw thoughts flourish a little bit.

And sometimes what you find out is that that little pink idea, when expanded into the blue context, is much more interesting than it was in the pink context. So the idea here is, terrific ideas often hide behind good ones. Good ones are the ones that are-- this is like peer review and NSF.

[LAUGHTER]

They always fund good research, but they almost never fund great research. Because six people are trying to decide whether what you're trying to do is reasonable ahead of time. And usually the way it works is, you decide whether it is reasonable by looking what happened. And then Koestler said-- and what happens when you get one of these big blue inspirations-- oh, sorry.

Well, I goofed. I left out a slide, so I'll just tell you here. He said, there are three reactions. If you are telling a joke, then the reaction is ha-ha. If you're doing science, then the reaction is a-ha. And if you're doing art, then the reaction is ah.

[LAUGHTER]

Because he points out that, in each of these cases-- for instance, a joke is something that takes you down the garden path and then suddenly reveals that the context you're in is not the one you thought you're in. Science has this aspect, as well. You suddenly see it was there all the time. And often, besides saying a-ha, you start laughing. And of course, in art, the whole idea in art is to try and take you out of the world that you're in, your commonplace world, and reveal that there's more to the world.

And one of the maxims here is that, knowing more than your own field is really helpful in doing this. And I've always thought that one of the reasons the '60s was so interesting is that nobody was a computer scientist back then. And everybody who came into it came into it with lots of other knowledge and interests. Then they tried to figure out what computers were. And the only place they had to use for analogies were other areas.

And so we got some extremely interesting ideas from that. And of course, the reason being educated is important is simply because you don't have any blue context if you don't have any other kinds of knowledge to think with. So engineering is one of the hardest fields to be creative in, just because it's all about optimizing. And you don't optimize without being very firmly anchored to the context that you're in. So what we're talking about here is something that is not about optimization, but actually in kind of rotating the point of view.

Now, I was five years old in 1945. And I must have seen the Life magazine article, because I used to peel through Life magazine. But at that age, I was much more interested in the manila envelopes that life came in because you could draw on them. I'm sure that memex made no impression on me back then. I ran across it when reading a science fiction story by Robert Heinlein in the '50s. And Heinlein had this nice thing of taking terms that he had found out about and making them generic. So he spoke rather casually in the science fiction story of a memex.

And whenever he did that, I had found out that that was a good reason to go to the library and trying to find out what basis memex had. That brought me to reading Bush's article in the '50s. And I'm ashamed to say that, aside from being interesting in the science fiction way, it made nowhere near the impression on me that it did on Doug Engelbart and some other people. It wasn't actually until after I had met Doug Engelbart and had heard him talk that I realized that the ideas of Bush had tremendous significance. But I got that through the eyes and the ideas of Doug Engelbart.

So for me, I start off in the very early '60s, 1961, doing data processing for the Air Force. And back then, they didn't really have operating systems. They were very ad hoc. And Air Training Command had many bases. And they had to move files around. And somebody, to this day unknown-- I once tried to find out who it was that thought up this idea-- had come up with a wonderful notion for allowing data to be used from base to base without having to have lots of standards and formats and operating systems.

And the way it worked was this-- is that each file on the Burroughs 220 tapes had three sections. The first section was a set of pointers into the second section, which was a set of code. And the code knew about the third section, which was the formats of the data records. So in modern terms, what you have here is a generic interface, a set of methods, and then the data parts of objects.

So that is the first example that I know of in which this object-oriented idea was actually used. Of course, it wasn't thought of in those terms back then. But it was something that was used quite a bit in the Air Force until they decided to standardize on COBOL, in which case all of this stuff got thrown out, and they went back to processing data.