brain scan seer of the mirror world the economist

7/28/2019 Brain Scan Seer of the Mirror World the Economist

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Recuperado de http://www.economist.com/node/21540383


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reality, streaming video, tablet computers, e-bookssearch engines and internet telephony. Moreimportantly, he anticipated the consequences all thiwould have on the nature of social interactiondescribing distributed online communities that wor

just as Facebook and Twitter do today.

Mirror Worlds aren't mere information services. Theyare places you can stroll around', meeting andelectronically conversing with friends or randompassers-by. If you find something you don't like, post a

note; you'll soon discover whether anyone agrees withyou, he wrote. I can't be personal friends with all thepeople who run my local world any longer, but viaMirror Worlds we can be impersonal friends. There wibe freer, easier, more improvisationacommunications, more like neighbourhood chattingand less like typical mail and phone calls. Where

someone is or when he is available won't matterMirror Worlds will rub your nose in the big picture andsociety may be subtly but deeply different as a result.If his vision was correct, Dr Gelernter realised, thennew systems would be neededand whoever builthem would have an opportunity to make them moreelegant and accessible than existing software. He hadalready made a big contribution to the field of networkcomputing with his work on the development of Lindaa parallel-programming language that allows programrunning on different machines to co-ordinate theiactions. Multiple interconnected computers can thenoperate as a single, more powerful machine. In 1991


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Dr Gelernter and his colleagues at Yale demonstratedthe value of this approach by linking 14 smaworkstation computers to create a cluster that waas powerful as a supercomputer, but cost a fraction othe price. This was a forerunner of the modern cloud

computing approach in which firms such as Googleand Amazon combine thousands or millions omachines to deliver computing services.Clouds on the horizon

Linking up machines in this way, Dr Gelernteobserved at the time, made far more efficient use o

computing resources and created a foundation for newapplications such as those outlined in Mirror WorldsIn 1992 the New York Times wrote of his vision of aworld wired together into one giant computer, thoughit noted that this scenario was considered a potentianightmare by people who worry about computeprivacy.

The publicity around Dr Gelernter's work may explainwhy Ted Kaczynski, an anti-technology terrorist knownas the Unabomber, decided to target him with a lettebomb in 1993. Mr Kaczynski hoped to foment aworldwide revolution against the industrialtechnological system and sent a series of lettebombs, causing three deaths and many injuries beforebeing arrested in 1996. The letter bomb sent to DGelernter put him in hospital for weeks, required himto undergo extensive surgery and left him withpermanent injuries to his right eye and right handwhich he covers with a glove. Whenever I get tofeeling a bit morose and missing my old right hand,


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wind up thinking instead how privileged I am to be anacademic in computer science, he wrote to his friendby e-mail after leaving hospital. In the final analysisone decent typing hand and an intact head is all youreally need.

I want the state of each hospital patient to bewatched by a million software agents.The attack prompted Dr Gelernter to branch out intonew areas beyond computing. While convalescing hewrote an acclaimed book about the 1939 New YorkWorld's Fair, and he has gone on to establish himsel

as a political commentator, art critic and painter. (Hewas originally attracted to computer science becausehe thought it would be a solid career that would allowhim to pursue his love of painting.) At the same timeDr Gelernter pressed on with his work as a computescientist. In 1997 he and his colleague Eric Freemanformed a company, also called Mirror Worlds, to

develop an approach called lifestreamsa graphicauser interface intended to replace the windows andfiles of conventional computer desktops with anelegant chronological stream of digital objects.Looking like an endless Rolodex, a lifestream wouldextend from the moment of your birth to the day oyour death, containing every document, photomessage or web page you have ever interacted withall in a single, searchable stream, and held safelyonline. Individual items could be shared with othepeople. When I want to make something public, I flipa switch, and everyone in the world who's interestedsees it, says Dr Gelernter. I could also blend millions


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of other streams into mine, with a simple way tocontrol the flow of information so I'm nooverwhelmed. It would be my personal life, my publiclife and my confidential electronic diary.If that sounds an awful lot like Facebook, the

similarities become almost eerie when Dr Gelernteexplains how he hoped to release lifestreams into theworld. I wanted the company to build software focollege students, who are eager early adopters. Iwould be designed not only to eliminate file systembut also to be a real-time messaging medium. Socia

networking was the most important aspect of itStarting with Yale, we would give it away for free toget undergraduates excited about recommending it totheir friends, he says. But Mirror Worlds' investordecided that it would be better to focus on corporateclients, and the result was an organisational tool calledScopeware. It sold modestly to a few large American

state agencies, but never took off. Mirror Worldceased trading in 2004, the same year that MarZuckerberg launched Facebook.The story of Mirror Worlds was not over yet, howeverIn 2008 the company, now owned by a hedge fundrevived itself and filed suit against Apple for pateninfringement. Between 1996 and 2003, Dr Gelernteand Dr Freeman had generated a number of patentsrelating to the idea of lifestreams. These patents, thefirm argued, were being infringed by several Appleproducts, including its Spotlight search feature, itCover Flow interface for displaying album covers iniTunes and its Time Machine backup software. A


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countersuit from Apple accused Dr Gelernter of hidingprior art relating to his patents and misrepresentinghis inventorship.Dr Gelernter thus found himself at war with Jobs, oneof the few figures in the computer industry who shared

his views on the importance of technology beingsubservient to users, rather than the other wayaround. Apple has always been interested in thecultural and aesthetic value of its products over theengineering. Steve always saw himself as an artist,says Dr Gelernter. According to an internal Apple e

mail presented at the trial, Jobs saw an article abouScopeware in 2001, was impressed by the idea andsuggested that Apple might want to license it. The twofirms met but no deal was done.Inversion of fortune

In 2010 a district court in Texas found Apple guilty onall counts and awarded Mirror Worlds a stunning

$625.5m in damagesthe fourth-biggest patent awardin history. It was good to be vindicated, although bythat time, I had only a small financial interest in theverdict, says Dr Gelernter. In research, the capitathat you have is not money in the bank but youreputation. I simply wanted a footnote saying thathese were Gelernter's ideas. But in April 2011 afederal judge overturned the verdict, even whileupholding the Mirror Worlds patents, ruling that Applehad not infringed them and should pay nothing. Iwas like a punch in the face, says Dr Gelernter. MirroWorlds is now appealing against this ruling and a finajudgment is expected in early 2012.


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Given his track record for predicting the future, what iDr Gelernter working on next? One prediction inMirror Worlds remains conspicuously unfulfilled: hivision of cyberspace seething with billions ointelligent software agents working on behalf of thei

human masters. They might monitor news feeds, tracklocal-government decisions or keep an eye on people'health via digital sensors. I want the state of eachhospital patient to be watched by a million agents,says Dr Gelernter. We can create a software agent foa particular rare combination of circumstances tha

happens only once every 1,000 years but happens toyou. The technology exists, he says, but our MirroWorld is uninhabited. It's like a forest with nothingliving in it.He plans to form a new company to focus on thiagent-based approach, something today's internefirms show little interest in pursuing. Google i

commercially successful and dazzlingly imaginativebut I don't see what I would like to see from them, oFacebook or Twitter, says Dr Gelernter. They're noturning on their imaginations. His new company wialso deliver a new incarnation of lifestreams, capableof subsuming social networking, news and multimediaI've added software layers and apps that make it easyto take any kind of document, object or image and puit in the stream, he says. I want this to be apublication medium, the launch pad for everything anda copy of everything.As ever, Dr Gelernter's excitement about the potentiaof new technology is tempered by frustration that too


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little attention is paid to aesthetic and social factorsA lot of convenience and power could be gained, anda lot of unhappiness, irritation and missedopportunities avoided, if the industry thought aboudesign, instead of always making it the last thing on

the list, he says. We need more people who are ahome in the worlds of art and the humanities and whoare less diffident in the presence of technology. Thereare not enough articulate Luddite, anti-technologyvoices.It is not the sort of thing you expect to hear from a

professor of computer science, let alone the victim oan anti-technology extremist. But as well as havingforeseen the future of computing, over his career DGelernter has developed a clear understanding ohumans' conflicted relationship with the technology onwhich they increasingly rely.From the print edition: Technology Quarterly
http://www.economist.com/printedition/2011-12-03http://www.economist.com/printedition/2011-12-03

brain scan seer of the mirror world the economist

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