The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks
by Joshua Cooper Ramo · 16 May 2016 · 326pp · 103,170 words
and Time In which we learn what networks are really, rather wonderfully, meant for. 1. Starting in the early 1990s, the American scientist and inventor Danny Hillis began what has since become an every-few-months sort of ritual. He packed up from his home in Encino, a short drive over the
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dollars. As we considered people we all knew who’d made fundamental, essential contributions but had not been as boldfaced as they might have been, Danny Hillis’s name came up immediately. Hillis had developed a revolutionary “massively parallel” computer in the 1980s. The machine had helped create an entire discipline of
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a very low number. It was an easy decision for our prize committee. No Bill Gates. No Steve Jobs. So here’s how I met Danny Hillis: I called to tell him he had won a million dollars. (I recommend this as a way to start a friendship.) Hillis had been a
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need that was becoming our new, expected velocity. They were murdering time. This, in the end, was what the networks had been built for. 3. Danny Hillis’s father was an epidemiologist. His mother was a biostatistician. And his childhood was a blur of infection-led family migrations. “Anywhere in the world
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some time off yet. There is so much yet to be connected. There are so many new topologies to be built. “Time is a ride,” Danny Hillis once remarked in an early meditation on his ten-thousand-year clock, “and you are on it.” He was right. That ride takes place, in
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!—our age is now placing new, mind-shaping forces within instant reach. 7. Back in the fall of 1988, at about the same moment that Danny Hillis and his team were busy peddling their amazing Connection Machine—and trying to smash every world computing-speed record they could find—another device appeared
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I first met her, in the 1990s, she was in charge of much of the work on artificial intelligence (AI) at MIT’s Media Lab, Danny Hillis’s old home. Maes had arrived at MIT in 1990 and almost immediately turned to the problem of making machines that might think. One day
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of the Scientific Revolution. Well, you and I may have been born too late for an age of purely human cognition. We might ask, as Danny Hillis once proposed to me on an afternoon walk, Was the Age of Reason merely a blip in human history? Our modern world emerged from an
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Daniel Hillis, “The Connection Machine” (PhD diss., MIT, 1985), 2. Adding, in case: Ibid., 19. He drove: Po Bronson, “The Long Now: Time-Traveling with Danny Hillis,” Wired, May 1, 1998. Feynman, sixty-five: W. Daniel Hillis, “Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine,” Physics Today 42, no. 2 (February 1989): 78. “At
Clock of the Long Now
by Stewart Brand · 1 Jan 1999 · 194pp · 49,310 words
; it’s a given. “What people mean by the word technology,” says computer designer Alan Kay, “is anything invented since they were born.” Computer designer Danny Hillis counters, “What people mean by the word technology is the stuff that doesn’t really work yet.” Technology is both the problem and its own
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new doubling is a new world. Ad man Regis McKenna calls it “continuous discontinuous change.” Life becomes perpetual transition with no resting point in sight. Danny Hillis explains what motivated him to build a linear Clock in an exponential era: “Some people say that they feel the future is slipping away from
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the original stories Vinge predicted that the Singularity would happen in reality, in the lifetime of his readers. A good many people, including Clock designer Danny Hillis, have adopted Vinge’s term as a shorthand way of referring to impending technology acceleration and convergence. They all note that the future becomes drastically
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later a whole genre of pop music called Ambient claimed Eno as its parent.) In a 1994 discussion of how to think about and name Danny Hillis’s millennial Clock, Eno suggested, “How about calling it ‘The Clock of the Long Now,’ since the idea is to extend our concept of the
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thing can do is give permission to think long term. If it succeeds in that, the rest may follow. The Clock’s instigator and designer, Danny Hillis, thinks of the project in terms of his three children, who want to know what their story is and where they might fit into it
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. THE WORLD’S SLOWEST COMPUTER If you were going to design a clock to keep good time for 10,000 years, where would you begin? Danny Hillis started with certain design principles (that might apply to other things beside clocks, as does his whole approach of breaking down a problem into components
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the enormous Indian ruins at Chaco Canyon. “Anthropologists call that sudden urge, when acted on, a florescence.”) At 4 A.M. one day in 1997, Danny Hillis woke up with a picture in his mind. He wrote immediately to his colleagues: Imagine the Clock is a series of rooms. In the first
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in today’s world, the bulk of whose work is knowledge-based, which means increasingly relying on computers. The world economy itself has become digital. Danny Hillis notes that from previous ages we have good raw data written on clay, on stone, on parchment and paper, but from the 1950s to the
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current media, which requires constant effort and expense. “Back when information was hard to copy, people valued the copies and took care of them,” says Danny Hillis. “Now, copies are so common as to be considered worthless, and very little attention is given to preserving them over the long term.” Furthermore, though
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crytographically sequestered until their time is ripe. Property deeds, contracts, wills, directions to caches could be securely stashed with appropriate wake-up directions built in. Danny Hillis points out that “Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence programs need this. By the time any sort of extra-terrestrial life is likely to answer, we
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incremental and open-ended), but specific long-term plans will always be based on wrong long-term predictions, and it is best to avoid them. Danny Hillis responded to Kelly’s report: The difference between the two examples—dirigible ports versus ecological conservation—is a great demonstration of the difference between long
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. A third scenario, perhaps the ideal outcome, would be for the bonds between generations to grow stronger, with an ever-growing bias toward the young. Danny Hillis recalls, “What my grandfather did was create options. He worked hard to allow my father to have a better education than he did, and in
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that can be reached quickly are rather limited, and work on them displaces attention and effort that might be spent on worthier, longer-term goals. Danny Hillis points out, “There are problems that are impossible if you think about them in two-years terms—which everyone does—but they’re easy if
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future. The project leader is a land artist and anthropologist named Jim Mason. Construction of the Prototype Clock swarmed ahead on schedule. At one point Danny Hillis remarked, “This is a clock that Harrison or Babbage could have built, if they’d had FedEx.” Indeed the eighteenth-century creator of the Longitude
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remachined—parts from distant fabricators overnight to Chris Rand’s high-tech machine shop in a decaying shipyard on the waterfront of Sausalito, California. There Danny Hillis’s clock design was refined and improved by designer (and project manager) Alexander Rose, mechanical engineer Liz Woods, and clockmaker David Munroe. The result is
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by Thomas Friedman, New York Times (13 November 1996), p. A19. :16 “What people mean by the word technology . . .” The remarks by Alan Kay and Danny Hillis are frequently made by them in speeches. :16 “The world did not double or treble its movement between 1800 and 1900 . . .” Quoted by Arthur Schlesinger
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“continuous discontinuous change” Regis McKenna, Real Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School, 1997) :17 “Some people say that they feel the future is slipping away . . .” Danny Hillis, “The Millennium Clock,” Wired Scenarios (1995), p. 48. CHAPTER 4, THE SINGULARITY :20 “At this singularity the laws of science and our ability to predict
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, “The Long Now,” Wired (May 1998), p. 118. :48 “If you’re going to do something that’s meant to be interesting for ten millennia . . .” Danny Hillis interview with Richard Kadrey, HotWired (5 December 1995). :51 “To me the Clock and the Library capture two different aspects of time
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.” Danny Hillis in same HotWired interview as above. :53 Historian Daniel Boorstin reports that the Inner Shrine at Ise. . . Daniel Boorstin, The Creators (New York: Random House,
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members of the board of The Long Now Foundation, most of it via thousands of messages online, a few of them quoted in this volume. Danny Hillis, Peter Schwartz, Brian Eno, Doug Carlston, Kevin Kelly, Paul Saffo, Mitch Kapor, Esther Dyson, executive director Alexander Rose and new board member Roger Kennedy are
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. Reading a book in manuscript is an onerous task, and commenting on it to the author is a delicate matter. Those who did both include Danny Hillis, Kevin Kelly, Peter Schwartz, John Brockman, Brian Eno, Kees Van der Heijden, and Ryan Phelan. An early line-edit came from James Donnelly, and a
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: Managing Digital Continuity” was sponsored by the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Information Institute, and The Long Now Foundation. Participants were Peter Lyman, Howard Besser, Danny Hillis, Brewster Kahle, Jaron Lanier, Doug Carlston, Kevin Kelly, Brian Eno, Stewart Brand, Margaret MacLean, and Ben Davis. A book of the proceedings is available from
The End of Illness
by David B. Agus · 15 Oct 2012 · 433pp · 106,048 words
that is the human body, and what we need to do to guide it toward health. Before you take your next vitamin, read this book.” —Danny Hillis, PhD, cofounder, Applied Minds and Thinking Machines “Dr. David Agus has been disrupting medicine as we know it for his entire career. Now he brings
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think about, though, is that DNA says more about our risk than our fate. It governs probabilities, not necessarily destinies. As my friend and colleague Danny Hillis (whom we’ll meet later when I cover emerging technologies) likes to describe it, DNA is simply a list of parts or ingredients rather than
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dynamics of your human body, and how that sequence codes for proteins that have specialized functions in you, is an analog process. My work with Danny Hillis has taken this challenge to heart, as we try to understand disease from an entirely different perspective from DNA alone. I first met Hillis in
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mine, and he said point-blank: “You need an engineer. You gotta meet this guy from Disney.” I wasn’t in the mood to meet Danny Hillis, a person whose name I kept hearing over and over in the beginning of 2003. At the time I wasn’t quite sure what he
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your hat and call it a day. Repeatable results are what allow us to draw reliable conclusions. Hence Al Gore’s insistence that I allow Danny Hillis to help me solve my problem. At its core, ours was an engineering problem, and this meant that it was probably not going to be
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what’s going on internally. At my laboratories at the Center for Applied Molecular Medicine at USC and Applied Proteomics, the company I cofounded with Danny Hillis, this is the kind of work we’re doing—trying to find the key to understanding all of our body’s proteins and how they
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to bring all this new technology that I’ve been describing into the virtual world. In 2009 I was part of a team, together with Danny Hillis and Parag Mallick, that put together a proposal for the National Cancer Institute that called for a Physical Sciences in Oncology Center. Our center, which
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trust in me. To Marc Benioff, for your true friendship. To Al Gore, for pushing me in the right direction (and first introducing me to Danny Hillis). To Max Nikias, Carmen Puliafito, and Eli Broad, for bringing me to USC, a remarkable academic home. To Sumner Redstone, for your unwavering belief in
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me. To Larry Norton, Danny Hillis, and Murray Gell-Mann, for making me think beyond my own discipline and putting up with my endless questions. To Lance Armstrong and the late
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.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/daedalus.html. Hillis, D. TED talk, 2010. Understanding Cancer through Proteomics. Accessed on October 18, 2011. http://www.ted.com/talks/danny_hillis_two_frontiers_of_cancer_treatment.html. Jablonski, N.G., and G. Chaplin. Colloquium Paper: Human skin pigmentation as an adaptation to UV radiation. Proceedings of
What Technology Wants
by Kevin Kelly · 14 Jul 2010 · 476pp · 132,042 words
consequences. The clock divided an unbroken stream of time into measurable units, and once it had a face, time became a tyrant, ordering our lives. Danny Hillis, computer scientist, believes the gears of the clock spun out science and all its many cultural descendants. He says, “The mechanism of the clock gave
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a complex system, in an unusual space, there won’t be many others. Look, most invention is a matter of time . . . of when, not if.” Danny Hillis, another polymath and serial inventor, is cofounder of an innovative prototype shop called Applied Minds, which is another idea factory. As you might guess from
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you. Most of what you adopt they will ignore. But every once in a while your adoption of “something that doesn’t quite work yet” (Danny Hillis’s definition of technology) will evolve into an appropriate tool they can use. It might be a solar grain dyer; it might be a cure
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use. They don’t need to be. I think there is a “complex enough” restraint. Technologies need not complexify to be useful in the future. Danny Hillis, computer inventor, once confided that he believed that there’s a good chance that 1,000 years from now computers might still be running programming
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also breeds certainty. The advantages of new technology are always disruptive. The first version of an innovation is cumbersome and finicky. It is, to repeat Danny Hillis’s definition of technology, “stuff that does not work yet.” A newfangled type of plow, waterwheel, saddle, lamp, phone, or automobile can offer only uncertain
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Brende David Brin Rob Carlson James Carse Jamais Cascio Richard Dawkins Eric Drexler Freeman Dyson George Dyson Niles Eldredge Brian Eno Joel Garreau Paul Hawken Danny Hillis Piet Hut Derrick Jensen Bill Joy Stuart Kauffman Donald Kraybill Mark Kryder Ray Kurzweil Jaron Lanier Pierre Lemonnier Seth Lloyd Lori Marino Max More Simon
Emergence
by Steven Johnson · 329pp · 88,954 words
far too slow to churn through the thousandfold generations of evolutionary time. But the massively parallel, high-speed computers introduced in the eighties—such as Danny Hillis’s Connection Machine—were ideally suited for exploring the powers of the genetic algorithm. And one of the most impressive GA systems devised for the
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wills the program into being. But the next generation is profoundly Darwinian. * * * Consider the program for number sorting devised several years ago by supercomputing legend Danny Hillis, a program that undermines all of our conventional assumptions about how software should be produced. For years, number sorting has served as one of the
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most parallel, like genetic algorithms, neural networks. These systems tend to learn by accumulating experience over a wide number of individual cases.” Think here of Danny Hillis’s number-sorting program. Hillis did manage to coax an ingenious and unplanned solution from the software, but it took thousands of iterations (not to
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for city life and ant foraging, but it’s harder to imagine selling shareholders on it as a replacement for the CEO. Software designers like Danny Hillis or Oliver Selfridge leaned on evolutionary techniques to rein in their systems and to force them toward specific goals. But evolution requires many parallel generations
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a learning network of traffic lights that will find an optimal system in changing conditions. Selfridge wants to attack the problem of traffic the way Danny Hillis attacked the problem of number sorting: by giving the network the general goal of minimizing delays, but letting the overall system figure out the details
Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand · 15 Mar 2009 · 422pp · 113,525 words
Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (2007). These days I divide my time between Global Business Network and an idiosyncratic foundation. In the 1990s, when inventor Danny Hillis came up with an idea to help people think long-term by building a monumental ten-thousand-year clock, I responded by cofounding The Long
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about Yucca Mountain, and the sickness was embedded in its long-term thinking, its ten-thousand-year time frame. Among those on the bus were Danny Hillis, designer of the clock, and Peter Schwartz, cofounder of Global Business Network. I wrote in my trip report that at the entrance to the Repository
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,a training video informed us that it was important not to trip on anything, and showed how to use a belt-mounted emergency breathing apparatus. Danny Hillis remarked that it is the device which, in event of a mine fire, OSHA demands to find on your body. Outside the tunnel entrance were
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, and hope for the best.’ What would people say about the risk of doing it that way?” They would call it genetic gambling, says inventor Danny Hillis, and outlaw it. As for medicine, the panic generated by recombinant DNA back in the 1970s has completely died away. In 1982, a human gene
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a bug as deeply embedded as I thought Y2K must be. The world was facing the blue screen of death! I should have listened to Danny Hillis, who has designed whole computer platforms. He predicted that Y2K would lead, at worst, to some dog licenses not being renewed on time. I should
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using any form of combustion as a source of power. While Greens worship Gaia, Turqs bargain with Gaia. • The operative principle for all is what Danny Hillis calls the Golden Rule of Time: Do for the future what you’re grateful the past did for you. (Or what you wish the past
Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
by John Brockman · 19 Feb 2019 · 339pp · 94,769 words
meetings, I got to know two young researchers who were about to play key roles in revolutionizing computer science. At MIT in the late seventies, Danny Hillis developed the algorithms that made possible the massively parallel computer. In 1983, his company, Thinking Machines, built the world’s fastest supercomputer by utilizing parallel
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’ve worked with researchers in nearly every variety of AI and complexity, including Rodney Brooks, Hans Moravec, John Archibald Wheeler, Benoit Mandelbrot, John Henry Holland, Danny Hillis, Freeman Dyson, Chris Langton, J. Doyne Farmer, Geoffrey West, Stuart Russell, and Judea Pearl. AN ONGOING DYNAMICAL EMERGENT SYSTEM From the initial meeting in Washington
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perspective that invites thinking in decades and centuries about the subject. All contemporary discussion is bound to age badly and immediately without the longer perspective.” Danny Hillis wants people in AI to realize how they’ve been programmed by Wiener’s book. “You’re executing its road map,” he says, “and you
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. This grand evolutionary loop can now be closed, with atoms arranging bits arranging atoms. Chapter 17 THE FIRST MACHINE INTELLIGENCES W. DANIEL HILLIS W. Daniel “Danny” Hillis is an inventor, entrepreneur, and computer scientist, Judge Widney Professor of Engineering and Medicine at USC, and author of The Pattern on the Stone: The
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Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work. While Danny Hillis was an undergraduate at MIT, he built a computer out of Tinkertoys. It has around ten thousand wooden parts, plays tic-tac-toe, and never
Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff · 22 Mar 2022 · 573pp · 142,376 words
the darker reality that would become known as filter bubbles several decades later. One of the people Brand met during his three-month stay was Danny Hillis, a cerebral young supercomputer designer who was a protégé of Minsky’s. Several years earlier Hillis had founded Thinking Machines, a radical supercomputer company based
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remained fantasies, however, if not for the unexpected email that arrived in Brand’s inbox several months after his visit to the dentist. In it, Danny Hillis sketched out his vision of a mechanical clock designed to run for ten thousand years. Hillis, still making the world’s fastest supercomputers but increasingly
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and go investigate,” Brand wrote the board. At the end of September 1998, he drove his Range Rover across Nevada to Ely, where he met Danny Hillis and his then wife, Patti; Rose; Kennedy; Saffo; and Brewster Kahle. Kahle, a New Yorker who had studied computer science at MIT and then worked
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in the annual Burning Man gathering. Brand looks at a prototype of the Clock of the Long Now, a project he began with computer scientist Danny Hillis as an exercise to inspire long-term thinking. Significantly, the two set out to build what will effectively be the world’s slowest computer just
Darwin Among the Machines
by George Dyson · 28 Mar 2012 · 463pp · 118,936 words
, and Jeff Robbins had the patience to await a manuscript, followed by the efficiency as editor to produce a book without additional delay. Others, including Danny Hillis, William S. Laughlin, James Noyes, Patrick Ong, and Ann Yow, offered encouragement at different stages along the way. The builders of my boat designs kept
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most of the work. “Non-computable functions may be the most common type of function in theory, but in practice they hardly ever come up,” Danny Hillis has explained. “In fact, it is difficult to find a well-defined example of a non-computable function that anybody wants to compute. This suggests
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due to the information gained.”27 Richardson thereby anticipated massively parallel computing, his 64,000 mathematicians reincarnated seventy years later as the multiple processors of Danny Hillis’s Connection Machine. “We had decided to simplify things by starting out with only 64,000 processors,” explained Hillis, recalling how Richard Feynman helped him
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, and structure, arranged in space. Memory and recall, no matter what their form, are translations between these two species of bits. “Memory locations,” according to Danny Hillis, “are just wires turned sideways in time.”13 In this correspondence between sequence and structure lies the basis not only of computation and memory, but
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material counterpart in life at all.”26 The mystery of music brings us to the closing fable of this book. It is the work of Danny Hillis, architect of the massively parallel Connection Machine, and one of the closer approximations to a Doctor Mirabilis alive today. Fables survive in association with enduring
Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else
by Steve Lohr · 10 Mar 2015 · 239pp · 70,206 words
, Arne Duncan, Sue Duncan, Tony Fadell, Edward Felten, David Ferrucci, Rachana Shah Fischer, Brian Gehlich, Jim Goodnight, Nagui Halim, Hendrik Hamann, Glenn Hammerbacher, Lenore Hammerbacher, Danny Hillis, Jeffrey Immelt, Jon Iwata, James Kalina, Kaan Katircioglu, Gary King, Jon Kleinberg, Martin Kohn, Randy Komisar, Patricia Kovatch, Edward Lazowska, and Michael Linderman. They also
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world—on their way to sometimes becoming superhuman decision makers. How do you really control them? At a research conference at IBM’s Watson lab, Danny Hillis, an artificial intelligence expert and cofounder of Applied Minds, a technology design and research firm, took up that issue. The ever-smarter systems being made
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individuals. So declaring that something will be good for the population, on average, isn’t entirely persuasive. What will be needed is the storytelling that Danny Hillis, the artificial intelligence expert, describes as the machines explaining themselves, giving a simplified account of how they work. What is also needed is time—a
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of the program’s step-by-step progression to a suggested diagnosis. This approach is what some call “algorithmic accountability,” and what the computer scientist Danny Hillis describes as the “storytelling” that will make decisions made by artificial intelligence acceptable to society. So rules, tools, and social expectations will all be part
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automated algorithms, knowingly or not. The real issue is under what terms we let the big-data algorithms take over—as the artificial intelligence expert Danny Hillis explained earlier, about the need for an audit trail, the need for the smart system to explain how it arrived as its software-generated decision
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Machine by the same pair in 2011. “wonderful place for data scientists to experiment”: An interview on Feb. 1, 2013, with Claudia Perlich. “a storyteller”: Danny Hillis’s descriptions and quotes come from a talk he gave at IBM’s Watson lab on Oct. 2, 2013. 7: Data Gets Physical “This is
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
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Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
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The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World
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Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
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Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
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How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
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The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State
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Artificial Whiteness
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Quicksilver
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The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
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The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
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Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
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Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
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Turing's Cathedral
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Anathem
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Future War: Preparing for the New Global Battlefield
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Seveneves
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