Machines of Loving Grace Read Free Page B

programmatically. Shakey’s vision system worked better than the rangefinder. Even with the simplest machine vision processing, it could identify both edges and basic shapes, essential primitives to understand and travel in its surroundings.
    Duvall’s manager believed in structuring his team so that “science” would only be done by “scientists.” Programmers were low-status grunt workers who implemented the design ideas of their superiors. While some of the leaders of the group appeared to have a high-level vision to pursue, the project was organized in a military fashion, making work uninspiring for a low-level programmer like Duvall, stuck writing device drivers and other software interfaces. That didn’t sit well with the young computer hacker.
    Robots seemed like a cool idea to him, but before Star Wars there weren’t a lot of inspiring models. There was Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet in the 1950s, but it was hard to find inspiration in a broader vision. Shakey simply didn’t work very well. Fortunately Stanford Research Institute was a big place and Duvall was soon attracted by a more intriguing project.
    Just down the hall from the Shakey laboratory he would frequently encounter another research group that was building a computer to run a program called NLS, the oN-Line System. While Shakey was managed hierarchically, the group run by computer scientist Doug Engelbart was anything but. Engelbart’s researchers, an eclectic collection of buttoned-down white-shirted engineers and long-haired computer hackers, were taking computing in a direction so different it was not even in the same coordinate system. The Shakey project was struggling to mimic the human mind and body. Engelbart had a very different goal. During World War II he had stumbled across an article by Vannevar Bush, who had proposed a microfiche-based information retrieval system called Memex to manage all of the world’s knowledge. Engelbart later decided that such a system could be assembled based on the then newly available computers. He thought the time was right to build an interactive system to capture knowledge and organize information in such a way that it would now be possible for a small group of people—scientists, engineers, educators—to create and collaborate more effectively. By this time Engelbart had already invented the computer mouse as a control device and had also conceived of the idea of hypertext links that would decades later become the foundation for the modern World Wide Web. Moreover, like Duvall, he was an outsider within the insular computer science world that worshipped theory and abstraction as fundamental to science.

    Artificial intelligence pioneer Charles Rosen with Shakey, the first autonomous robot. The Pentagon funded the project to research the idea of a future robotic sentry. ( Image courtesy of SRI International )
    The cultural gulf between the worlds defined by artificial intelligence and Engelbart’s contrarian idea, deemed “intelligence augmentation”—he referred to it as “IA”—was already palpable. Indeed, when Engelbart paid a visit to MIT during the 1960s to demonstrate his project, Marvin Minsky complained that it was a waste of research dollars on something that would create nothing more than a glorified word processor.
    Despite earning no respect from establishment computer scientists, Engelbart was comfortable with being viewed as outside the mainstream academic world. When attending the Pentagon DARPA review meetings that were held regularly to bring funded researchers together to share their work, he would always begin his presentations by saying, “This is not computer science.” And then he would go on to sketch a vision of using computers to permit people to “bootstrap” their projects by making learning and innovation more powerful.
    Even if it wasn’t in the mainstream of computer science, the ideas captivated Bill Duvall. Before long he switched his allegiance and