Comment On sparks and credit and muses etc. (Score 1) 82
Thanks for the pointer! I doubt I'll find my name there. Also, I said the 3X3 display wall panel may have sparked an interest in combining speech research and Jeopardy (perhaps, in an unconscious way?) -- but Watson itself is a much broader system. I wanted to work on such systems then, and talked a bit about "wouldn't it be nice if..." like with a display wall connected to a supercomputer for solving tough problems, but I said nothing detailed as to how it would really work, beyond creating a simple system with a Linux server where you could say things like, "put stocks on panel 3" or something like that. I don't even remember in detail what pattern of utterances I set it up to respond to (it was not very complex). So, my contribution to Watson itself technically -- probably near zilch. It's just the display wall Jeopardy connection I wonder about. But now that you raise the issue, aspects of using an AI to help solve problems was part of that idea. But, sci-fi writers like Isaac Asimov with Multivac or his robot stories have been taking about that for decades...
As for credit for being a spark, do people, say, always even remember some book they read years ago where an idea began to seep into their mind? How do you even quantify a degree of contribution? When I asked Ted Nelson (when he visited IBM once) about whether "The Skills of Xandu" short story by Theodore Sturgeon inspired his work, he thanked me said he had been looking for the story and he claimed to not even be able to remember the story's name!
https://archive.org/details/pr...
BTW, I gave a copy of that story to my supervisor at IBM Research, a master inventor with 50 patents to his name. He finally looked at it a while after I left, and thanked me, and said it was the story that got him interested in materials research based on its nanotech angle! But he had long forgotten it. I can wonder how many other inventors that story has inspired? I don't know what inspired it though. Maybe Memex?
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...
I've been tangentially around several development like WordNet (George Miller), "Mind Children" (Hans Moravec, who read my senior thesis written under Geoge about self-replicating robots as he was working on the book), Marshall Brain's early career (where he probably saw a simulation I made of self-replicating robots, and I wonder if that contributed to his later concern with "Manna"), and at IBM Research as mentioned with Jeopardy and Watson. Possibly some others (like my possibly talking with David Gelernter about triples I was enamored of, and him saying tuples were more general, at SUNY Stony Brook), my talking at Princeton about robotics and stores (Jeff Bezos was the year after me), my senior thesis which presaged "Evolutionary psychology" but I doubt that sparked much as not many people read it and that field was already developing in parallel. as I can see now. In no case would I claim to be clearly the driving force behind any of these accomplishments which are full of a lot of hard and inventive work. As with Watson, it's possible I was just a tangential spark to some of these projects to some degree -- or not! It is also quite possible that I ended up hanging around people like Hans Moravec because we already were thinking along similar lines. Also, sometime ideas seem just "in the air" for whatever reason. Or ideas come to people by other paths, often multiple times before we even notice them. (It's said in direct mail as a rule of thumb you need to send the same advertising letter three times before people pay attention to it.) And certainly, in all cases, a lot of sparks went the other way, to me.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyo...
As another case of parallel creation, I won "highest honors" in a regional science fair for a robot that looked like R2D2 *before* Star Wars came out. R2D2 though must have been made around the same time as I made my robot. Likely the relationship is that somehow we both had seen the same vacuum cleaner (which I used as the body) and also both had seen "Silent Running". Or it was just coincidence. Although it bugged me a bit that people thought I was copying R2D2 in later years and versions.
And really, it is only sometime decades later when one thinks about some connections or sparks or their possible results.
I've always liked connecting up ideas and even connecting up people to each other over some common interest. It is not without its downside. I remember being around CMU and having a grad student come to me after I had said Matthew Mason's brilliant "Uncertainty Reducing Operations" idea (brilliant) about robotic grasping (move the hand in a swipe so the part is likely at the edge of a box) could be applied to better understanding biological processes like protein synthesis. The grad student told me essentially I should not be saying interdisciplinary or speculative stuff like that if I wanted to be in the graduate program there. That was a huge shock to me, to hear someone say something like that around a research labs. That was long before someone else (James P. Hogan) suggested I read "Disciplined Minds" to better understand academia and grad school.
More on me and WordNet for example, where George had also told me he was making WordNet in part to show that having a network of concepts was not enough by itself for AI which many researchers seemed to believe then and was something I implicitly believed then):
https://groups.google.com/foru...
"My 1985 UG senior thesis work ("Why Intelligence: Object, Evolution, Stability and Model") with him may have very slightly help inspired Wordnet and so even more indirectly Simpli and Google AdSense: in the sense of my enthusiastically talking to him a lot about networks of concepts for AI I wanted to put on a hard disk for a Commodore PET using Pointrel triads. That hard disk had eaten a document George was writing in his office on a deadline so he let me have it in the lab to play with (rather than throw it out) -- that file incident was the probably the only time I heard him swear.
But, you're probably not going to find my name on any WordNet stuff. In our society, credit can link to income though, so there is always reason to seek it (at least, until we get a basic income). Sometimes I get a mention (even if hyphenated
http://www.research.ibm.com/pe...
Yeah, and I got on a software patent.
http://www.google.com/patents/...
Such is life. I'm glad I got (potentially) a chance to contribute, no matter how tangential. Anyway, I hope maybe I've helped the Slashdot community more than hurt it (too many links and long posts), in terms of helping connect up some ideas about technology and society,
And then of course, there are the software programs and essays, and whatever tangential impacts they may have or not have...
Anyway, by now you probably think I'm a loony.
Or maybe some muse works sometimes works through me?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"The following morning, though, two visitors come to Steven's home, revealing that they are doctors from a mental clinic. They tell Steven that Sarah is an escaped psychiatric patient from their asylum who has multiple personality disorder. They find the whole "muse" idea hilarious. When they try to find Sarah to take her back, they discover that she has escaped."
But whatever our society can say about prizing creativity, for the most part, it doesn't (or at least, it generally rewards others):
https://johntaylorgatto.wordpr...
"Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers.
For example, notice the "hard" part of getting that prototype built at IBM research was things like getting laptop locks for laptops about to be destroyed anyway.
Although "success" is more than creativity. It's hard work, connections, resources, luck, and so on. And that also shows in big companies like Microsoft or Google buying whatever successful companies they see, and letting all the other experiments just fade away as someone else's cost...
Related, by Calvin Coolidge:
http://www.goodreads.com/quote...
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "Press On!" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."
Well, that may be a bit optimistic in some ways.
And they don't have to actually invent anything as long as they can buy it or just take the idea somehow if not patented (or even if it is) and use it. Around where I live now, a guy invented the railroad airbrake, but the story goes he showed it to a railroad magnate who just took the idea and ran with it (it was not patented). While one might see that as an argument for patents, alternatively, if we had a "basic income", credit in that sense might not be such a big deal... Just think of all the lives that brake concept saved by preventing so many train wrecks...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the "cultural inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "
And often the problem is they don;t get the whole really big idea! See Alan Kay's talk about the Xerox ARC research for example/ He's not lamenting not getting more recognition. He's lamenting that not enough was taken!
"Founder School Session: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Or by my wife on an open source project I've helped her with
"Steal These Ideas"
http://www.storycoloredglasses...
Also, the older I get, and the more I know, and the more I reflect on the sci-fi and various technical books I was swimming in in my teen years, the more I realize that the building blocks for so many "ideas" I've "had" were supplied by past generations... Even if I may put some of them together in new ways. Or spent my life trying to implement some of them, like Huey, Dewey, and Louie from Silent Running, or the software implied by the crystal belts in the Skills of Xanadu, or the self-replicating space habitat from "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" and so on.... When I was a kid, I rarely paid attention to the author's name on a story, and often times did not even pay attention to the title...
Anyway, now that I'm getting older, it seems like those years may be mostly behind me... Like George in his last decades, he just took that one idea, WordNet, and put years and years of hard work into it, to make it succeed. And a big part of that was convincing Princeton University to let him set it free legally. Wherever you are now, thanks for setting a good example about that, George!
Of course, my obsession with triples for storing information is probably is not as good a choice as WordNet was.
http://pointrel.sourceforge.ne...
But even that triple store idea may have come (not sure in the mists of time) by maybe thumbing through William Kent's "Data and Reality" for a bit while visiting an library at IBM San Jose when I was a teenager? So, William Kent would deserve some WordNet credit too, assuming I did?
Victor Serebriakoff's book "Brain" was influential, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" by Gregory Bateson. "The Human Use of Human Beings" by Norbert Weiner. All these and many more were influential on me. Hard to say where I got one mental building block or another. How much do you pay attention to "sources" when you are a teen soaking up everything form everywhere?
A funny/ironic thing is, I remember once telling George about how I wanted to work on a problem before reading what others had to say about it so my "creativity" was not "contaminated" by their approach or solutions. I still think that is a good idea, for a time. But what I failed to realize, is how much my own creativity or problem solving strategies were based on learning so many strategies from reading about or seeing others wrestle with various problems. And I was also selling my own creativity short, by assuming that if I tried some approach and it did not work, or even if it did, that I might not think of another approach anyway. "Standing on the shoulders of giants" is so often true. As is never really noticing or quite recalling where some spark years ago came from...
My wife likes to say that big idea are like whales. If you are lucky, you get to swim with them for a time. But eventually they swim off on their own, leaving you behind. Sigh.
And of course, there have no doubt been many, many sparks in my own life, most of which I did not notice at the time. I remember, in the 1980s the (Indian) girlfriend of my roommate saying I needed to get more color in my diet. And wow, she was right
"What Color Is Your Diet?"
http://www.amazon.com/What-Col...
That's just one example form my own life. No doubt there are many, many more. Most of which I might not even be able to remember, including as I was not paying attention to sources at the time, just "ideas".
Anyway, I hope I did not overstated the case too much for my involvement in some things I was tangentially around.