Gordon Bell
Microsoft Bay Area Research Center
Email: GBell At Microsoft.com is the most reliable communication link
AT&T Mobile phone & answering machine: (425) 785-7508 best voice link
Home: (650) 949-2735 (answering machine checked weekly) is a poor link
Office Phone: (415) 778-8225
FAX only if you must: MS fax gateway(425) 936-7329 address to "gbell"
Microsoft Office: 455 Market Street, Suite 1690, San Francisco, CA, 94105
Gordon Bell is a senior researcher in Microsoft's Media Presence Research Group - a part of the Bay Area Research Center (BARC) maintaining an interest in startup ventures.
Gordon has long evangelized scalable systems starting with his interest in multiprocessors (mP) beginning in 1965 with the design of Digital's PDP-6, PDP-10's antecedent, one of the first mPs and the first timesharing computer. He continues this interest with various talks about trends in future supercomputing (see Papers …presentations, etc.) and especially clustered systems formed from cost-effective “personal computers”. As Digital's VP of R&D he was responsible for the VAX Computing Environment. In 1987, he led the cross-agency group as head of NSF's Computing Directorate that made "the plan" for the National Research and Education Network (NREN) aka the Internet. My Supercomputing and the CyberInfrastructure page lists articles, memos, talks, and testimony regarding the various aspects of computing including funding, goals, and problems in reaching to the Teraflops in 1995 and Petaflops in 2010.
http://research.micr...om/users/GBell/
Gordon Bell wrote: gbell@microsoft.com
>Have thought about this and must say I don't believe I am ready to write
>such a chapter.
>
>Jim Gray and I did write a piece for the Communications of the ACM on
>Digital Immortality that is attached that you might want to include in a
>readings, for example. However, we have no new thoughts on the subject.
>Regards,
>g
Gordon,
I've forwarded your submission to the editing team. We'll be in
contact over the coming months. Also, there will be more books
created going forward.
Thanks!
Bruce
Gordon Bell wrote:
>I have no idea what the reprint policy is with CACM.
>They have the copyright.
>g
>
Digital Immortality
Gordon Bell and Jim Grey
PDF File
(Rough Text Version)
28 March 2001/Vol. 44, No. 3 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM
Tools and Technologies
Futuristic Forecast of
Tools and Technologies
How many of the common high-tech products we use today were once nothing more than
products from the fertile minds of science fiction writers many decades earlier?
Indeed, technological progress has been turning fiction into fact from the earliest days of computing.
In this section, the featured essayists ponder future generations of tools and technologies, and
as fictional as they may sound today, there is a basis of fact in their forecasts. Imagine a time when the
network is the world and the world is the network. A time when networked devices and mechanisms are
so deeply embedded into daily lives that the only time they may ever be noticed, says Jim Waldo,
is when they are not working. “Imagine smelling pictures and tasting video,”
asks Ramesh Jain. Yes, just imagine. . .
Digital Immortality
JEAN-FRANÇOIS PODEVIN
GORDON BELL )Digital immortality, like
ordinary immortality, is a
continuum from enduring
fame at one end to end-
AND JIM GRAY
less experience and learning
at the other, stopping
just short of endless life. Preserving
and transmitting your ideas is one-way
immortality—allowing communication with the
future. Endless experience and learning is two-way
immortality—allowing you, or at least part of you,
to communicate with the future in the sense that
the artifact continues to learn and evolve. Current
technology can extend corporal life for a few
decades. Both one-way and two-way immortality
require part of a person to be converted to information
(cyberized) and stored in a more durable
media. We believe that two-way immortality, where
one’s experiences are digitally preserved and which
then take on a life of their own, will be possible
within this century. We are exploring points along
the one-way, two-way spectrum in our CyberAll
project (Research. Microsoft.com/~gbell).
Hamarabi, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Mozart, Rembrandt,
and Euler are immortal—or at least their
ideas are. They recorded their ideas in an enduring
form that could be passed on to the future. These
great ideas, images, music, writing, architecture, and
even algorithms will survive as long as people do. Of
course, these people are dead, but their ideas are
effectively immortal.
Paper and then the printing press made it easier
and less expensive to record, preserve, and disseminate
ideas. Voice recorders, cameras, and camcorders
now make it easy to record events, and, sometimes,
even experiences. Moore’s Law is bringing recording
In the year 3001, 19 new elements will have been added to the periodic table; materials that are 50-times lighter and 50-times
stronger have allowed us to build colossal structures with modest resources. The harnessing of gravity has made it possible for
contained or gossamer shapes weighing under 10 grams to be virtually gravity-free. —Jean-François Podevin, illustrator
COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM March 2001/Vol. 44, No. 3 29
(
costs down to the point where you can record everything
you see and hear.
Digital technologies offer new kinds of information
we can convey to the future. They allow almost anyone
to create his or her own immortality for any size
community—either a family’s future generations or
an intellectual community. Web sites (www.
123456789.net, www.legacy.com, www.forevernet-
work.com, and www.memorymountain.com) offer
(for a fee) to store letters, essays, photos, videos, and
stories “forever” in order to pass them on to future
generations. These are the digital equivalents of
will cost a few hundred dollars, allowing persons to
be immortal in terms of the media they’ve encountered.
For “famous” people, one will be able to access
his or her entire life.
There are many unresolved technical and social
issues associated with CyberAll. How should the
information be preserved, given changes in media,
platforms, and programs
(www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/g_bell_1. html)? How
should it be organized and presented? (Will it take a
lifetime to see another’s lifetime)? Who should be
able to see what, and when? What are the legal and
ethical rights and responsibilities concerning infortombs,
crypts, and
mation that involves
libraries.
other people? Again, we
Future technologies
are exploring some of
will surely enhance our
these issues, but mostly
ability to convey ideas
we are focusing on the
and experiences, creatbasic
tasks of acquisiing
a one-way relationtion,
preservation, and
ship with future
recall.
generations (should
Beyond this one-way
they care to listen or
immortality, we see hints
look.) Even today it is
that at least some aspects
becoming reasonable to
of a person could be
record everything we
expressed as a program
read and hear. For
that interacts with future
example, retaining every
generations. It is interconversation
a person
esting that, given an
has ever heard requires
archive of a person’s spoless
than a terabyte (for
ken output, it is possible
adequate quality).
to make a compelling
CyberAll is being
avatar of that person.
built along the lines
This avatar can “live for-
CAREN ROSENBLATT
envisioned by Vannevar
Bush and Bill Gates as a memory aid and research
tool. CyberAll is a store for documents, photos,
music, audio, and video recordings, and is currently
about 12 gigabytes, including the store for four
books, 20 encoded video lectures, 150 music CDs,
several thousand documents, and an archive of email
messages. It has an accumulation rate of two gigabytes
per year. This rate will increase as speech and
video become part of CyberAll’s media capture, but it
is still a fairly modest expense. Indeed, the real cost of
CyberAll is in the data capture, data organization,
and data presentation. This is where our research
efforts are directed.
Within 5–10 years, personal stores of a terabyte
30 March 2001/Vol. 44, No. 3 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM
ever” in a virtual world
and respond to queries about that person’s past life.
For example, like many great people, Albert Einstein
has several posthumous Web sites. In addition, computer
science researchers at CMU
(cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/oz/
web/papers/biblography.html) authored an avatar of
Einstein that responds to questions from viewers. In
fact, the avatar is an actor hired to read quotes from
Einstein’s writings. Many who have seen this demonstration
understand that in the future it will be easier
and easier to author such avatars. The real question is
whether such a program could ever “learn” enough to
stay current. Having an immortal, interactive program
begins to look a bit like two-way immortal
Tools and Technologies
ity—being able to “live and communicate” forever.
We believe along with Ray Kurzweil, Hans
Morovec, and others, that it is likely there will be more
and more faithful avatars over the next century. By
2040, Morovec predicts robots will be as smart as
humans. Successive generations of question-answering
avatars will gradually become indistinguishable from
the actual persons we know and love in 2001,
enabling that person to appear to “live forever.”
c
Gordon Bell (gbell@Microsoft.com) is a senior researcher at
Microsoft, Redmond, WA. He is also a member of Communications’
Advisory Board.
Jim Gray (Gray@Microsoft.com) is a specialist in database and
transaction processing computer systems at Microsoft, Redmond, WA.
Copyright held by authors.
We believe that
two-way immortality,
where one’s experiences
are digitally preserved and
which then take on a life of
their own, will be possible
within this century.
Closing the Circle of
Information Technology
Information technology has already penetrated and transformed research in
science and technology so fundamentally that younger generations will not
know what it was like before the computing revolution. My own career as a micro-
RITA R. COLWELL)
biologist exploring the linkages between environment and health has
paralleled this transformation. My own research experience has given me a deep
respect for the power of computing to propel us on to new discoveries in all research
disciplines. As this revolution continues, I have very high hopes for the potential of information technology.
As the wellspring of basic
research in physics, chemistry, and
mathematics nourishes progress in
medicine and health, we can
hardly imagine what shape the
advances will take. But we can be
sure that, coupled with the power
of information technology, they
will dwarf those of the 20th century,
or even those through all of
human history. We already have
experimental nanochips that simulate
the electrical activity of a
normal nerve synapse by letting
nerve axons regrow through the
chip. We imagine implanting a
chip in the brain, directly in those
areas where intention resides.
Thus, we would be able to bypass
the areas of muscular control.
Such a confluence of microelectronics
and neural research holds
great promise for improving the
operation of artificial limbs, or
even for bypassing spinal-cord
injuries, creating hope that a paraplegic
may walk again. Even for
some types of mental illness, we
can imagine a computer implant
that might provide the missing
neurological circuitry necessary
for normal brain functioning.
In my research in the field of
environment and health, computing
has already brought us to the
threshold of being able to predict
epidemics of cholera and other
diseases. We are beginning to
have at our fingertips information
about emerging diseases as they
are identified. We can now track
the progress of these diseases from
COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM March 2001/Vol. 44, No. 3 31
(
To unravel the complexity of living systems—the web of life and
its surrounding environment—will require tools advanced far
beyond those we now possess.
anywhere in the world and in a
number of languages.
Still, to unravel the complexity
of living systems—the web of life
and its surrounding environ-
ment—will require tools
advanced far beyond those we
now possess. We know that
ecosystems do not respond linearly
to environmental change,
and that tracing that complexity
is crucial to the future of life on
our planet. Yet, we are watching
the simultaneous flowering of
nano-, bio-, and information
technology, each accelerating the
other’s progress, bringing us to
the brink of being able to
observe complexity at multiple
scales across the hierarchic levels
of life. Envision being able to
wave a tool packed with sen-
sors—not a Geiger counter, but
an “eco-counter,” if you will—
that would inventory the health
of an entire ecosystem. From the
Lilliputian level of observing
individual atoms and molecules
with nanotechnology, to our
global ecological observatories in
every ecosystem, we are setting
up vantage points for viewing at
every scale.
As we imagine the new frontiers
we can explore by harnessing
the power of information
technology in medicine, health,
and the environment, we confront
yet another challenge: How
to engage all of our society to
realize this dream? This challenge
looms particularly large. The top
five fastest-growing occupations
in the U.S. economy are in the
field of computing, but much of
our workforce is not poised to
take advantage of these opportunities.
Women, minorities, and
the disabled constitute more than
two-thirds of our country’s workers,
yet these groups are excluded,
to a large extent, from
the burgeoning science and technology
professions. The digital
divide cuts both ways—our
economy suffers as well as those
members of society left behind.
If these groups joined the U.S.
science and technology workforce
in proportion to their numbers,
we would no longer have a
significant shortage of skilled
workers.
A diverse workforce has been
called our country’s competitive
edge in science and technology,
and it is as much a part of my
hopes for our future in information
technology as any technological
wonder. I suspect,
however, that our technological
capabilities will be very integral
to fulfilling our hopes to involve
everyone in the information revolution.
For the first time we are
on the threshold of being able to
provide anyone—not just the
middle-class student in the university,
but also the Native American
child on a reservation, or a
senior citizen in a retirement
home—with the ability to learn
any subject at any time.
Immersed in a virtual environment,
anyone will be able to
learn—not from books and tapes,
but through a life-like interactive
experience. With an unlimited
corps of personal online tutors,
we will be able to tailor teaching
methods to each individual’s
needs, level of education, and
cognitive abilities. At last we will
have the technology to enable us
to achieve true literacy in science
and technology across society, not
just for the privileged. This will
also mean the world of science
and engineering research will be
richer for the prospect of fuller
participation. When future generations
look back at this juncture
in time, I hope they will be able
to judge us as having exercised the
foresight and wisdom to employ
information technology not just
to speed up the pace of discovery,
but to have truly improved and
sustained our world.
c
Rita R. Colwell (rcolwell@nsf.gov) is
the director of the National Science
Foundation, Arlington, VA.
Copyright held by author.
32 March 2001/Vol. 44, No. 3 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM
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