WEBVTT 00:00:00.040 --> 00:00:02.470 The following content is provided under a Creative 00:00:02.470 --> 00:00:03.880 Commons license. 00:00:03.880 --> 00:00:06.920 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to 00:00:06.920 --> 00:00:10.570 offer high quality educational resources for free. 00:00:10.570 --> 00:00:13.470 To make a donation or view additional materials from 00:00:13.470 --> 00:00:19.300 hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at 00:00:19.300 --> 00:00:20.550 ocw.mit.edu. 00:00:29.080 --> 00:00:30.860 PROFESSOR: I just came across a couple of interesting quotes 00:00:30.860 --> 00:00:32.330 about cybernetics. 00:00:32.330 --> 00:00:34.630 What did cybernetics have to do with any of this? 00:00:34.630 --> 00:00:35.510 Well, an awful lot. 00:00:35.510 --> 00:00:37.440 Here's a quote from Jerry Wiesner. 00:00:37.440 --> 00:00:40.010 "We were all fired up by Norbert Wiener's cybernetics. 00:00:40.010 --> 00:00:42.600 We have explored the far-ranging implications of 00:00:42.600 --> 00:00:45.040 the complex concepts of information and 00:00:45.040 --> 00:00:46.790 communication theory. 00:00:46.790 --> 00:00:49.190 It ranged from man-made communications to computing 00:00:49.190 --> 00:00:52.250 systems to the sciences of man, inquiries into the 00:00:52.250 --> 00:00:54.890 structure and development of the nervous system, the 00:00:54.890 --> 00:00:58.080 phenomena of inner life and behavior in relation to other 00:00:58.080 --> 00:00:59.730 men." 00:00:59.730 --> 00:01:03.290 So you get the sense of, like, the whole interdisciplinary 00:01:03.290 --> 00:01:05.110 thing, which is a big topic, of course, 00:01:05.110 --> 00:01:07.160 on our campus today. 00:01:07.160 --> 00:01:10.370 RLE was one of the major kind of early points in that. 00:01:13.100 --> 00:01:15.780 "Neurophysiologists and other biologists, linguistics, 00:01:15.780 --> 00:01:19.380 economists, social scientists, and psychologists recognized 00:01:19.380 --> 00:01:22.300 almost intuitively the usefulness and relevance of 00:01:22.300 --> 00:01:25.100 feedback information theory to their fields. 00:01:25.100 --> 00:01:28.780 For all of them, the concepts of information theory, coding, 00:01:28.780 --> 00:01:32.350 feedback, prediction, and filtering provide new pathways 00:01:32.350 --> 00:01:35.490 to explore pathways that seemed to wind unendingly." 00:01:35.490 --> 00:01:37.720 So this whole idea-- 00:01:37.720 --> 00:01:41.240 this is another one of these places where you see the 00:01:41.240 --> 00:01:44.670 relationship between the institutional structures at 00:01:44.670 --> 00:01:48.330 MIT, how the labs are organized, what the overall 00:01:48.330 --> 00:01:50.660 policy is that's coming from the federal government to 00:01:50.660 --> 00:01:53.470 support the work, and actually the content of the work, what 00:01:53.470 --> 00:01:56.070 sorts of things people are studying, how they're thinking 00:01:56.070 --> 00:01:58.220 about these problems, what the innovations are. 00:01:58.220 --> 00:02:00.120 And, I think-- and this is one of the threads I want to 00:02:00.120 --> 00:02:01.580 communicate to you today-- 00:02:01.580 --> 00:02:05.200 there's a real common thread in a lot of what MIT does in 00:02:05.200 --> 00:02:08.320 these realms, including SAGE and Lincoln Labs and that 00:02:08.320 --> 00:02:13.170 stuff, going back from probably before the war around 00:02:13.170 --> 00:02:16.400 computing and interaction and all the different aspects of 00:02:16.400 --> 00:02:17.960 communications. 00:02:17.960 --> 00:02:20.655 The Department of Linguistics itself is formed by research 00:02:20.655 --> 00:02:26.000 from RLE in 1961. 00:02:26.000 --> 00:02:28.150 There's actually a real relationship between, for 00:02:28.150 --> 00:02:29.070 those of you familiar-- 00:02:29.070 --> 00:02:32.020 anybody know what Chomsky and linguistics is? 00:02:36.850 --> 00:02:41.370 So Noam Chomsky, who is the sort of founding father, in a 00:02:41.370 --> 00:02:44.740 lot of ways, of modern linguistics, created this idea 00:02:44.740 --> 00:02:47.270 in the '50s called generative grammar, which is the idea 00:02:47.270 --> 00:02:49.120 that the structures of language are 00:02:49.120 --> 00:02:50.690 built into the brain. 00:02:50.690 --> 00:02:54.510 They're not things that you learn as a toddler or as baby. 00:02:54.510 --> 00:02:57.240 And that's one of the special things that makes human brains 00:02:57.240 --> 00:02:59.680 different from all other kinds of brains. 00:02:59.680 --> 00:03:01.820 And that's called generative grammar-- 00:03:01.820 --> 00:03:04.940 that the basic grammars are some that is 00:03:04.940 --> 00:03:06.910 inherently inside of you. 00:03:06.910 --> 00:03:09.370 A very radical idea, at the time, for a number of 00:03:09.370 --> 00:03:13.180 different reasons, partly because it was connected to 00:03:13.180 --> 00:03:16.470 what's called the cognitive revolution in psychology. 00:03:16.470 --> 00:03:20.040 Up until that point, the kind of leading paradigm, even in 00:03:20.040 --> 00:03:25.150 Cambridge psychology, was behaviorism led by B. F. 00:03:25.150 --> 00:03:26.600 Skinner at Harvard. 00:03:26.600 --> 00:03:29.500 The idea that, well, it's too complicated to understand 00:03:29.500 --> 00:03:33.550 what's going on inside either our brains or anybody's, any 00:03:33.550 --> 00:03:34.590 animals' brains. 00:03:34.590 --> 00:03:36.940 We're just going to look at the behaviors, the inputs and 00:03:36.940 --> 00:03:41.720 the outputs, measure the behaviors, and try to 00:03:41.720 --> 00:03:44.890 understand that anything that's going on inside only 00:03:44.890 --> 00:03:48.420 matters if it's expressed in a particular behavior. 00:03:48.420 --> 00:03:51.110 Well, around this time period, led by many people around 00:03:51.110 --> 00:03:53.790 here, there's a thing called the cognitive revolution, they 00:03:53.790 --> 00:03:57.670 call it now, where people rejected that view. 00:03:57.670 --> 00:04:01.460 And they began looking inside what thinking was all about, 00:04:01.460 --> 00:04:04.070 very much driven by parallel developments in 00:04:04.070 --> 00:04:06.450 computing, in AI. 00:04:06.450 --> 00:04:09.860 And in some sense, the whole idea of psychology at MIT was 00:04:09.860 --> 00:04:11.360 superseded by what? 00:04:16.800 --> 00:04:18.880 Cognitive science. 00:04:18.880 --> 00:04:21.050 Which now we have a Department of Brain and Cognitive 00:04:21.050 --> 00:04:23.120 Science, which was sort of-- do we have a psychology 00:04:23.120 --> 00:04:25.050 department here? 00:04:25.050 --> 00:04:25.250 No. 00:04:25.250 --> 00:04:27.660 We used to, at one point, but we don't anymore. 00:04:27.660 --> 00:04:28.840 It was sort of folded in. 00:04:28.840 --> 00:04:29.750 It's interesting. 00:04:29.750 --> 00:04:31.640 It's a separate topic and way to think about what those 00:04:31.640 --> 00:04:32.790 differences are. 00:04:32.790 --> 00:04:35.460 Partly, I'm dwelling on this because tomorrow is the 00:04:35.460 --> 00:04:40.440 symposium, the last of the 150th Anniversary Symposia, 00:04:40.440 --> 00:04:46.120 which is on Brains, Minds, and Machines, and is a new 00:04:46.120 --> 00:04:48.550 research initiative that's trying to look at the problem 00:04:48.550 --> 00:04:57.430 of intelligence by combining AI, cognitive science, 00:04:57.430 --> 00:04:59.820 neuroscience, and linguistics. 00:04:59.820 --> 00:05:02.180 And these things are all not that far apart, again, from 00:05:02.180 --> 00:05:04.740 this early history, but they've developed separately, 00:05:04.740 --> 00:05:07.925 in some ways, for the last 50 years, and the idea is to tie 00:05:07.925 --> 00:05:08.510 them together. 00:05:08.510 --> 00:05:11.340 So if you're familiar with AI, there's not been a lot of 00:05:11.340 --> 00:05:12.760 neuroscience in AI. 00:05:12.760 --> 00:05:15.420 But now there's an attempt to bring a lot of that together. 00:05:15.420 --> 00:05:20.770 It's going to be a really interesting, exciting thing. 00:05:20.770 --> 00:05:22.940 I have to introduce the symposium tomorrow night, and 00:05:22.940 --> 00:05:23.970 I'm working on my comments. 00:05:23.970 --> 00:05:26.980 And, usually, when I introduce these symposia, I talk about 00:05:26.980 --> 00:05:29.680 what happened at MIT before the people in 00:05:29.680 --> 00:05:31.280 the room were there. 00:05:31.280 --> 00:05:33.780 And then, when they got up and they talk about their own 00:05:33.780 --> 00:05:36.670 experiences, then they cover the last 50 or 60 years. 00:05:36.670 --> 00:05:39.940 There's not much that happened at MIT in linguistics or in 00:05:39.940 --> 00:05:44.490 psychology or in anything cognitive before Marvin Minsky 00:05:44.490 --> 00:05:47.980 and Noam Chomsky and a few of these other 00:05:47.980 --> 00:05:51.220 sort of critical people. 00:05:51.220 --> 00:05:53.280 Interestingly, the whole efforts-- 00:05:53.280 --> 00:05:56.870 these things also manifested themselves in biology. 00:05:56.870 --> 00:05:59.730 How do you think, in the 1950s, biology took up some of 00:05:59.730 --> 00:06:03.900 this influence from cognitive science or, particularly, from 00:06:03.900 --> 00:06:05.150 communications theory? 00:06:12.360 --> 00:06:13.960 What's the word that people use to describe DNA? 00:06:16.856 --> 00:06:18.620 A code. 00:06:18.620 --> 00:06:22.440 The whole idea of DNA as a code and biology as a kind of 00:06:22.440 --> 00:06:26.460 informational science emerges right at this time, not only 00:06:26.460 --> 00:06:30.550 at MIT, a lot of other places, but very much taken up there. 00:06:33.470 --> 00:06:36.640 Last year we read an article about that, but we compressed 00:06:36.640 --> 00:06:38.400 the syllabus a little bit. 00:06:38.400 --> 00:06:39.650 OK. 00:06:41.780 --> 00:06:45.860 The political context during those years-- 00:06:45.860 --> 00:06:49.790 after the war, again, the Radiation Lab dies down. 00:06:49.790 --> 00:06:52.430 The country is really demobilizing. 00:06:52.430 --> 00:06:54.960 Troops are coming back from the war. 00:06:54.960 --> 00:06:57.580 Everybody's going away from the military back to civilian 00:06:57.580 --> 00:07:01.980 life, until 1949, 1952. 00:07:01.980 --> 00:07:03.930 Critical events happen then. 00:07:03.930 --> 00:07:05.180 Anybody want to guess? 00:07:08.630 --> 00:07:13.580 Russians explode an H-bomb in 1949, much, much sooner than 00:07:13.580 --> 00:07:19.240 anybody expected, and the Korean War starts in 1950. 00:07:19.240 --> 00:07:21.360 And that's really the beginning of the Cold War. 00:07:21.360 --> 00:07:22.700 So you really have this-- 00:07:22.700 --> 00:07:25.700 it's not correct to think about the Cold War as just the 00:07:25.700 --> 00:07:27.170 continuation of World War II. 00:07:27.170 --> 00:07:30.590 There is this sort of brief-- but it is a kind of 5-year 00:07:30.590 --> 00:07:33.620 period where everything's shrinking before the Cold War 00:07:33.620 --> 00:07:35.460 really gets going. 00:07:35.460 --> 00:07:38.350 And then you begin, during the '50s, you really have the 00:07:38.350 --> 00:07:42.340 civilian sense of being under threat by nuclear warfare. 00:07:42.340 --> 00:07:46.770 It was before my time, but perhaps your parents or even 00:07:46.770 --> 00:07:48.700 your grandparents will remember. 00:07:48.700 --> 00:07:51.920 In the 1950s, if you were in an elementary school in this 00:07:51.920 --> 00:07:55.150 country, you were trained how to respond to a nuclear attack 00:07:55.150 --> 00:07:57.150 when you were in school. 00:07:57.150 --> 00:07:59.175 And you'll hear the phrase "duck and cover," which so 00:07:59.175 --> 00:08:00.890 many people were trained to do. 00:08:00.890 --> 00:08:04.080 Hide under your desk, pretty much, which I'll leave it as 00:08:04.080 --> 00:08:06.960 an exercise to the reader to what that'll do for you when 00:08:06.960 --> 00:08:08.590 there's a nuclear weapon coming. 00:08:15.740 --> 00:08:22.730 And so during this period, in some sense, it's the golden 00:08:22.730 --> 00:08:24.970 age of science policy. 00:08:24.970 --> 00:08:26.670 People often talk about that. 00:08:26.670 --> 00:08:29.980 And we'll come back to this after Sputnik, where 00:08:29.980 --> 00:08:32.630 scientists are involved in high-level decision making in 00:08:32.630 --> 00:08:36.539 a way they've never really been since then. 00:08:36.539 --> 00:08:41.618 In the world of computers, all the way up through 1960, 00:08:41.618 --> 00:08:45.250 three-quarters of the world of computing was simply run and 00:08:45.250 --> 00:08:46.760 funded by the government. 00:08:46.760 --> 00:08:50.540 So there was hardly any computation to speak of. 00:08:50.540 --> 00:08:53.120 And the quarter that was not there was mostly in the 00:08:53.120 --> 00:08:56.370 business world of punch cards and IBM punch card machines. 00:09:02.290 --> 00:09:08.575 And a lot of that work was done in high-end computational 00:09:08.575 --> 00:09:15.100 at Los Alamos, fluid dynamic simulations and things for 00:09:15.100 --> 00:09:17.420 nuclear weapons. 00:09:17.420 --> 00:09:21.910 So during the Cold War, you have all kinds of new kinds of 00:09:21.910 --> 00:09:26.460 institutions emerging, in addition to new technologies. 00:09:26.460 --> 00:09:29.440 Outside of MIT, you have the Rand Corporation. 00:09:29.440 --> 00:09:31.520 Anybody hear of the Rand Corporation before? 00:09:31.520 --> 00:09:32.300 It's still around. 00:09:32.300 --> 00:09:34.180 You still hear them issuing reports and things. 00:09:34.180 --> 00:09:36.150 I have colleagues who work there. 00:09:36.150 --> 00:09:39.700 Founded in 1946 by the Air Force, and that's the place 00:09:39.700 --> 00:09:43.000 that pretty much invented the term "think tank." 00:09:43.000 --> 00:09:45.760 So you have these kind of not governmental-- 00:09:45.760 --> 00:09:47.220 Rand is not part of the government-- 00:09:47.220 --> 00:09:50.910 but it's a not-for-profit corporation where they do a 00:09:50.910 --> 00:09:53.230 lot of large-scale strategy, operations 00:09:53.230 --> 00:09:57.400 research, nuclear strategy. 00:09:57.400 --> 00:10:00.830 I mentioned already the Office of Naval Research, which sort 00:10:00.830 --> 00:10:04.320 of carries on the OSRD tradition for the 10 years 00:10:04.320 --> 00:10:05.590 after the Second World War. 00:10:05.590 --> 00:10:07.370 And they came up in the reading because they funded 00:10:07.370 --> 00:10:14.060 the early part of Whirlwind and lots of different types of 00:10:14.060 --> 00:10:17.390 new theories, from engineering science-- 00:10:17.390 --> 00:10:21.380 you hear that phrase coming up a lot at MIT in that period-- 00:10:21.380 --> 00:10:25.140 systems engineering, systems dynamics, systems analysis, 00:10:25.140 --> 00:10:26.180 operations research. 00:10:26.180 --> 00:10:28.610 I mentioned cybernetics, control theory, general 00:10:28.610 --> 00:10:29.970 systems theory. 00:10:29.970 --> 00:10:34.560 And all this stuff is sort of buzzing around. 00:10:34.560 --> 00:10:41.440 And before I show you this film about Whirlwind-- 00:10:41.440 --> 00:10:42.780 well, let me show you the film about Whirlwind. 00:10:55.620 --> 00:10:55.990 OK. 00:10:55.990 --> 00:11:00.680 And so then, the other one I called up is the-- 00:11:00.680 --> 00:11:02.080 you'll remember from the reading 00:11:02.080 --> 00:11:05.400 that they build Whirlwind. 00:11:05.400 --> 00:11:08.170 It starts out as this sort of flight simulator thing. 00:11:08.170 --> 00:11:10.840 Rather quickly, Jay Forrester has these huge ambitions for 00:11:10.840 --> 00:11:12.770 it and starts into this just large 00:11:12.770 --> 00:11:14.820 machine computation project. 00:11:14.820 --> 00:11:18.940 And then they switch their Navy funding into Air Force 00:11:18.940 --> 00:11:22.710 funding, and they look at this problem of air defense. 00:11:26.530 --> 00:11:29.970 Starting in the early '50s, there's a physicist at MIT 00:11:29.970 --> 00:11:32.860 named George Valley. 00:11:32.860 --> 00:11:36.310 And they start looking at this whole business about how do we 00:11:36.310 --> 00:11:38.910 defend the continent, which is an interesting question. 00:11:38.910 --> 00:11:41.340 Remember, we talked last time, or the time before, about 00:11:41.340 --> 00:11:42.990 anti-aircraft control. 00:11:42.990 --> 00:11:46.340 SAGE is really the exact same thing, just the updated '50s 00:11:46.340 --> 00:11:47.490 version of it, right? 00:11:47.490 --> 00:11:48.840 How do you shoot down airplanes that 00:11:48.840 --> 00:11:49.990 are attacking you? 00:11:49.990 --> 00:11:53.190 And air defense is a typical problem that civilian 00:11:53.190 --> 00:11:58.340 scientists like, and that government, especially elected 00:11:58.340 --> 00:12:01.880 officials, like because it plays well politically. 00:12:01.880 --> 00:12:04.240 It seems to be, morally, a little bit more comfortable 00:12:04.240 --> 00:12:06.190 than offensive weapons. 00:12:06.190 --> 00:12:07.750 Of course, you can shoot someone down if they're are 00:12:07.750 --> 00:12:09.210 about to drop bombs on you. 00:12:09.210 --> 00:12:17.100 The military, also, generally dislikes it because the people 00:12:17.100 --> 00:12:19.790 who run the world regarding aircraft in the military-- 00:12:19.790 --> 00:12:21.850 even at this point, they were the Air Force-- 00:12:21.850 --> 00:12:23.700 the Air Force doesn't like to think a lot about shooting 00:12:23.700 --> 00:12:24.350 down airplanes. 00:12:24.350 --> 00:12:27.810 It's not one of their favorite hobby topics. 00:12:27.810 --> 00:12:29.610 And they generally aren't big on defense. 00:12:29.610 --> 00:12:33.010 They want to go out and kill the enemy and offense. 00:12:33.010 --> 00:12:35.780 So you constantly see this question of air defense rising 00:12:35.780 --> 00:12:37.460 up in scientific circles. 00:12:37.460 --> 00:12:39.630 It's still true today, actually, with things like 00:12:39.630 --> 00:12:40.880 missile defense. 00:12:43.720 --> 00:12:49.080 And they put this system together called SAGE-- 00:12:49.080 --> 00:12:50.870 and, again, you read about it-- 00:12:56.960 --> 00:12:59.390 sort of continental air defense system, I think, 00:12:59.390 --> 00:13:04.110 partly comes from the way that engineering really dominated 00:13:04.110 --> 00:13:05.820 here, above the other sciences. 00:13:05.820 --> 00:13:09.490 And in many of these other schools were-- 00:13:09.490 --> 00:13:11.690 where the engineering is sort of separated off 00:13:11.690 --> 00:13:13.090 as a separate school-- 00:13:13.090 --> 00:13:15.230 but the really high-prestige work was going to the 00:13:15.230 --> 00:13:16.970 mathematicians. 00:13:16.970 --> 00:13:19.480 I also think that, actually, a lot of the history of 00:13:19.480 --> 00:13:22.680 computing was written later by mathematicians. 00:13:22.680 --> 00:13:25.660 And so they kind of remade it the way they wanted it to. 00:13:25.660 --> 00:13:26.590 You can see-- 00:13:26.590 --> 00:13:31.780 actually, even Norbert Wiener does that, John Von Neumann. 00:13:31.780 --> 00:13:37.130 John Von Neumann plays a role in the ENIAC project very, 00:13:37.130 --> 00:13:40.830 very late and does some very important fundamental, 00:13:40.830 --> 00:13:42.600 theoretical work, but it's basically 00:13:42.600 --> 00:13:45.250 an engineering project. 00:13:45.250 --> 00:13:48.360 Whereas here, partly because of the military connection, 00:13:48.360 --> 00:13:51.720 partly because of the Rad Lab, there's always this focus on 00:13:51.720 --> 00:13:58.240 the human relationship and the real-time interaction, and 00:13:58.240 --> 00:14:00.870 partly because they're enabled to do these big projects and 00:14:00.870 --> 00:14:03.800 kind of build these big, experimental systems, rather 00:14:03.800 --> 00:14:07.150 than having one single. 00:14:07.150 --> 00:14:08.340 There's a great quote. 00:14:08.340 --> 00:14:14.160 It's from later on, where a university administrator is 00:14:14.160 --> 00:14:19.250 told that they just, the University, just bought a 00:14:19.250 --> 00:14:22.170 giant computer for millions of dollars, and now they need to 00:14:22.170 --> 00:14:24.930 form a department of computer science. 00:14:24.930 --> 00:14:27.440 And the administrator says, that's ridiculous. 00:14:27.440 --> 00:14:29.880 We just bought a giant air conditioning unit for millions 00:14:29.880 --> 00:14:30.770 of dollars. 00:14:30.770 --> 00:14:33.180 Nobody's telling me I need to make a department of air 00:14:33.180 --> 00:14:35.590 conditioning science. 00:14:35.590 --> 00:14:39.850 And so the struggles of sort of-- is the computer just a 00:14:39.850 --> 00:14:42.130 big, glorified calculator, or is it something 00:14:42.130 --> 00:14:43.480 fundamentally new-- 00:14:43.480 --> 00:14:45.700 are all happening during this period, too. 00:14:45.700 --> 00:14:46.870 Anybody know when the Computer Science 00:14:46.870 --> 00:14:50.260 Department here is founded? 00:14:50.260 --> 00:14:51.730 Everything I'm showing you here is from the 00:14:51.730 --> 00:14:54.700 '50s, 1950 to 1956. 00:14:54.700 --> 00:14:58.550 When does MIT create the CS part of EECS? 00:15:01.840 --> 00:15:03.760 1968. 00:15:03.760 --> 00:15:07.530 Takes a long time to actually recognize that there's a new 00:15:07.530 --> 00:15:08.780 science there. 00:15:19.022 --> 00:15:21.700 As I said, this is really IBM PR. 00:15:21.700 --> 00:15:26.890 So they were showing this to maybe generals and other 00:15:26.890 --> 00:15:29.470 people who would be their military customers or just 00:15:29.470 --> 00:15:31.290 generally the public. 00:15:31.290 --> 00:15:32.830 It's not very technical. 00:15:32.830 --> 00:15:35.450 It's, like, got the kids on the playground, like defending 00:15:35.450 --> 00:15:37.580 your people sort of thing. 00:15:37.580 --> 00:15:40.170 But you see throughout this the computers are there as 00:15:40.170 --> 00:15:41.780 these control centers. 00:15:41.780 --> 00:15:45.100 And this is real-time interactive computer graphics, 00:15:45.100 --> 00:15:48.160 which is going on nowhere else in the world at the time. 00:15:48.160 --> 00:15:50.680 And the idea of a computer, not as this kind of 00:15:50.680 --> 00:15:53.480 calculator/switcher, but as this interactive-- 00:15:53.480 --> 00:15:56.140 not just interactive but also very much 00:15:56.140 --> 00:15:58.970 networked kind of computer. 00:15:58.970 --> 00:16:02.050 Some of the things you saw that were really done for the 00:16:02.050 --> 00:16:05.830 first time with SAGE and Whirlwind, real time, they 00:16:05.830 --> 00:16:07.420 mention graphic displays. 00:16:07.420 --> 00:16:11.050 Modems were invented for this system. 00:16:11.050 --> 00:16:12.530 You don't even use modems anymore. 00:16:12.530 --> 00:16:14.930 Does anybody have a modem that they use these days? 00:16:14.930 --> 00:16:17.260 I haven't used one in, probably, close to 10 years at 00:16:17.260 --> 00:16:21.790 this point, but used to use them a lot. 00:16:21.790 --> 00:16:24.580 Real-time memory allocation, all kinds of stuff that you 00:16:24.580 --> 00:16:27.860 use in the software engineering world. 00:16:27.860 --> 00:16:30.700 And SAGE was really the first big software project, too. 00:16:30.700 --> 00:16:34.380 It really taught the American industry how to organize these 00:16:34.380 --> 00:16:35.480 big software projects. 00:16:35.480 --> 00:16:37.080 And there were many others that were built that were 00:16:37.080 --> 00:16:38.330 similar to it. 00:16:41.660 --> 00:16:47.470 And as the film kind of makes clear, it's 00:16:47.470 --> 00:16:48.850 oriented towards civilians. 00:16:48.850 --> 00:16:53.170 It's built to make civilians feel comfortable. 00:16:53.170 --> 00:16:55.580 It's not built because the military wants to go out and 00:16:55.580 --> 00:16:56.570 get the Soviet Union. 00:16:56.570 --> 00:16:58.760 That's what they do for a living. 00:16:58.760 --> 00:17:01.360 And it's built to make people feel comfortable. 00:17:01.360 --> 00:17:04.160 And was pretty much obsolete by the time it was 00:17:04.160 --> 00:17:07.300 operational, so it had, essentially, no military 00:17:07.300 --> 00:17:10.060 impact despite all the money that was spent on it. 00:17:10.060 --> 00:17:12.310 But it had some technological input. 00:17:12.310 --> 00:17:15.069 Nobody's really ever was able to know if it would have 00:17:15.069 --> 00:17:17.540 worked if we were actually attacked. 00:17:17.540 --> 00:17:21.240 But there was a brief period where air attack by Soviet 00:17:21.240 --> 00:17:24.829 bombers over the North Pole was a great fear of people. 00:17:24.829 --> 00:17:28.659 What ended that fear or made it irrelevant? 00:17:28.659 --> 00:17:29.520 AUDIENCE: ICBMs. 00:17:29.520 --> 00:17:30.610 PROFESSOR: ICBMs. 00:17:30.610 --> 00:17:32.950 Where this system wouldn't work against ICBMs. 00:17:32.950 --> 00:17:34.510 But you still see that fear. 00:17:34.510 --> 00:17:36.410 And all the debates about missile defense 00:17:36.410 --> 00:17:37.870 in the last 20 years-- 00:17:37.870 --> 00:17:40.340 Patriot missile during the Gulf War and all that stuff-- 00:17:40.340 --> 00:17:43.060 is just an extension of this kind of fear. 00:17:46.250 --> 00:17:48.290 So this is sort of what's going on 00:17:48.290 --> 00:17:51.410 around here in the '50s. 00:17:51.410 --> 00:17:53.420 I have a couple more videos, let me see which ones. 00:18:08.740 --> 00:18:13.050 And a lot of people really actually did question, is this 00:18:13.050 --> 00:18:17.210 really the kind of MIT that we want to be living in-- 00:18:17.210 --> 00:18:21.250 big military projects, lots of money flowing in, lots of 00:18:21.250 --> 00:18:23.400 focus on building large systems-- 00:18:23.400 --> 00:18:26.660 as opposed to research projects or kind of individual 00:18:26.660 --> 00:18:29.200 scientists doing things? 00:18:29.200 --> 00:18:33.910 And that's where-- and I want to say a little bit before we 00:18:33.910 --> 00:18:38.100 move on, and Roz Williams mentioned this. 00:18:38.100 --> 00:18:41.810 I don't think we've assigned it this year for reading. 00:18:45.780 --> 00:18:52.840 Was a bunch of people at MIT got together in 1949. 00:18:52.840 --> 00:18:56.840 It was called the Committee on the Educational Survey, but it 00:18:56.840 --> 00:18:59.260 became known as the Lewis Report. 00:18:59.260 --> 00:19:01.190 And, again, Roz Williams mentions it. 00:19:01.190 --> 00:19:02.000 The Lewis-- 00:19:02.000 --> 00:19:04.710 who it was named after was her grandfather, Doc Louis of 00:19:04.710 --> 00:19:05.960 chemical engineering. 00:19:08.130 --> 00:19:11.840 Other people on the committee were Stratton, who I 00:19:11.840 --> 00:19:14.610 mentioned, Elting Morison, who was a historian who actually 00:19:14.610 --> 00:19:18.750 founded the department that I head now, Viki Weisskopf, who 00:19:18.750 --> 00:19:21.990 was a famous Manhattan Project-era physicist. 00:19:21.990 --> 00:19:23.300 Jerry Wiesner we've talked about. 00:19:23.300 --> 00:19:25.580 Gordon Brown we talked about. 00:19:25.580 --> 00:19:27.710 John Burchard, who was the first Dean of Humanities and 00:19:27.710 --> 00:19:31.630 Social Sciences, and Harold Hazen, who was the Dean of 00:19:31.630 --> 00:19:34.620 Engineering at the time that we talked about before. 00:19:34.620 --> 00:19:37.240 And there were these problems that were on peoples' mind at 00:19:37.240 --> 00:19:38.950 the beginning of the Cold War. 00:19:38.950 --> 00:19:40.660 I'll read you a couple of quotes from it, which are 00:19:40.660 --> 00:19:42.300 pretty interesting. 00:19:42.300 --> 00:19:45.590 "We continue to claim that our primary mission is to teach, 00:19:45.590 --> 00:19:47.440 but other activities have assumed an 00:19:47.440 --> 00:19:49.730 unprecedented role at MIT. 00:19:49.730 --> 00:19:51.970 Service to the community and to the national government has 00:19:51.970 --> 00:19:55.180 always been recognized as a primary obligation, but now 00:19:55.180 --> 00:19:57.600 the dollar volume of government contracts, 00:19:57.600 --> 00:20:00.900 government-sponsored research, amounts to far more than the 00:20:00.900 --> 00:20:02.390 academic budget. 00:20:02.390 --> 00:20:05.060 Postwar government funds have been used to maintain a very 00:20:05.060 --> 00:20:08.710 large technical staff without the privilege of tenure. 00:20:08.710 --> 00:20:11.030 And the major part of the Institute's personnel is now 00:20:11.030 --> 00:20:12.570 dependent on the continuation of 00:20:12.570 --> 00:20:15.020 short-term financial support. 00:20:15.020 --> 00:20:18.360 Government money has made available to us magnificent 00:20:18.360 --> 00:20:21.010 facilities that have become a permanent part of the 00:20:21.010 --> 00:20:23.790 Institute and that involve continued responsibility for 00:20:23.790 --> 00:20:25.190 their maintenance." 00:20:25.190 --> 00:20:27.560 So there was this problem of just big size. 00:20:27.560 --> 00:20:28.730 Like how do you maintain it? 00:20:28.730 --> 00:20:31.310 Once the Institute grew that big, people had to-- it's like 00:20:31.310 --> 00:20:33.960 a big animal in a cage that you need to shovel money into 00:20:33.960 --> 00:20:36.560 all the time. 00:20:36.560 --> 00:20:39.820 Whereas before, the Institute was primarily focused on 00:20:39.820 --> 00:20:42.720 undergraduate education, and it was really a kind of 00:20:42.720 --> 00:20:45.120 technical institute college kind of environment. 00:20:45.120 --> 00:20:48.600 It became much more focused on research. 00:20:48.600 --> 00:20:52.360 And these sponsored projects, particularly military 00:20:52.360 --> 00:20:54.800 sponsored, were bigger and bigger. 00:20:54.800 --> 00:20:58.460 They asked, "Is all this work genuinely creative? 00:20:58.460 --> 00:21:00.670 Can it, indeed, be justified on the ground that it 00:21:00.670 --> 00:21:03.420 strengthens our educational program? 00:21:03.420 --> 00:21:06.270 Have our staff members not on occasion been lured by 00:21:06.270 --> 00:21:09.210 prestige that accompanies an enlargement of activities 00:21:09.210 --> 00:21:11.370 without considering the loss in their professional 00:21:11.370 --> 00:21:13.230 competence that the undertaking of added 00:21:13.230 --> 00:21:15.090 administrative burdens may entail? 00:21:15.090 --> 00:21:17.210 So these were all real questions that come up for the 00:21:17.210 --> 00:21:20.610 next 60 years, in a way, about-- 00:21:20.610 --> 00:21:24.110 are the faculty members now big managers managing big 00:21:24.110 --> 00:21:26.870 research projects more than real thinkers sitting down and 00:21:26.870 --> 00:21:28.270 actually thinking things through? 00:21:32.990 --> 00:21:35.980 "Is there not a danger that the interests and energy of 00:21:35.980 --> 00:21:38.670 our faculty are being diverted from education to 00:21:38.670 --> 00:21:40.010 income-producing work? 00:21:44.090 --> 00:21:48.230 And secondly, many large projects emphasize design and 00:21:48.230 --> 00:21:49.420 construction problems-- 00:21:49.420 --> 00:21:51.750 like Whirlwind, SAGE-- 00:21:51.750 --> 00:21:55.010 engineering development or applications of science rather 00:21:55.010 --> 00:21:59.320 than fundamental scientific inquiry. 00:21:59.320 --> 00:22:01.720 We must be careful lest the great preponderance of 00:22:01.720 --> 00:22:04.930 activities of this type divert interest from the more 00:22:04.930 --> 00:22:08.610 fundamental aspects of scientific research. 00:22:08.610 --> 00:22:11.230 And the third concern is the preponderance of military 00:22:11.230 --> 00:22:13.490 projects in the sponsored programs. 00:22:13.490 --> 00:22:14.380 Two difficulties-- 00:22:14.380 --> 00:22:17.390 first, national security requires some of 00:22:17.390 --> 00:22:20.040 it be done in secret. 00:22:20.040 --> 00:22:22.710 And second, it would be unfortunate for MIT to become 00:22:22.710 --> 00:22:25.530 regarded as an institution that is dependent on the 00:22:25.530 --> 00:22:28.200 development of war weapons as it is for an industrial 00:22:28.200 --> 00:22:29.370 organization to be [? required ?] 00:22:29.370 --> 00:22:32.050 in a similar light. 00:22:32.050 --> 00:22:34.100 We suggest that future planning should look forward 00:22:34.100 --> 00:22:36.340 to the possibility of increased emphasis on 00:22:36.340 --> 00:22:38.640 activities more directly related to the public 00:22:38.640 --> 00:22:38.920 welfare." 00:22:38.920 --> 00:22:41.770 This is a very interesting moment where major people at 00:22:41.770 --> 00:22:44.470 MIT get together and they say, is this really the world that 00:22:44.470 --> 00:22:45.740 we want to live in? 00:22:45.740 --> 00:22:47.030 What's happening to MIT? 00:22:47.030 --> 00:22:48.640 Is this really a good idea? 00:22:48.640 --> 00:22:52.630 And again, that's 1949, right-- really, the year 00:22:52.630 --> 00:22:54.930 before the Cold War really hits. 00:22:54.930 --> 00:22:57.830 And a lot of people feel those concerns were sort of buried 00:22:57.830 --> 00:23:01.550 throughout the '50s, in a way, as the Institute became more 00:23:01.550 --> 00:23:04.630 and more dependent on these things. 00:23:04.630 --> 00:23:08.700 A couple other things to mention from that period. 00:23:08.700 --> 00:23:12.730 Baker House is built in 1947, and it's really the beginning. 00:23:12.730 --> 00:23:14.470 We've talked about this before, I think, of the 00:23:14.470 --> 00:23:17.980 residential part of campus growing on the west side of 00:23:17.980 --> 00:23:22.810 Mass Ave. and then on down the street, of course. 00:23:22.810 --> 00:23:24.880 The other dorms are built then. 00:23:24.880 --> 00:23:28.870 The mid-century convocation is 1949, when Winston Churchill 00:23:28.870 --> 00:23:30.600 comes to town and speaks. 00:23:30.600 --> 00:23:34.420 And, again, sort of says MIT has an obligation to think, 00:23:34.420 --> 00:23:37.160 not just about the sciences and technology it's creating, 00:23:37.160 --> 00:23:39.110 but what are the social implications of those 00:23:39.110 --> 00:23:40.200 technologies. 00:23:40.200 --> 00:23:42.670 And that's when-- 00:23:42.670 --> 00:23:45.330 the School of Humanities and Social Sciences is founded, 00:23:45.330 --> 00:23:51.180 essentially, right after he says that in 1949. 00:23:51.180 --> 00:23:54.130 And also at that mid-century convocation is the 00:23:54.130 --> 00:23:58.760 inauguration of James Frank Killian-- 00:23:58.760 --> 00:24:00.620 James Killian, James R. Killian, 00:24:00.620 --> 00:24:02.100 forget his middle name-- 00:24:02.100 --> 00:24:03.890 as president. 00:24:03.890 --> 00:24:08.700 He's the first alumni, alumnus, to become president, 00:24:08.700 --> 00:24:09.660 which is kind of interesting. 00:24:09.660 --> 00:24:14.640 It took almost 100 years for that to happen. 00:24:14.640 --> 00:24:19.010 And he's as much of a kind of executive manager, not a 00:24:19.010 --> 00:24:22.330 career scientist, in the way that his predecessor Karl 00:24:22.330 --> 00:24:23.700 Compton was. 00:24:23.700 --> 00:24:27.220 He really ran MIT during World War II when Compton, as we 00:24:27.220 --> 00:24:31.480 mentioned, was off around the globe getting these weapons 00:24:31.480 --> 00:24:33.210 into service. 00:24:33.210 --> 00:24:37.435 So what is the end of this sort of early Cold War period? 00:24:44.100 --> 00:24:47.940 When does the world that this film is describing really come 00:24:47.940 --> 00:24:49.190 to a shocking end? 00:24:52.786 --> 00:24:53.720 AUDIENCE: Sputnik. 00:24:53.720 --> 00:24:54.020 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 00:24:54.020 --> 00:24:57.740 October 4, 1957 you have Sputnik. 00:24:57.740 --> 00:24:59.770 We read a piece about that. 00:24:59.770 --> 00:25:02.230 And there is this just this incredible sense of shock. 00:25:02.230 --> 00:25:04.670 You can see from this video-- 00:25:04.670 --> 00:25:09.600 I actually don't remember what the year on this was-- 00:25:09.600 --> 00:25:15.310 1956, so right before then. 00:25:15.310 --> 00:25:19.400 And there's a sort of sense of arrogant confidence that we're 00:25:19.400 --> 00:25:23.300 doing everything right, and the whole world follows us. 00:25:23.300 --> 00:25:26.760 Couple people raised this in the response papers, too. 00:25:26.760 --> 00:25:28.280 And then Sputnik is launched. 00:25:28.280 --> 00:25:31.510 And it's this incredible shock to the American 00:25:31.510 --> 00:25:33.660 system because suddenly-- 00:25:33.660 --> 00:25:37.700 it's somewhat similar to the explosion 00:25:37.700 --> 00:25:39.640 of the Soviet H-bomb. 00:25:39.640 --> 00:25:40.980 Remember, we come out of the war. 00:25:40.980 --> 00:25:43.410 We have this world-changing new weapon and 00:25:43.410 --> 00:25:44.860 nobody else has it. 00:25:44.860 --> 00:25:47.420 And then, not only the Soviets get that one, but 00:25:47.420 --> 00:25:50.750 they get the A-bomb. 00:25:50.750 --> 00:25:55.860 They get the H-bomb, also, in very short order. 00:25:55.860 --> 00:25:59.950 And there's a lot happening in the '50s, and there's a lot of 00:25:59.950 --> 00:26:00.960 debate going on. 00:26:00.960 --> 00:26:05.680 And people see space, somewhat like computing, as sort of 00:26:05.680 --> 00:26:07.140 like this exotic new field. 00:26:07.140 --> 00:26:09.210 Nobody's quite sure what it's good for, but it must be 00:26:09.210 --> 00:26:11.710 important for the military somehow. 00:26:11.710 --> 00:26:13.700 And there's a lot of debate about that. 00:26:13.700 --> 00:26:16.930 Meanwhile, President Eisenhower is this sort of 00:26:16.930 --> 00:26:19.360 interesting, ironic figure in that we have a military 00:26:19.360 --> 00:26:21.480 general in the White House, which doesn't happen that 00:26:21.480 --> 00:26:24.030 often in American history. 00:26:24.030 --> 00:26:26.870 And yet, at the same time, he's a conservative 00:26:26.870 --> 00:26:27.450 Republican. 00:26:27.450 --> 00:26:29.410 He wants to keep government small. 00:26:29.410 --> 00:26:34.300 He wants to rein things in and control military spending as 00:26:34.300 --> 00:26:35.150 best he can. 00:26:35.150 --> 00:26:38.460 He actually calls military spending theft at one point. 00:26:41.810 --> 00:26:46.550 But in a certain sense, he's pushed by the forces of 00:26:46.550 --> 00:26:49.050 history in ways that he's not able to control and is, 00:26:49.050 --> 00:26:57.030 actually, not very sensitive to what Sputnik means. 00:26:57.030 --> 00:26:59.550 And a lot of people aren't, even as soon as 00:26:59.550 --> 00:27:01.220 it first goes up. 00:27:01.220 --> 00:27:04.010 And somebody mentioned this about-- 00:27:04.010 --> 00:27:05.550 why wasn't the US first? 00:27:05.550 --> 00:27:08.330 Well, partly the US wasn't first because they didn't see 00:27:08.330 --> 00:27:10.740 that being first was going to be a priority. 00:27:10.740 --> 00:27:16.300 And it wasn't, necessarily, an objective comparison of US 00:27:16.300 --> 00:27:20.200 technical competence versus Soviet technical competence. 00:27:20.200 --> 00:27:23.035 That's how most people in the world, including in Congress 00:27:23.035 --> 00:27:26.310 and the American public and the media, read it, but it 00:27:26.310 --> 00:27:30.060 wasn't necessarily that way. 00:27:30.060 --> 00:27:32.270 Eisenhower was very concerned about some of the legal 00:27:32.270 --> 00:27:33.380 implications of-- 00:27:33.380 --> 00:27:36.260 if you send a satellite over somebody's territory, is that 00:27:36.260 --> 00:27:41.080 considered an invasion, or is the space above your-- 00:27:41.080 --> 00:27:43.840 it had already been legally established that air space is 00:27:43.840 --> 00:27:44.620 like territory. 00:27:44.620 --> 00:27:46.480 You can't go into it without permission. 00:27:46.480 --> 00:27:49.690 But that wasn't established about orbital space. 00:27:49.690 --> 00:27:51.530 And they were actually, in some ways, happy. 00:27:51.530 --> 00:27:53.590 One of the Assistant Secretaries of Defense 00:27:53.590 --> 00:27:56.400 immediately wrote, "The Russians have, in fact, done 00:27:56.400 --> 00:28:00.180 us a good turn in establishing the concept of the freedom of 00:28:00.180 --> 00:28:04.630 international space." And now we can overfly them with 00:28:04.630 --> 00:28:06.430 impunity because they've done it to us. 00:28:09.020 --> 00:28:11.240 And so, there was this sort of question. 00:28:11.240 --> 00:28:13.810 Eisenhower said, "Sputnik does not rouse my 00:28:13.810 --> 00:28:15.700 apprehension not one iota. 00:28:15.700 --> 00:28:19.950 They've put one small ball into the air." 00:28:19.950 --> 00:28:24.790 Yet, the press assumed that this meant Soviet superiority 00:28:24.790 --> 00:28:26.100 in technology. 00:28:26.100 --> 00:28:27.960 They sort of pushed the panic button. 00:28:27.960 --> 00:28:30.670 People in Congress, particularly Lyndon Johnson, 00:28:30.670 --> 00:28:33.865 took every opportunity to rub it in. 00:28:33.865 --> 00:28:36.610 Let me see if I have the quote. 00:28:36.610 --> 00:28:41.750 Because the US military said, oh, that's not a big deal. 00:28:41.750 --> 00:28:43.660 We have four projects that are going to get that 00:28:43.660 --> 00:28:44.980 going, at the time. 00:28:44.980 --> 00:28:49.190 And Johnson said, in public, he said, knowing that we have 00:28:49.190 --> 00:28:53.800 better rockets on the drawing boards is not very reassuring. 00:28:53.800 --> 00:28:56.370 It's like being told that, I suppose, our next model will 00:28:56.370 --> 00:28:59.960 have tail fins and automatic windshield wipers, which was 00:28:59.960 --> 00:29:03.590 sort of the sarcastic comment about what we're going to do. 00:29:03.590 --> 00:29:05.700 What they hadn't really recognized was that space was 00:29:05.700 --> 00:29:10.030 this incredibly, symbolically, potent thing and that people 00:29:10.030 --> 00:29:13.240 responded to it way out of proportion to what the direct 00:29:13.240 --> 00:29:14.740 implications of it were. 00:29:14.740 --> 00:29:17.690 If the US had decided that being first in space was 00:29:17.690 --> 00:29:20.340 important, they probably could have rushed ahead and gone 00:29:20.340 --> 00:29:21.200 first in space. 00:29:21.200 --> 00:29:22.020 They didn't. 00:29:22.020 --> 00:29:23.970 They had some bureaucratic infighting. 00:29:23.970 --> 00:29:26.860 They had the unfortunate failure of another rocket 00:29:26.860 --> 00:29:28.780 right after there. 00:29:28.780 --> 00:29:33.430 And the world really changed, in 1957, from a science and 00:29:33.430 --> 00:29:35.025 technology point of view in this country. 00:29:38.680 --> 00:29:45.620 I teach a lot about science policy. 00:29:45.620 --> 00:29:47.760 And one of the things you learn about science policy in 00:29:47.760 --> 00:29:50.500 this country is that practically every agency that 00:29:50.500 --> 00:29:52.780 exists in the federal government concerned with 00:29:52.780 --> 00:29:56.240 science and technology arose in response to a crisis of one 00:29:56.240 --> 00:29:57.930 kind or another. 00:29:57.930 --> 00:30:00.130 The most recent example is the Department of Homeland 00:30:00.130 --> 00:30:02.720 Security, which was created after 9/11. 00:30:02.720 --> 00:30:04.700 No matter what a good idea they thought it might have 00:30:04.700 --> 00:30:07.760 been or not been beforehand, it was a response to crisis. 00:30:07.760 --> 00:30:11.200 And after Sputnik, you had several things which were 00:30:11.200 --> 00:30:16.470 really quite important for MIT and for the development of 00:30:16.470 --> 00:30:17.530 technology. 00:30:17.530 --> 00:30:25.390 One was reorganizing R&D in the Defense Department to 00:30:25.390 --> 00:30:28.300 avoid what they called technological surprise. 00:30:28.300 --> 00:30:32.750 And that involved creating a new agency called the Advanced 00:30:32.750 --> 00:30:36.280 Research Project Agency, called ARPA, which 00:30:36.280 --> 00:30:37.910 was founded in 1958. 00:30:37.910 --> 00:30:42.120 Its first director was a professor from MIT named Jack 00:30:42.120 --> 00:30:44.650 Ruina, who's still around. 00:30:44.650 --> 00:30:47.420 And I'll talk about that a little bit in a minute. 00:30:47.420 --> 00:30:52.880 Vastly increased accelerations in R&D funding and also, of 00:30:52.880 --> 00:30:55.940 course, the NACA, National Advisory Committee for 00:30:55.940 --> 00:30:59.430 Aeronautics became what? 00:30:59.430 --> 00:31:03.520 NASA, National Air and Space Administration in 1958. 00:31:03.520 --> 00:31:11.040 Both those agencies were founded in 1958. 00:31:11.040 --> 00:31:12.820 And then there's also the National Defense 00:31:12.820 --> 00:31:15.190 Education Act in 1958. 00:31:15.190 --> 00:31:20.050 This may sound like a long time ago, but most, if not 00:31:20.050 --> 00:31:21.410 many, of your professors-- 00:31:21.410 --> 00:31:23.080 if they're older, age 50-- 00:31:23.080 --> 00:31:26.920 were probably educated with funds from that Act, including 00:31:26.920 --> 00:31:28.010 President Susan Hockfield. 00:31:28.010 --> 00:31:31.600 She came here-- in her inaugural speech she said, I 00:31:31.600 --> 00:31:33.000 was a post-Sputnik child. 00:31:33.000 --> 00:31:35.850 I was educated and got into science because there was a 00:31:35.850 --> 00:31:39.970 huge push in scientific education in the late '50s and 00:31:39.970 --> 00:31:41.800 early '60s to get kids into science. 00:31:41.800 --> 00:31:43.400 And I was one of the beneficiaries of that. 00:31:43.400 --> 00:31:46.380 So we're very much living in this kind of post-Sputnik 00:31:46.380 --> 00:31:47.650 world in that way. 00:31:50.730 --> 00:31:53.900 And I want to talk then a little bit 00:31:53.900 --> 00:31:56.420 about ARPA and DARPA. 00:31:56.420 --> 00:31:59.140 Show you a couple more movies that take this whole same 00:31:59.140 --> 00:32:01.870 story, in a way, into another realm. 00:32:11.170 --> 00:32:12.950 People have heard of DARPA before this, right? 00:32:12.950 --> 00:32:15.260 Has anybody not heard of DARPA? 00:32:15.260 --> 00:32:17.980 So, obviously, it's most famous because the internet 00:32:17.980 --> 00:32:23.210 started as the ARPANET and was created in very much this 00:32:23.210 --> 00:32:27.090 period, slightly after, but only in the early '60s. 00:32:27.090 --> 00:32:29.430 And one of the things about computing-- 00:32:29.430 --> 00:32:32.240 one of things that's special about DARPA was that it's not 00:32:32.240 --> 00:32:35.230 the Office of Naval Research or the Air Force Office of 00:32:35.230 --> 00:32:38.560 Scientific Research or the Army Research Lab. 00:32:38.560 --> 00:32:41.580 ARPA reports directly to the Secretary of Defense, so it's 00:32:41.580 --> 00:32:45.610 outside of all of these inter-service rivalries. 00:32:45.610 --> 00:32:48.170 And it doesn't own-- in fact, it tends to stay away from 00:32:48.170 --> 00:32:51.990 things like big ships and big airplanes, much like the OSRD 00:32:51.990 --> 00:32:55.000 did, and focus on these technologies that are so far 00:32:55.000 --> 00:32:56.840 out and wacky that nobody really knows what 00:32:56.840 --> 00:32:57.780 they're good for. 00:32:57.780 --> 00:32:59.530 At the time, space was one of them. 00:32:59.530 --> 00:33:02.530 In fact, ARPA was responsible for space until-- 00:33:02.530 --> 00:33:04.900 it was only a few months NASA was created-- 00:33:04.900 --> 00:33:06.780 and then they had space taken away from them. 00:33:06.780 --> 00:33:08.290 And computing was another one. 00:33:08.290 --> 00:33:10.370 That everybody had the sense it was good for something but 00:33:10.370 --> 00:33:12.170 nobody really knew what. 00:33:12.170 --> 00:33:17.630 And so let me show you a coupleof images, couple of 00:33:17.630 --> 00:33:19.960 other neat little films about what some of the ARPA 00:33:19.960 --> 00:33:21.210 computing work did. 00:33:31.130 --> 00:33:34.550 So that's another kind of late '50s version of this whole 00:33:34.550 --> 00:33:40.750 idea of machine control, which is Air Force still and not 00:33:40.750 --> 00:33:41.560 ARPA funded. 00:33:41.560 --> 00:33:44.125 But then you get into the ARPA-funded stuff. 00:34:03.710 --> 00:34:09.199 So this is sort of the next logical step in 00:34:09.199 --> 00:34:10.400 a lot of this work. 00:34:10.400 --> 00:34:14.860 And Ivan Sutherland is someone who's, remarkably, still alive 00:34:14.860 --> 00:34:17.710 today, too. 00:34:17.710 --> 00:34:20.360 Not that he's remarkably still alive,but. 00:34:20.360 --> 00:34:22.270 He went from here out to the University of Utah where he 00:34:22.270 --> 00:34:24.230 founded the computer graphics program there. 00:34:24.230 --> 00:34:27.050 And practically every fundamental concept in 00:34:27.050 --> 00:34:30.150 computer graphics came out of either his work or his lab. 00:34:30.150 --> 00:34:33.389 And then his students went on to found Silicon Graphics, 00:34:33.389 --> 00:34:41.060 Adobe, many of the other really critical-- 00:34:41.060 --> 00:34:43.560 a lot of them worked for Industrial Light and Magic, 00:34:43.560 --> 00:34:47.889 the George Lucas company and sort of migrated west, 00:34:47.889 --> 00:34:49.969 continuing into Hollywood. 00:34:49.969 --> 00:34:53.949 Pixar, that was the other one I was trying to think of. 00:34:53.949 --> 00:34:56.219 And that, again, comes from this. 00:34:56.219 --> 00:34:58.860 We didn't watch that part of the film on SAGE, but they had 00:34:58.860 --> 00:35:01.580 these light pens in SAGE, too, as the beginning of this sort 00:35:01.580 --> 00:35:04.180 of graphical user interface. 00:35:04.180 --> 00:35:07.050 And then the last one I want to show you about has to do 00:35:07.050 --> 00:35:08.300 with time-sharing. 00:35:17.940 --> 00:35:21.010 So Corbato is still around. 00:35:21.010 --> 00:35:22.530 I saw him last week, and he still 00:35:22.530 --> 00:35:23.770 teaches in computer science. 00:35:23.770 --> 00:35:28.090 And they came up with this time-sharing system where-- 00:35:28.090 --> 00:35:30.335 I mean, how many of you use a console window ever 00:35:30.335 --> 00:35:33.550 on your Mac or PC? 00:35:33.550 --> 00:35:36.030 So, basically, that's the idea behind time-sharing. 00:35:36.030 --> 00:35:39.000 That you have a computer there, before a graphical 00:35:39.000 --> 00:35:41.910 interface, that you could type commands and programs to, and 00:35:41.910 --> 00:35:43.770 it would respond to you immediately. 00:35:43.770 --> 00:35:46.190 Before that, you had only batch processing, where you'd 00:35:46.190 --> 00:35:49.710 put your punch cards in at night, and you go home and 00:35:49.710 --> 00:35:52.380 come back the next morning, and there would be the thing. 00:35:52.380 --> 00:35:54.500 And they're again, following this thread. 00:35:54.500 --> 00:35:57.300 There was this idea that you could be so much more creative 00:35:57.300 --> 00:36:01.580 with a computer if you could sit there and hack away at it, 00:36:01.580 --> 00:36:03.830 and it would respond to you in real time. 00:36:03.830 --> 00:36:08.170 And that's really where time-sharing comes from. 00:36:08.170 --> 00:36:13.980 That led to a thing called Project MAC in the 1960s, 00:36:13.980 --> 00:36:16.010 which was a DARPA funded-- 00:36:16.010 --> 00:36:18.530 it was the predecessor to the Laboratory for Computer 00:36:18.530 --> 00:36:22.030 Science, which is now CSAIL. 00:36:22.030 --> 00:36:25.750 And Project MAC was run by Bob Fano, who I mentioned before. 00:36:25.750 --> 00:36:28.860 And had all these different kinds of creative computing 00:36:28.860 --> 00:36:32.180 things inside it, including a lot of Minsky's work in AI, 00:36:32.180 --> 00:36:36.030 although they split out and formed a separate AI lab. 00:36:36.030 --> 00:36:39.000 Then they came together with CSAIL. 00:36:39.000 --> 00:36:42.640 And all these sort of time-sharing experiments, the 00:36:42.640 --> 00:36:47.150 origins of a lot of the late-night hacker culture from 00:36:47.150 --> 00:36:49.400 MIT, come from people working late at night 00:36:49.400 --> 00:36:51.790 on Project MAC projects. 00:36:51.790 --> 00:36:55.140 A lot of the early computer games, Spacewar and whatnot, 00:36:55.140 --> 00:36:57.180 were developed in that context. 00:36:57.180 --> 00:37:00.920 And even a lot of the early later stuff for PCs, like 00:37:00.920 --> 00:37:05.090 spreadsheets, sort of came out of a 00:37:05.090 --> 00:37:08.030 Project MAC sort of setting. 00:37:08.030 --> 00:37:10.540 And then I also mentioned, of course, the internet, or the 00:37:10.540 --> 00:37:13.950 early ARPANET, one of the first nodes on 00:37:13.950 --> 00:37:15.820 the ARPANET was MIT. 00:37:15.820 --> 00:37:18.740 A lot of the first routers were built by a company called 00:37:18.740 --> 00:37:21.640 Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, which still exists here, sort 00:37:21.640 --> 00:37:22.390 of down the street. 00:37:22.390 --> 00:37:25.970 So there's this sort of continuous thread that's then 00:37:25.970 --> 00:37:33.620 updated through all these different crises and periods 00:37:33.620 --> 00:37:34.260 and whatnot. 00:37:34.260 --> 00:37:39.760 And through the '60s, that's sort of how this very, very 00:37:39.760 --> 00:37:42.930 heavily military still, but sort of different agencies and 00:37:42.930 --> 00:37:47.250 different contexts bears on the campus. 00:37:47.250 --> 00:37:47.730 I think you're right on. 00:37:47.730 --> 00:37:51.780 I mean, I think the atomic bomb had a lot to do with-- 00:37:51.780 --> 00:37:55.420 it's hard for us to imagine, but before 00:37:55.420 --> 00:37:56.690 World War II, two things. 00:37:56.690 --> 00:37:59.430 First of all, science was mostly the realm of 00:37:59.430 --> 00:38:02.840 pointy-headed professors and was very interesting and 00:38:02.840 --> 00:38:05.610 philosophically important but didn't always feel like it had 00:38:05.610 --> 00:38:08.930 a big impact on daily life and certainly not on public 00:38:08.930 --> 00:38:10.510 policy, per se. 00:38:10.510 --> 00:38:13.250 Again, the US government was hardly involved in the 00:38:13.250 --> 00:38:16.470 scientific world. 00:38:16.470 --> 00:38:18.820 Maybe in the world of agriculture it seemed to have 00:38:18.820 --> 00:38:20.460 a big impact. 00:38:20.460 --> 00:38:22.410 Most of industry didn't have a lot of science 00:38:22.410 --> 00:38:24.380 associated with it. 00:38:24.380 --> 00:38:26.950 And it really took the atomic bomb, not just for technology, 00:38:26.950 --> 00:38:29.800 but also for science itself, the idea that it-- 00:38:29.800 --> 00:38:32.740 like something that presidents should care about. 00:38:32.740 --> 00:38:34.490 I mean, even-- 00:38:34.490 --> 00:38:38.070 you look at the scientific revolution and the Copernican 00:38:38.070 --> 00:38:39.170 view of the universe-- 00:38:39.170 --> 00:38:40.430 doesn't affect the way I govern my 00:38:40.430 --> 00:38:43.210 kingdom an awful lot. 00:38:43.210 --> 00:38:46.470 And secondly, same thing with technology, where the idea 00:38:46.470 --> 00:38:49.370 today that whoever has the best technology wins the war 00:38:49.370 --> 00:38:51.490 was just not an accepted idea. 00:38:51.490 --> 00:38:54.620 And there was no real evidence for it up until that point. 00:38:54.620 --> 00:38:57.020 Maybe a little bit here in the Naval arms race around the 00:38:57.020 --> 00:39:02.040 turn of the 19th century, the turn of the 20th century. 00:39:02.040 --> 00:39:08.480 But today, almost everyone who is a leader in the military is 00:39:08.480 --> 00:39:11.020 trained in engineering in one way or another, not everybody 00:39:11.020 --> 00:39:12.560 but a very large amount of them. 00:39:12.560 --> 00:39:16.150 That was not true, even at the beginning of World War II. 00:39:16.150 --> 00:39:18.490 Military science was this other thing. 00:39:18.490 --> 00:39:20.640 There was this whole sort of tradition about fighting wars. 00:39:20.640 --> 00:39:23.580 There still is, still very prominent. 00:39:23.580 --> 00:39:25.850 And it took World War II to really bring 00:39:25.850 --> 00:39:28.970 those two ideas together. 00:39:28.970 --> 00:39:31.110 And even then it was still a little bit under question 00:39:31.110 --> 00:39:33.140 because it was really about who had the most planes and 00:39:33.140 --> 00:39:36.320 the most tanks, not always the best tanks and the best guns. 00:39:39.320 --> 00:39:43.030 Then, to some degree, you can say that Bush sort of served 00:39:43.030 --> 00:39:45.010 as the president's science adviser during the 00:39:45.010 --> 00:39:45.870 Second World War. 00:39:45.870 --> 00:39:48.870 But, again, most of the decisions to be made were 00:39:48.870 --> 00:39:51.370 either grand political decisions for the president as 00:39:51.370 --> 00:39:57.510 far as how to be allied with the Soviet Union and how to 00:39:57.510 --> 00:40:02.440 work with the British. 00:40:02.440 --> 00:40:05.130 And at the same time, military decisions-- 00:40:05.130 --> 00:40:06.160 where do we invade? 00:40:06.160 --> 00:40:07.560 At what time do we do it? 00:40:07.560 --> 00:40:09.770 And there's technologies that bear on that, but they're not 00:40:09.770 --> 00:40:11.990 things that rise to the presidential level. 00:40:11.990 --> 00:40:14.480 It's really during the Cold War that you see the 00:40:14.480 --> 00:40:16.970 prevalence of atomic weapons and ICBMs. 00:40:16.970 --> 00:40:22.300 Again, ICBMs don't really come out until the late '50s. 00:40:22.300 --> 00:40:26.170 It's all through the Cold War you're living with bombers and 00:40:26.170 --> 00:40:28.730 nuclear bombs that are as big as this room that you need a 00:40:28.730 --> 00:40:30.350 huge bomber to deliver. 00:40:30.350 --> 00:40:32.340 That's why something like SAGE came out. 00:40:32.340 --> 00:40:37.030 It's only around the late '50s you get this sense of mutual 00:40:37.030 --> 00:40:39.150 assured destruction, where we've got all these missiles 00:40:39.150 --> 00:40:40.345 ready to go, and they've got all these 00:40:40.345 --> 00:40:41.670 missiles ready to go. 00:40:41.670 --> 00:40:42.980 That's the world that dominated the 00:40:42.980 --> 00:40:46.310 next 30 years or so. 00:40:46.310 --> 00:40:49.820 And that's where arms control, different technical issues, 00:40:49.820 --> 00:40:52.180 become merged with politics in a way. 00:40:52.180 --> 00:40:54.710 And the presidential science adviser-- 00:40:54.710 --> 00:40:57.610 it varies from administration to administration-- 00:40:57.610 --> 00:41:01.150 but it's never been as prominent a position as it was 00:41:01.150 --> 00:41:05.290 when Killian and Wiesner were in that job. 00:41:05.290 --> 00:41:09.620 Nixon actually outright abolished it in the '70s, 00:41:09.620 --> 00:41:11.460 didn't want it all. 00:41:11.460 --> 00:41:14.000 Anybody know why that's a troubled position? 00:41:14.000 --> 00:41:16.360 So it's sort of science policy talk more than an MIT talk, 00:41:16.360 --> 00:41:17.610 but it's relevant. 00:41:19.990 --> 00:41:21.700 There's an inherent contradiction in being the 00:41:21.700 --> 00:41:22.950 president's science advisor. 00:41:29.830 --> 00:41:32.290 AUDIENCE: It's not pure science [? anymore ?] 00:41:32.290 --> 00:41:32.800 PROFESSOR: That's true. 00:41:32.800 --> 00:41:34.050 There's a lot of people who do that. 00:41:36.610 --> 00:41:40.920 So, first of all, are you representing to the president 00:41:40.920 --> 00:41:46.510 the conclusions of the scientific community, or are 00:41:46.510 --> 00:41:49.650 you representing the president's opinion and his 00:41:49.650 --> 00:41:53.860 policy goals to the scientific community? 00:41:53.860 --> 00:41:55.170 Right? 00:41:55.170 --> 00:42:01.440 And those things can easily be 180 degrees at odds. 00:42:01.440 --> 00:42:03.960 In fact, the story was-- this was all kind of leaked in the 00:42:03.960 --> 00:42:04.640 newspaper-- 00:42:04.640 --> 00:42:07.300 that George W. Bush asked Chuck Vest 00:42:07.300 --> 00:42:08.550 to be science adviser. 00:42:08.550 --> 00:42:11.460 And Vest said no because he felt he would be forced to 00:42:11.460 --> 00:42:13.900 take positions on things like climate change that he didn't 00:42:13.900 --> 00:42:16.280 think were going to be acceptable to him. 00:42:16.280 --> 00:42:19.740 So, if you look at what the Secretary of Defense does, or 00:42:19.740 --> 00:42:22.670 even the head of NASA, their job is to take the president's 00:42:22.670 --> 00:42:25.670 policies and implement them through the agency. 00:42:25.670 --> 00:42:27.980 And any time a big decision comes up you'll always see 00:42:27.980 --> 00:42:29.760 them on TV saying, well, that's for the 00:42:29.760 --> 00:42:31.060 president to decide. 00:42:31.060 --> 00:42:33.450 Robert Gates doesn't decide whether we're in 00:42:33.450 --> 00:42:34.460 Afghanistan or not. 00:42:34.460 --> 00:42:37.060 That's the president's job to decide that. 00:42:37.060 --> 00:42:38.370 Well, what happens when-- 00:42:41.310 --> 00:42:44.300 in the defense world, at least there's an understanding that 00:42:44.300 --> 00:42:46.160 decisions on defense are sort of partly 00:42:46.160 --> 00:42:47.760 political and whatnot. 00:42:47.760 --> 00:42:49.830 In the science world that's not so clear. 00:42:49.830 --> 00:42:52.810 And there's any number of cases where the president's 00:42:52.810 --> 00:42:57.060 policy preferences are at odds with what the science says, 00:42:57.060 --> 00:43:00.650 and that was very clear in the previous administration. 00:43:00.650 --> 00:43:03.290 But I'm sure that John Holdren, who is now the 00:43:03.290 --> 00:43:06.310 president's science adviser, who is a much more powerful 00:43:06.310 --> 00:43:10.770 guy and better-respected science adviser and scientist 00:43:10.770 --> 00:43:15.970 than the previous guy was, gets pulled in a lot of 00:43:15.970 --> 00:43:18.520 competing directions all the time. 00:43:18.520 --> 00:43:21.400 So it's a very difficult job and not 00:43:21.400 --> 00:43:23.080 everyone succeeds at that. 00:43:23.080 --> 00:43:24.600 I thought it was interesting that, even in the little, 00:43:24.600 --> 00:43:27.470 short film clip I showed you about the APT programming 00:43:27.470 --> 00:43:30.300 language, the guy on the board said, well, now there's a new 00:43:30.300 --> 00:43:34.320 kind of person in here who is the kind of machine-oriented 00:43:34.320 --> 00:43:35.730 programmer. 00:43:35.730 --> 00:43:40.150 And he's going to take these requirements and-- 00:43:40.150 --> 00:43:41.840 let me give you a little background on David Noble, 00:43:41.840 --> 00:43:44.410 which is actually interesting. 00:43:44.410 --> 00:43:49.670 He was a professor here in the kind of early to mid-1980s and 00:43:49.670 --> 00:43:54.580 was in STS and did a lot of collaboration with the 00:43:54.580 --> 00:43:55.690 engineering departments. 00:43:55.690 --> 00:44:00.060 And he wrote this book that was extremely critical of both 00:44:00.060 --> 00:44:02.740 the Air Force and MIT's role in numerically-controlled 00:44:02.740 --> 00:44:04.060 machine tools. 00:44:04.060 --> 00:44:07.010 And he was turned down for tenure a couple years later, 00:44:07.010 --> 00:44:09.790 and ended up suing MIT. 00:44:09.790 --> 00:44:13.660 He said because he was a Marxist, and they turned him 00:44:13.660 --> 00:44:16.210 down for tenure because he was a Marxist. 00:44:16.210 --> 00:44:19.050 MIT's response was, you didn't get denied tenure because 00:44:19.050 --> 00:44:19.700 you're a Marxist. 00:44:19.700 --> 00:44:21.890 You got denied tenure because you're a jerk. 00:44:21.890 --> 00:44:23.510 And that's actually legal. 00:44:23.510 --> 00:44:25.430 It's not legal to deny tenure to someone 00:44:25.430 --> 00:44:26.460 because of their politics. 00:44:26.460 --> 00:44:29.590 It is legal to deny tenure to them because of their personal 00:44:29.590 --> 00:44:31.060 style of interaction. 00:44:31.060 --> 00:44:32.500 I don't know many of the stories there. 00:44:32.500 --> 00:44:33.980 And I actually only have met the guy once. 00:44:33.980 --> 00:44:37.490 He died about three months ago at a fairly young age. 00:44:40.250 --> 00:44:46.280 And he's a well-respected historian. 00:44:46.280 --> 00:44:48.720 And he's always raised these sort of questions about these 00:44:48.720 --> 00:44:50.330 kinds of arrangements. 00:44:50.330 --> 00:44:52.980 And it's very worth reading it because of the questions it 00:44:52.980 --> 00:44:56.050 raises, although I do think he misses a couple of things-- 00:44:56.050 --> 00:44:58.850 kind of like what you said. 00:44:58.850 --> 00:45:01.640 In his world-- and I don't remember if this comes through 00:45:01.640 --> 00:45:03.670 in that essay or if it's in the larger book-- 00:45:06.600 --> 00:45:10.980 people who operate computers are managers, and people who 00:45:10.980 --> 00:45:14.680 operate machines are workers. 00:45:14.680 --> 00:45:17.900 And anything like numerically-controlled machine 00:45:17.900 --> 00:45:20.170 tools has that worker-- 00:45:20.170 --> 00:45:23.150 white-collar managers oppressing the workers. 00:45:23.150 --> 00:45:25.100 I mean, first of all today, almost everybody sits in front 00:45:25.100 --> 00:45:26.870 of a computer. 00:45:26.870 --> 00:45:30.050 Many, many jobs-- some of them are high-level executives and 00:45:30.050 --> 00:45:32.140 some of them are blue-collar operatives-- 00:45:32.140 --> 00:45:35.220 but the fact that you're using a computer has almost nothing 00:45:35.220 --> 00:45:39.610 to say about what level job you're in. 00:45:39.610 --> 00:45:42.170 And in the world that he came out of, he only had this 00:45:42.170 --> 00:45:44.660 association of white-collar managers. 00:45:44.660 --> 00:45:48.160 So anytime anything became computerized, it also became 00:45:48.160 --> 00:45:49.620 white collarized for him. 00:45:49.620 --> 00:45:52.570 Where, actually, we actually know today that the opposite 00:45:52.570 --> 00:45:53.500 is often the case. 00:45:53.500 --> 00:45:56.140 That when something becomes computerized, the skill level 00:45:56.140 --> 00:45:58.510 of the people who operate the computer is lower than the 00:45:58.510 --> 00:46:04.290 skill level of the people who did it before it was operated. 00:46:04.290 --> 00:46:06.640 And it's funny because he actually wrote an essay, after 00:46:06.640 --> 00:46:09.010 he wrote the book, about a study of machine tools in 00:46:09.010 --> 00:46:11.570 Sweden, where he was like, oh look, they did it this way. 00:46:11.570 --> 00:46:14.210 It's much more democratic and open, the way they use 00:46:14.210 --> 00:46:16.330 numerically-controlled machine tools. 00:46:16.330 --> 00:46:21.860 And there's an implication in his work that a given 00:46:21.860 --> 00:46:25.540 technology has a given social organization that comes along 00:46:25.540 --> 00:46:28.290 with it because of what's inherent in the technology. 00:46:28.290 --> 00:46:31.180 That's basically what he says in that "Command 00:46:31.180 --> 00:46:33.790 Performance" piece. 00:46:33.790 --> 00:46:38.370 And the jargon in the field is called, it's deterministic. 00:46:38.370 --> 00:46:41.030 A certain technology dictates a certain set of social 00:46:41.030 --> 00:46:41.970 conditions. 00:46:41.970 --> 00:46:44.105 But actually, if there's one thing we know from research in 00:46:44.105 --> 00:46:46.730 the field is that you can have lots of different social 00:46:46.730 --> 00:46:49.940 organizations around any particular technology. 00:46:49.940 --> 00:46:53.150 You can use the internet as a tool of authoritarian 00:46:53.150 --> 00:46:56.050 repression, or you can use the internet as a tool of people's 00:46:56.050 --> 00:46:57.260 liberation. 00:46:57.260 --> 00:47:02.020 Depends how you use it, but the tool itself can be used in 00:47:02.020 --> 00:47:02.890 different ways. 00:47:02.890 --> 00:47:05.270 I don't think that Noble would have seen himself, at the 00:47:05.270 --> 00:47:08.240 time, as a technological determinist, although, to some 00:47:08.240 --> 00:47:10.630 degree, all Marxists are technological determinists 00:47:10.630 --> 00:47:12.620 because Marx was a technological determinist. 00:47:12.620 --> 00:47:14.620 He said-- 00:47:14.620 --> 00:47:16.350 I'm not going to get the quote exactly right, but 00:47:16.350 --> 00:47:17.680 it's sort of like-- 00:47:17.680 --> 00:47:20.800 the spinning wheel gives you feudal society. 00:47:20.800 --> 00:47:25.080 Industrial production gives you capitalist society. 00:47:25.080 --> 00:47:26.920 And he, more or less, put it that way. 00:47:26.920 --> 00:47:31.290 And we actually know that's just empirically incorrect. 00:47:31.290 --> 00:47:33.410 What Noble did say that I think is really valuable to 00:47:33.410 --> 00:47:37.400 keep in mind that underlies a lot of the stuff that we saw 00:47:37.400 --> 00:47:40.680 in the video is that-- 00:47:40.680 --> 00:47:45.030 what are the implications of all of this military funding 00:47:45.030 --> 00:47:49.160 going to support university research and engineering 00:47:49.160 --> 00:47:51.260 research and scientific research? 00:47:51.260 --> 00:47:54.770 And I've tried to show the connections between where the 00:47:54.770 --> 00:47:57.910 money comes from and what the ideas are that got created. 00:47:57.910 --> 00:48:00.860 And I think one of the most legitimate criticisms of it is 00:48:00.860 --> 00:48:07.780 that military systems end up focusing almost exclusively on 00:48:07.780 --> 00:48:09.530 performance. 00:48:09.530 --> 00:48:11.760 And that's kind of the title of his piece, "Command 00:48:11.760 --> 00:48:17.710 Performance." That everyone was always pushing toward 00:48:17.710 --> 00:48:23.210 thinner wings and more precise tools and, obviously, faster 00:48:23.210 --> 00:48:28.140 airplanes, bigger bombs, heavier rockets. 00:48:28.140 --> 00:48:29.440 You don't care about costs. 00:48:29.440 --> 00:48:32.180 You don't, necessarily, care as much about schedule, other 00:48:32.180 --> 00:48:35.280 things which are sort of related like maintainability, 00:48:35.280 --> 00:48:37.090 sustainability. 00:48:37.090 --> 00:48:40.080 Lots of other ways to think about how a system performs 00:48:40.080 --> 00:48:43.440 besides simply performance. 00:48:43.440 --> 00:48:46.100 You know, an interesting example of that was the-- has 00:48:46.100 --> 00:48:48.792 anybody ever heard of the SST? 00:48:48.792 --> 00:48:51.666 What was the SST? 00:48:51.666 --> 00:48:54.558 AUDIENCE: Boeing's supersonic transport [INAUDIBLE]. 00:48:54.558 --> 00:48:56.010 Newer version of the Concorde. 00:48:56.010 --> 00:48:56.410 PROFESSOR: Right. 00:48:56.410 --> 00:49:01.210 So Boeing was trying to make, in the '60s, a supersonic 00:49:01.210 --> 00:49:03.600 transport--it was actually a competitor to the Concorde-- 00:49:03.600 --> 00:49:05.100 that would be Mach 3. 00:49:05.100 --> 00:49:06.880 And it was a big American project. 00:49:06.880 --> 00:49:10.290 And the idea was, gee, the Wright brothers were going at 00:49:10.290 --> 00:49:13.750 20 miles an hour, and we went 200 miles an hour in 1940. 00:49:13.750 --> 00:49:15.730 And we're doing 500 miles an hour with jet 00:49:15.730 --> 00:49:17.040 aircraft in the '60s. 00:49:17.040 --> 00:49:19.660 Clearly, the whole world is going to go supersonic. 00:49:19.660 --> 00:49:22.070 And if you focus only on performance, as the military 00:49:22.070 --> 00:49:24.000 does, and sure enough, military systems go 00:49:24.000 --> 00:49:24.670 supersonic. 00:49:24.670 --> 00:49:27.240 And that's the faster, the better, generally. 00:49:27.240 --> 00:49:29.510 Also just straight economics of-- 00:49:29.510 --> 00:49:30.470 I just read this the other day. 00:49:30.470 --> 00:49:33.480 The Concorde took as much fuel to put 100 people across the 00:49:33.480 --> 00:49:36.380 Atlantic as a 747 takes to put 400 00:49:36.380 --> 00:49:37.490 people across the Atlantic. 00:49:37.490 --> 00:49:40.300 So, just run the numbers on that. 00:49:40.300 --> 00:49:41.396 AUDIENCE: Also, there was the huge noise 00:49:41.396 --> 00:49:42.460 problem with the Concorde. 00:49:42.460 --> 00:49:43.340 PROFESSOR: Noise problems. 00:49:43.340 --> 00:49:45.956 AUDIENCE: Anyone who lived anywhere near the place where 00:49:45.956 --> 00:49:50.170 it lands with the rumbling. 00:49:50.170 --> 00:49:50.960 PROFESSOR: Exactly. 00:49:50.960 --> 00:49:53.450 So actually it's a very interesting moment because, in 00:49:53.450 --> 00:49:57.390 the civilian world, the cancellation of the SST and a 00:49:57.390 --> 00:50:01.430 lot of other things that happened in 1970 are all about 00:50:01.430 --> 00:50:02.470 this sort of, like, you know what? 00:50:02.470 --> 00:50:04.700 Performance isn't the be all and end all. 00:50:04.700 --> 00:50:07.590 There are other things that matter with our systems like, 00:50:07.590 --> 00:50:10.070 especially, cost because that's a 00:50:10.070 --> 00:50:12.790 straight economic one. 00:50:12.790 --> 00:50:16.840 But also environmental impact in a bunch of different ways, 00:50:16.840 --> 00:50:20.180 whether it's noise or emissions. 00:50:20.180 --> 00:50:23.600 Reliability is a big one that often ends up being cost. 00:50:23.600 --> 00:50:27.920 And the reason I'm bringing this up, partly, is it gets us 00:50:27.920 --> 00:50:33.490 to a little bit later part of MIT's life in the 1980s. 00:50:33.490 --> 00:50:35.130 What's happening in the 1980s? 00:50:35.130 --> 00:50:37.470 Maybe this is the Sputnik moment of the 1980s. 00:50:37.470 --> 00:50:39.330 Actually, it's not as much of a moment. 00:50:39.330 --> 00:50:41.700 What causes the US a big crisis of 00:50:41.700 --> 00:50:44.510 confidence in the 1980s? 00:50:44.510 --> 00:50:45.890 AUDIENCE: There was a fuel crisis. 00:50:45.890 --> 00:50:48.850 PROFESSOR: OK, the fuel crisis precipitates it for sure. 00:50:48.850 --> 00:50:51.880 That's in the '70s really, 1973. 00:50:51.880 --> 00:50:58.710 What's the big issue in the '80s? 00:50:58.710 --> 00:51:00.168 AUDIENCE: Iran-Contra. 00:51:00.168 --> 00:51:01.630 Iran-Contra, or is that the late 70's? 00:51:01.630 --> 00:51:04.070 PROFESSOR: Yeah, that's political more. 00:51:04.070 --> 00:51:04.790 That's '80s. 00:51:04.790 --> 00:51:07.230 But it's the Japanese car companies 00:51:07.230 --> 00:51:09.393 start eating our lunch. 00:51:09.393 --> 00:51:12.620 And we have the greatest car industry in the world-- 00:51:12.620 --> 00:51:15.410 General Motors and Henry Ford, and we invented it all. 00:51:15.410 --> 00:51:17.710 And suddenly, Toyota and Honda, which were making 00:51:17.710 --> 00:51:20.180 motorcycles, start coming in. 00:51:20.180 --> 00:51:23.440 And not only are they doing well economically, but their 00:51:23.440 --> 00:51:24.810 cars are better. 00:51:24.810 --> 00:51:25.720 They get better mileage. 00:51:25.720 --> 00:51:27.060 They're much higher quality. 00:51:27.060 --> 00:51:31.650 And the American car companies just will not listen 00:51:31.650 --> 00:51:32.920 or learn from it. 00:51:32.920 --> 00:51:36.110 And then people say, very much like with 00:51:36.110 --> 00:51:37.260 Sputnik, what do you mean? 00:51:37.260 --> 00:51:39.680 We're the most technologically advanced nation in the world 00:51:39.680 --> 00:51:40.710 with the biggest economy. 00:51:40.710 --> 00:51:44.040 How is it that these car companies from this little 00:51:44.040 --> 00:51:46.530 island that we defeated in World War II are now doing so 00:51:46.530 --> 00:51:47.860 much better than us? 00:51:47.860 --> 00:51:50.670 And it led to this thing called the crisis of 00:51:50.670 --> 00:51:51.880 competitiveness. 00:51:51.880 --> 00:51:53.250 You may hear that phrase sometimes. 00:51:53.250 --> 00:51:55.160 It was a big issue in the '80s. 00:51:55.160 --> 00:51:57.980 And one of the things people said was, gee, are we not 00:51:57.980 --> 00:51:59.680 spending enough on R&D? 00:51:59.680 --> 00:52:02.460 Now we're spending tons and tons on R&D, but it's all in 00:52:02.460 --> 00:52:06.050 the military realm or so heavily in the military realm. 00:52:06.050 --> 00:52:09.270 And the military is focusing on performance-- 00:52:09.270 --> 00:52:13.460 very, very high-speed computers, very, very advanced 00:52:13.460 --> 00:52:15.450 materials for this, that, and the other thing. 00:52:15.450 --> 00:52:18.990 And none of that technology is getting out of the lab into 00:52:18.990 --> 00:52:21.060 the field as much. 00:52:21.060 --> 00:52:23.740 MIT does a big study in-- 00:52:23.740 --> 00:52:25.910 I want to say it comes out in about 1988-- 00:52:25.910 --> 00:52:28.090 called Made in America. 00:52:28.090 --> 00:52:31.160 And it's edited by Richard Lester, who is now the head of 00:52:31.160 --> 00:52:34.220 nuclear engineering, Michael Dertouzos, who is the Director 00:52:34.220 --> 00:52:37.520 of the Computer Science Laboratory, a few others, 00:52:37.520 --> 00:52:40.510 Lester Thurow, who is the Noble Prize winner, Dean of 00:52:40.510 --> 00:52:43.410 the Sloan School. 00:52:43.410 --> 00:52:45.890 And Made in America sort of says-- 00:52:45.890 --> 00:52:49.190 how do we get the same level of achievement in the 00:52:49.190 --> 00:52:51.910 manufacturing industry in this country that we've got in the 00:52:51.910 --> 00:52:53.680 military industry? 00:52:53.680 --> 00:52:55.770 And there's a whole series of concrete steps that they 00:52:55.770 --> 00:52:56.670 suggest to do that. 00:52:56.670 --> 00:52:59.580 One of them is creating a dual master's program, which is 00:52:59.580 --> 00:53:00.885 still here, called-- 00:53:00.885 --> 00:53:03.190 it was called Leaders for Manufacturing, where you get a 00:53:03.190 --> 00:53:06.290 master's at Sloan and a master's in engineering. 00:53:06.290 --> 00:53:08.650 They changed the name, and I think it's Leaders for Global 00:53:08.650 --> 00:53:11.300 Systems or something now. 00:53:11.300 --> 00:53:16.420 So the competitiveness crisis very much came up as, like, 00:53:16.420 --> 00:53:19.270 this military focuses too much on performance, 00:53:19.270 --> 00:53:21.050 too much only on-- 00:53:21.050 --> 00:53:24.100 if you look in AeroAstro, it's all about supersonic, or 00:53:24.100 --> 00:53:28.580 dynamics, and not enough about more efficient engines or 00:53:28.580 --> 00:53:29.540 cleaner engines. 00:53:29.540 --> 00:53:32.570 And there really was a kind of shift after 00:53:32.570 --> 00:53:35.310 the '80s toward that. 00:53:35.310 --> 00:53:38.640 Interestingly enough, another flip side of that, which a lot 00:53:38.640 --> 00:53:40.400 of people don't realize-- because someone mentioned it 00:53:40.400 --> 00:53:42.830 in one of your response papers that-- 00:53:42.830 --> 00:53:45.530 well, you know, it looks like when I'm in my double E 00:53:45.530 --> 00:53:49.880 classes, I end up learning a lot about consumer technology. 00:53:49.880 --> 00:53:52.330 And I'm building mobile technology and 00:53:52.330 --> 00:53:53.340 mobile this and that. 00:53:53.340 --> 00:53:57.100 And where does all that stuff come from? 00:53:57.100 --> 00:54:00.850 Where do we end up developing advanced, small RF and 00:54:00.850 --> 00:54:03.880 microwave integrated circuits? 00:54:03.880 --> 00:54:06.230 I can tell you that stuff wasn't originally developed 00:54:06.230 --> 00:54:08.130 for the cell phone industry. 00:54:08.130 --> 00:54:10.950 That was all military communications stuff. 00:54:10.950 --> 00:54:13.850 And Qualcomm and a lot of those other big companies 00:54:13.850 --> 00:54:15.770 really developed a lot of those techniques 00:54:15.770 --> 00:54:17.030 early in that world. 00:54:17.030 --> 00:54:20.070 Then, there is a general consensus, probably somewhere 00:54:20.070 --> 00:54:23.200 in the '90s, the sophistication of computation 00:54:23.200 --> 00:54:27.450 and information technology in the commercial world exceeded 00:54:27.450 --> 00:54:29.570 that of what happens in the military world. 00:54:29.570 --> 00:54:32.880 Now I go to meetings and half the problem is, how does the 00:54:32.880 --> 00:54:35.380 Navy and the Air Force take advantage of all the amazing 00:54:35.380 --> 00:54:37.920 stuff that's coming out instead of having obsolete 00:54:37.920 --> 00:54:39.370 electronics and all those things. 00:54:39.370 --> 00:54:42.070 But that was somewhere in there. 00:54:42.070 --> 00:54:42.870 What's their concern? 00:54:42.870 --> 00:54:45.120 Well, actually it was something that was raised by 00:54:45.120 --> 00:54:48.570 Norbert Wiener, late in his career in the early '60s, that 00:54:48.570 --> 00:54:51.260 all of this automatic technology was going to put 00:54:51.260 --> 00:54:53.600 all the workers out of work. 00:54:53.600 --> 00:54:56.140 And I think the Air Force was then concerned-- 00:54:56.140 --> 00:54:58.140 gee, is there going to be a workers' revolt, and we're 00:54:58.140 --> 00:55:02.170 going to be facing a communist revolution sort of thing? 00:55:02.170 --> 00:55:04.720 So when people talked about social implications of 00:55:04.720 --> 00:55:08.740 automation, they talked about technological unemployment, 00:55:08.740 --> 00:55:10.510 essentially. 00:55:10.510 --> 00:55:12.960 Some of which did come to pass, and there's certainly 00:55:12.960 --> 00:55:14.160 fields today. 00:55:14.160 --> 00:55:17.030 I think, today, it gets more called outsourcing than it 00:55:17.030 --> 00:55:22.230 does called replacing workers, but it has the same effect on 00:55:22.230 --> 00:55:23.740 unemployment in this country. 00:55:26.510 --> 00:55:28.390 And it is interesting, especially at a place like 00:55:28.390 --> 00:55:30.810 Boeing, where all the engineers at Boeing are 00:55:30.810 --> 00:55:31.700 basically workers. 00:55:31.700 --> 00:55:33.030 They're unionized. 00:55:33.030 --> 00:55:36.090 And Boeing, these days, makes big decisions based on their 00:55:36.090 --> 00:55:39.270 relationships with their unions, both machinists and 00:55:39.270 --> 00:55:40.570 the engineers. 00:55:40.570 --> 00:55:43.710 And so, again, the clean distinction between factory 00:55:43.710 --> 00:55:47.780 workers as blue collar and white-collar engineers-- 00:55:47.780 --> 00:55:50.460 engineers in many places are more and more like blue-collar 00:55:50.460 --> 00:55:53.590 workers in a lot of ways, partly because of CAD and 00:55:53.590 --> 00:55:55.160 computer-aided design. 00:55:55.160 --> 00:55:58.870 How many people in here have ever designed a circuit, 00:55:58.870 --> 00:56:01.320 actually designed a new circuit that no one's built? 00:56:05.740 --> 00:56:08.570 I mean, I can open up my CAD software, and I get a library 00:56:08.570 --> 00:56:11.680 of all these demo circuits, and I can sort of copy and 00:56:11.680 --> 00:56:12.380 this sort of thing. 00:56:12.380 --> 00:56:15.380 And there's certainly changes that have come into what 00:56:15.380 --> 00:56:18.210 engineering practice means in a lot of different fields 00:56:18.210 --> 00:56:21.970 because of computer-aided design in different ways. 00:56:21.970 --> 00:56:26.500 Which, arguably, maybe makes it easier to outsource jobs in 00:56:26.500 --> 00:56:28.130 ways than it was before. 00:56:28.130 --> 00:56:31.520 Running a university has become a 24-hour job in a way 00:56:31.520 --> 00:56:35.610 that maybe it wasn't always before, partly for reasons 00:56:35.610 --> 00:56:37.870 that all jobs have become so 24-hours. 00:56:37.870 --> 00:56:40.600 And it's just a very big complex place, 00:56:40.600 --> 00:56:42.410 and it's harder for-- 00:56:42.410 --> 00:56:45.470 it's hard to picture an MIT president taking a 00:56:45.470 --> 00:56:47.960 simultaneous job in the government. 00:56:47.960 --> 00:56:50.330 I don't remember what Killian did, if he stepped down when 00:56:50.330 --> 00:56:54.850 he took that job, or if he did them both at the same time and 00:56:54.850 --> 00:56:57.360 for how long. 00:56:57.360 --> 00:57:00.470 And yet, at the same time, the presidents do-- 00:57:00.470 --> 00:57:03.040 like, Chuck Vest chaired one of the big review committees 00:57:03.040 --> 00:57:08.180 on the space station, and it's called the Vest Report. 00:57:08.180 --> 00:57:11.310 And it was kind of a midway design review in the early 00:57:11.310 --> 00:57:14.780 '90s, and the cultural authority of being the MIT 00:57:14.780 --> 00:57:17.240 president, I think, had a lot of impact there. 00:57:17.240 --> 00:57:21.030 And he sat on the President's Council on Competitiveness. 00:57:21.030 --> 00:57:25.560 And I don't know what Susan Hockfield's official titles 00:57:25.560 --> 00:57:28.520 are that way. 00:57:28.520 --> 00:57:30.040 But she does-- 00:57:30.040 --> 00:57:34.230 when Obama rolled out a big energy initiative two or three 00:57:34.230 --> 00:57:36.600 years ago that was part of his administration's science 00:57:36.600 --> 00:57:38.760 policy, she was standing right there next 00:57:38.760 --> 00:57:40.140 to him on the stage. 00:57:40.140 --> 00:57:43.750 So she's very involved with presidential science 00:57:43.750 --> 00:57:46.750 advice in that way. 00:57:46.750 --> 00:57:51.820 And I think it's also true that different presidents just 00:57:51.820 --> 00:57:54.210 emphasize different parts of the role. 00:57:54.210 --> 00:57:55.440 There is a sense-- 00:57:55.440 --> 00:57:59.950 and Chuck Vest was extremely enthusiastic about this-- 00:57:59.950 --> 00:58:04.120 where, from this earlier history of a lot of these 00:58:04.120 --> 00:58:06.660 things you've read about by now, there is a sense that the 00:58:06.660 --> 00:58:10.370 president of MIT is not just in Washington speaking for 00:58:10.370 --> 00:58:14.520 MIT, but is speaking for the research enterprise in general 00:58:14.520 --> 00:58:16.980 and research universities in general. 00:58:16.980 --> 00:58:21.850 And that the kind of privilege of the bully pulpit that you 00:58:21.850 --> 00:58:25.130 get from being the president of MIT is not used to go down 00:58:25.130 --> 00:58:28.440 to Washington to just scoop up more money for Cambridge. 00:58:28.440 --> 00:58:29.930 Clearly, we've seen that happen quite 00:58:29.930 --> 00:58:31.310 a lot in the history. 00:58:31.310 --> 00:58:34.820 But also to go down and speak for research overall and why 00:58:34.820 --> 00:58:37.490 it's important to maintain that in the economy. 00:58:37.490 --> 00:58:41.580 And when Vest became president, which I think was 00:58:41.580 --> 00:58:45.910 '91, was really right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 00:58:45.910 --> 00:58:47.590 And there was this thing people kept talking about 00:58:47.590 --> 00:58:49.460 called the peace dividend. 00:58:49.460 --> 00:58:52.230 And there was the sense that all of that DOD funding-- 00:58:52.230 --> 00:58:53.600 and some of it really did-- was about to 00:58:53.600 --> 00:58:54.980 fall off the cliff. 00:58:54.980 --> 00:58:56.800 And people were really questioning, why are we 00:58:56.800 --> 00:58:59.400 spending money on universities at all. 00:58:59.400 --> 00:59:01.610 When Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House, he basically 00:59:01.610 --> 00:59:06.150 wanted to end it altogether, and Vest, and a lot of related 00:59:06.150 --> 00:59:08.840 similar people, really spoke out against that. 00:59:08.840 --> 00:59:11.110 By the way, that's about to happen again. 00:59:11.110 --> 00:59:14.040 And I do think you'll see Susan Hockfield in Washington 00:59:14.040 --> 00:59:15.980 speaking on that behalf. 00:59:15.980 --> 00:59:16.510 Anybody see her? 00:59:16.510 --> 00:59:19.610 She was on Charlie Rose a couple of months ago with the 00:59:19.610 --> 00:59:21.780 President of Harvard talking about almost 00:59:21.780 --> 00:59:23.930 exactly that topic. 00:59:23.930 --> 00:59:26.300 So I think there's a lot of behind the scenes 00:59:26.300 --> 00:59:27.750 work that goes on. 00:59:27.750 --> 00:59:30.290 It's not necessarily secret or hidden, but it doesn't have a 00:59:30.290 --> 00:59:31.760 big public role. 00:59:31.760 --> 00:59:34.280 And at the same time-- you know, MIT has an office in 00:59:34.280 --> 00:59:35.400 Washington. 00:59:35.400 --> 00:59:38.685 And the guy who runs it is a very experienced guy, and they 00:59:38.685 --> 00:59:41.350 are registered lobbyists. 00:59:41.350 --> 00:59:43.860 And they're extremely effective at taking MIT 00:59:43.860 --> 00:59:47.230 professors and showing them around Washington. 00:59:47.230 --> 00:59:50.520 And I know this because about 2 and 1/2 years ago, I was 00:59:50.520 --> 00:59:53.530 part of a group that wrote a report on space policy. 00:59:53.530 --> 00:59:56.800 And we called these guys up-- we developed it in 00:59:56.800 --> 00:59:58.080 parallel with them. 00:59:58.080 --> 01:00:00.850 And within a few weeks, we were sitting in the room with 01:00:00.850 --> 01:00:04.430 the transition team for Obama, who was working on NASA, and 01:00:04.430 --> 01:00:06.820 the people in the White House who work on space policy. 01:00:06.820 --> 01:00:08.120 And that's what lobbyists do. 01:00:08.120 --> 01:00:10.840 They open the door, and they get you in there. 01:00:10.840 --> 01:00:13.640 Now they're not lobbyists in the sense of they go down and 01:00:13.640 --> 01:00:16.890 say, give us more money, but they have to be registered 01:00:16.890 --> 01:00:20.040 because they are performing that function. 01:00:20.040 --> 01:00:22.950 Now, MIT hasn't always had that office in Washington, and 01:00:22.950 --> 01:00:25.390 may not always have that office in Washington, but 01:00:25.390 --> 01:00:29.000 there's a lot of that sort of stuff that goes on. 01:00:29.000 --> 01:00:34.940 So, it is harder to picture-- 01:00:34.940 --> 01:00:37.430 again, I think it has much to do with just the demands on 01:00:37.430 --> 01:00:41.080 one's time than happened before. 01:00:41.080 --> 01:00:42.440 Fundraising-- 01:00:42.440 --> 01:00:45.310 most of what the president does these days is fundraising 01:00:45.310 --> 01:00:48.770 as far as out on the road, getting the alumni excited 01:00:48.770 --> 01:00:50.010 about what's going on here. 01:00:50.010 --> 01:00:55.520 And that's a pretty time-consuming job. 01:00:55.520 --> 01:00:57.250 Any other comments about that? 01:00:57.250 --> 01:01:00.610 It's not an exaggeration to say the field of computer 01:01:00.610 --> 01:01:04.740 science was created by DARPA over about 25-year period from 01:01:04.740 --> 01:01:07.270 1960 to 1985 or so. 01:01:07.270 --> 01:01:10.550 And then from Star Wars, which is a separate agency but 01:01:10.550 --> 01:01:11.380 similar kind of thing. 01:01:11.380 --> 01:01:14.990 Just wouldn't exist without that kind of money. 01:01:14.990 --> 01:01:19.030 Still today, a lot of the CSAIL funds are from DARPA, in 01:01:19.030 --> 01:01:21.480 a lot of different ways, or other parts of the military. 01:01:21.480 --> 01:01:22.660 How many people here have worked on an 01:01:22.660 --> 01:01:26.450 industrially-funded project? 01:01:26.450 --> 01:01:27.700 Nobody? 01:01:29.450 --> 01:01:31.110 How many people here know where the funding comes from 01:01:31.110 --> 01:01:32.360 for the projects you work on? 01:01:36.260 --> 01:01:36.950 Only a few. 01:01:36.950 --> 01:01:38.200 OK, interesting. 01:01:42.920 --> 01:01:47.240 So you know, again, the military funding is not 01:01:47.240 --> 01:01:49.020 as big as it was. 01:01:49.020 --> 01:01:52.240 I think it's very clear to say the mindset of that kind of 01:01:52.240 --> 01:01:55.510 work does not dominate the way that it did during the period 01:01:55.510 --> 01:01:57.290 when we were watching those. 01:01:57.290 --> 01:02:00.150 But there's still a lot of it, and the industrial funding has 01:02:00.150 --> 01:02:01.710 its own set issues, too. 01:02:04.710 --> 01:02:09.170 And then there's always new forms of this kind of thing. 01:02:09.170 --> 01:02:10.920 What's down the street there-- 01:02:10.920 --> 01:02:12.560 down the street, it's right over there-- is the Koch 01:02:12.560 --> 01:02:21.060 Institute that opened up just, what, a month ago. 01:02:21.060 --> 01:02:23.590 And that would seem to be, oh, how perfect. 01:02:23.590 --> 01:02:26.560 It's endowed by a private individual. 01:02:26.560 --> 01:02:28.330 Doesn't have any of the strings that government or 01:02:28.330 --> 01:02:31.070 industrial funding comes with or any of the sort of 01:02:31.070 --> 01:02:35.192 implications, but what were the issues there that came up? 01:02:41.580 --> 01:02:43.560 Anybody read about it when the Koch Institute was opened? 01:02:46.100 --> 01:02:51.360 Well, that man, David Koch, he has a lot of funding for other 01:02:51.360 --> 01:02:52.880 kinds of political-- 01:02:52.880 --> 01:02:55.350 well, not other kinds-- but political. 01:02:55.350 --> 01:02:58.420 He funds a lot of Tea Party, right-wing conservative stuff 01:02:58.420 --> 01:02:59.330 in the country. 01:02:59.330 --> 01:03:02.440 I mean, MIT is very clear about what the boundaries are 01:03:02.440 --> 01:03:05.720 for what's acceptable when money is accepted. 01:03:05.720 --> 01:03:07.070 I mean, there's any number times. 01:03:07.070 --> 01:03:08.850 It's happened to me. 01:03:08.850 --> 01:03:13.390 I had, essentially, a contract with an oil company that 01:03:13.390 --> 01:03:17.040 wanted to fund some of the work I did C, but they had a 01:03:17.040 --> 01:03:19.450 restriction in what the contract was supposed to say 01:03:19.450 --> 01:03:20.600 about intellectual property. 01:03:20.600 --> 01:03:23.060 That's actually the place it most comes up. 01:03:23.060 --> 01:03:25.560 That was just totally unacceptable, both to me and 01:03:25.560 --> 01:03:28.230 to the lawyers at MIT, who looked at it, and we ended up 01:03:28.230 --> 01:03:31.040 not taking the money because you couldn't work under those 01:03:31.040 --> 01:03:32.750 conditions. 01:03:32.750 --> 01:03:35.440 And those things get massaged in a lot of different ways, 01:03:35.440 --> 01:03:39.290 but people have a pretty clear sense of their intellectual 01:03:39.290 --> 01:03:41.880 freedom and aren't always willing to sell 01:03:41.880 --> 01:03:44.360 that off in that way. 01:03:44.360 --> 01:03:46.750 So, there's all sorts of things. 01:03:46.750 --> 01:03:48.800 Another one that comes up a lot now is foreign 01:03:48.800 --> 01:03:49.810 governments. 01:03:49.810 --> 01:03:54.890 And we have a lot of potential arrangements with foreign 01:03:54.890 --> 01:03:56.810 governments that raise interesting questions. 01:03:56.810 --> 01:04:01.130 Like, say the government of India were to come to MIT and 01:04:01.130 --> 01:04:06.480 say, we'd like to give you $50 million to help study poverty. 01:04:06.480 --> 01:04:09.900 Well, a lot of professors on campus would say, I don't feel 01:04:09.900 --> 01:04:14.180 comfortable taking research money from a country that has 01:04:14.180 --> 01:04:16.400 x numbers of hundreds of millions of poor people in 01:04:16.400 --> 01:04:19.030 their country and shouldn't be MIT's role in the world to 01:04:19.030 --> 01:04:25.070 take money from governments that have very, very serious 01:04:25.070 --> 01:04:25.830 pressing things. 01:04:25.830 --> 01:04:30.920 Or Saudi Arabia, where they don't allow women students or 01:04:30.920 --> 01:04:33.420 women professors or Jewish students or Jewish professors 01:04:33.420 --> 01:04:34.670 on their campuses. 01:04:34.670 --> 01:04:36.600 Should we go into collaborations with them? 01:04:36.600 --> 01:04:40.110 So it's actually pretty hard to think about a source of 01:04:40.110 --> 01:04:43.640 funding that comes to the Institute that doesn't have 01:04:43.640 --> 01:04:50.700 some kind of complicated set of circumstances around it. 01:04:50.700 --> 01:04:53.360 And that's one of the interesting things in your own 01:04:53.360 --> 01:04:55.850 work but also, as a historian, to look at this about how 01:04:55.850 --> 01:04:59.720 those things get negotiated in any given era. 01:04:59.720 --> 01:05:01.780 There's certainly, clearly, things that are just off 01:05:01.780 --> 01:05:04.380 limits that won't be done. 01:05:04.380 --> 01:05:06.350 There are other things that are pretty easy, like the 01:05:06.350 --> 01:05:08.940 National Science Foundation, where they come and they give 01:05:08.940 --> 01:05:12.240 you money and your only job in response is to write a paper. 01:05:12.240 --> 01:05:13.300 And there's a lot of things that are 01:05:13.300 --> 01:05:14.540 kind of in the middle. 01:05:14.540 --> 01:05:17.540 I actually happen to think that some of the military 01:05:17.540 --> 01:05:20.030 funding, particularly the DARPA funding, is actually a 01:05:20.030 --> 01:05:24.060 lot freer and has fewer strings attached than the NSF 01:05:24.060 --> 01:05:26.690 funding because the NSF is always peer reviewed. 01:05:26.690 --> 01:05:30.280 And you're always being pulled by other people in your field 01:05:30.280 --> 01:05:32.340 who want you to do what they do. 01:05:32.340 --> 01:05:37.280 Whereas with, sometimes, with what-- it's a little bit less 01:05:37.280 --> 01:05:38.600 true now than it used to be-- 01:05:38.600 --> 01:05:40.760 with DARPA funding, they can really just give you the money 01:05:40.760 --> 01:05:43.300 and let you do want you want to do because they're a little 01:05:43.300 --> 01:05:44.960 bit protected politically because 01:05:44.960 --> 01:05:46.210 they're within the DOD.