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PROFESSOR: I just came across a couple of interesting quotes
about cybernetics.
What did cybernetics have to do with any of this?
Well, an awful lot.
Here's a quote from Jerry Wiesner.
"We were all fired up by Norbert Wiener's cybernetics.
We have explored the far-ranging implications of
the complex concepts of information and
communication theory.
It ranged from man-made communications to computing
systems to the sciences of man, inquiries into the
structure and development of the nervous system, the
phenomena of inner life and behavior in relation to other
men."
So you get the sense of, like, the whole interdisciplinary
thing, which is a big topic, of course,
on our campus today.
RLE was one of the major kind of early points in that.
"Neurophysiologists and other biologists, linguistics,
economists, social scientists, and psychologists recognized
almost intuitively the usefulness and relevance of
feedback information theory to their fields.
For all of them, the concepts of information theory, coding,
feedback, prediction, and filtering provide new pathways
to explore pathways that seemed to wind unendingly."
So this whole idea--
this is another one of these places where you see the
relationship between the institutional structures at
MIT, how the labs are organized, what the overall
policy is that's coming from the federal government to
support the work, and actually the content of the work, what
sorts of things people are studying, how they're thinking
about these problems, what the innovations are.
And, I think-- and this is one of the threads I want to
communicate to you today--
there's a real common thread in a lot of what MIT does in
these realms, including SAGE and Lincoln Labs and that
stuff, going back from probably before the war around
computing and interaction and all the different aspects of
communications.
The Department of Linguistics itself is formed by research
from RLE in 1961.
There's actually a real relationship between, for
those of you familiar--
anybody know what Chomsky and linguistics is?
So Noam Chomsky, who is the sort of founding father, in a
lot of ways, of modern linguistics, created this idea
in the '50s called generative grammar, which is the idea
that the structures of language are
built into the brain.
They're not things that you learn as a toddler or as baby.
And that's one of the special things that makes human brains
different from all other kinds of brains.
And that's called generative grammar--
that the basic grammars are some that is
inherently inside of you.
A very radical idea, at the time, for a number of
different reasons, partly because it was connected to
what's called the cognitive revolution in psychology.
Up until that point, the kind of leading paradigm, even in
Cambridge psychology, was behaviorism led by B. F.
Skinner at Harvard.
The idea that, well, it's too complicated to understand
what's going on inside either our brains or anybody's, any
animals' brains.
We're just going to look at the behaviors, the inputs and
the outputs, measure the behaviors, and try to
understand that anything that's going on inside only
matters if it's expressed in a particular behavior.
Well, around this time period, led by many people around
here, there's a thing called the cognitive revolution, they
call it now, where people rejected that view.
And they began looking inside what thinking was all about,
very much driven by parallel developments in
computing, in AI.
And in some sense, the whole idea of psychology at MIT was
superseded by what?
Cognitive science.
Which now we have a Department of Brain and Cognitive
Science, which was sort of-- do we have a psychology
department here?
No.
We used to, at one point, but we don't anymore.
It was sort of folded in.
It's interesting.
It's a separate topic and way to think about what those
differences are.
Partly, I'm dwelling on this because tomorrow is the
symposium, the last of the 150th Anniversary Symposia,
which is on Brains, Minds, and Machines, and is a new
research initiative that's trying to look at the problem
of intelligence by combining AI, cognitive science,
neuroscience, and linguistics.
And these things are all not that far apart, again, from
this early history, but they've developed separately,
in some ways, for the last 50 years, and the idea is to tie
them together.
So if you're familiar with AI, there's not been a lot of
neuroscience in AI.
But now there's an attempt to bring a lot of that together.
It's going to be a really interesting, exciting thing.
I have to introduce the symposium tomorrow night, and
I'm working on my comments.
And, usually, when I introduce these symposia, I talk about
what happened at MIT before the people in
the room were there.
And then, when they got up and they talk about their own
experiences, then they cover the last 50 or 60 years.
There's not much that happened at MIT in linguistics or in
psychology or in anything cognitive before Marvin Minsky
and Noam Chomsky and a few of these other
sort of critical people.
Interestingly, the whole efforts--
these things also manifested themselves in biology.
How do you think, in the 1950s, biology took up some of
this influence from cognitive science or, particularly, from
communications theory?
What's the word that people use to describe DNA?
A code.
The whole idea of DNA as a code and biology as a kind of
informational science emerges right at this time, not only
at MIT, a lot of other places, but very much taken up there.
Last year we read an article about that, but we compressed
the syllabus a little bit.
OK.
The political context during those years--
after the war, again, the Radiation Lab dies down.
The country is really demobilizing.
Troops are coming back from the war.
Everybody's going away from the military back to civilian
life, until 1949, 1952.
Critical events happen then.
Anybody want to guess?
Russians explode an H-bomb in 1949, much, much sooner than
anybody expected, and the Korean War starts in 1950.
And that's really the beginning of the Cold War.
So you really have this--
it's not correct to think about the Cold War as just the
continuation of World War II.
There is this sort of brief-- but it is a kind of 5-year
period where everything's shrinking before the Cold War
really gets going.
And then you begin, during the '50s, you really have the
civilian sense of being under threat by nuclear warfare.
It was before my time, but perhaps your parents or even
your grandparents will remember.
In the 1950s, if you were in an elementary school in this
country, you were trained how to respond to a nuclear attack
when you were in school.
And you'll hear the phrase "duck and cover," which so
many people were trained to do.
Hide under your desk, pretty much, which I'll leave it as
an exercise to the reader to what that'll do for you when
there's a nuclear weapon coming.
And so during this period, in some sense, it's the golden
age of science policy.
People often talk about that.
And we'll come back to this after Sputnik, where
scientists are involved in high-level decision making in
a way they've never really been since then.
In the world of computers, all the way up through 1960,
three-quarters of the world of computing was simply run and
funded by the government.
So there was hardly any computation to speak of.
And the quarter that was not there was mostly in the
business world of punch cards and IBM punch card machines.
And a lot of that work was done in high-end computational
at Los Alamos, fluid dynamic simulations and things for
nuclear weapons.
So during the Cold War, you have all kinds of new kinds of
institutions emerging, in addition to new technologies.
Outside of MIT, you have the Rand Corporation.
Anybody hear of the Rand Corporation before?
It's still around.
You still hear them issuing reports and things.
I have colleagues who work there.
Founded in 1946 by the Air Force, and that's the place
that pretty much invented the term "think tank."
So you have these kind of not governmental--
Rand is not part of the government--
but it's a not-for-profit corporation where they do a
lot of large-scale strategy, operations
research, nuclear strategy.
I mentioned already the Office of Naval Research, which sort
of carries on the OSRD tradition for the 10 years
after the Second World War.
And they came up in the reading because they funded
the early part of Whirlwind and lots of different types of
new theories, from engineering science--
you hear that phrase coming up a lot at MIT in that period--
systems engineering, systems dynamics, systems analysis,
operations research.
I mentioned cybernetics, control theory, general
systems theory.
And all this stuff is sort of buzzing around.
And before I show you this film about Whirlwind--
well, let me show you the film about Whirlwind.
OK.
And so then, the other one I called up is the--
you'll remember from the reading
that they build Whirlwind.
It starts out as this sort of flight simulator thing.
Rather quickly, Jay Forrester has these huge ambitions for
it and starts into this just large
machine computation project.
And then they switch their Navy funding into Air Force
funding, and they look at this problem of air defense.
Starting in the early '50s, there's a physicist at MIT
named George Valley.
And they start looking at this whole business about how do we
defend the continent, which is an interesting question.
Remember, we talked last time, or the time before, about
anti-aircraft control.
SAGE is really the exact same thing, just the updated '50s
version of it, right?
How do you shoot down airplanes that
are attacking you?
And air defense is a typical problem that civilian
scientists like, and that government, especially elected
officials, like because it plays well politically.
It seems to be, morally, a little bit more comfortable
than offensive weapons.
Of course, you can shoot someone down if they're are
about to drop bombs on you.
The military, also, generally dislikes it because the people
who run the world regarding aircraft in the military--
even at this point, they were the Air Force--
the Air Force doesn't like to think a lot about shooting
down airplanes.
It's not one of their favorite hobby topics.
And they generally aren't big on defense.
They want to go out and kill the enemy and offense.
So you constantly see this question of air defense rising
up in scientific circles.
It's still true today, actually, with things like
missile defense.
And they put this system together called SAGE--
and, again, you read about it--
sort of continental air defense system, I think,
partly comes from the way that engineering really dominated
here, above the other sciences.
And in many of these other schools were--
where the engineering is sort of separated off
as a separate school--
but the really high-prestige work was going to the
mathematicians.
I also think that, actually, a lot of the history of
computing was written later by mathematicians.
And so they kind of remade it the way they wanted it to.
You can see--
actually, even Norbert Wiener does that, John Von Neumann.
John Von Neumann plays a role in the ENIAC project very,
very late and does some very important fundamental,
theoretical work, but it's basically
an engineering project.
Whereas here, partly because of the military connection,
partly because of the Rad Lab, there's always this focus on
the human relationship and the real-time interaction, and
partly because they're enabled to do these big projects and
kind of build these big, experimental systems, rather
than having one single.
There's a great quote.
It's from later on, where a university administrator is
told that they just, the University, just bought a
giant computer for millions of dollars, and now they need to
form a department of computer science.
And the administrator says, that's ridiculous.
We just bought a giant air conditioning unit for millions
of dollars.
Nobody's telling me I need to make a department of air
conditioning science.
And so the struggles of sort of-- is the computer just a
big, glorified calculator, or is it something
fundamentally new--
are all happening during this period, too.
Anybody know when the Computer Science
Department here is founded?
Everything I'm showing you here is from the
'50s, 1950 to 1956.
When does MIT create the CS part of EECS?
1968.
Takes a long time to actually recognize that there's a new
science there.
As I said, this is really IBM PR.
So they were showing this to maybe generals and other
people who would be their military customers or just
generally the public.
It's not very technical.
It's, like, got the kids on the playground, like defending
your people sort of thing.
But you see throughout this the computers are there as
these control centers.
And this is real-time interactive computer graphics,
which is going on nowhere else in the world at the time.
And the idea of a computer, not as this kind of
calculator/switcher, but as this interactive--
not just interactive but also very much
networked kind of computer.
Some of the things you saw that were really done for the
first time with SAGE and Whirlwind, real time, they
mention graphic displays.
Modems were invented for this system.
You don't even use modems anymore.
Does anybody have a modem that they use these days?
I haven't used one in, probably, close to 10 years at
this point, but used to use them a lot.
Real-time memory allocation, all kinds of stuff that you
use in the software engineering world.
And SAGE was really the first big software project, too.
It really taught the American industry how to organize these
big software projects.
And there were many others that were built that were
similar to it.
And as the film kind of makes clear, it's
oriented towards civilians.
It's built to make civilians feel comfortable.
It's not built because the military wants to go out and
get the Soviet Union.
That's what they do for a living.
And it's built to make people feel comfortable.
And was pretty much obsolete by the time it was
operational, so it had, essentially, no military
impact despite all the money that was spent on it.
But it had some technological input.
Nobody's really ever was able to know if it would have
worked if we were actually attacked.
But there was a brief period where air attack by Soviet
bombers over the North Pole was a great fear of people.
What ended that fear or made it irrelevant?
AUDIENCE: ICBMs.
PROFESSOR: ICBMs.
Where this system wouldn't work against ICBMs.
But you still see that fear.
And all the debates about missile defense
in the last 20 years--
Patriot missile during the Gulf War and all that stuff--
is just an extension of this kind of fear.
So this is sort of what's going on
around here in the '50s.
I have a couple more videos, let me see which ones.
And a lot of people really actually did question, is this
really the kind of MIT that we want to be living in--
big military projects, lots of money flowing in, lots of
focus on building large systems--
as opposed to research projects or kind of individual
scientists doing things?
And that's where-- and I want to say a little bit before we
move on, and Roz Williams mentioned this.
I don't think we've assigned it this year for reading.
Was a bunch of people at MIT got together in 1949.
It was called the Committee on the Educational Survey, but it
became known as the Lewis Report.
And, again, Roz Williams mentions it.
The Lewis--
who it was named after was her grandfather, Doc Louis of
chemical engineering.
Other people on the committee were Stratton, who I
mentioned, Elting Morison, who was a historian who actually
founded the department that I head now, Viki Weisskopf, who
was a famous Manhattan Project-era physicist.
Jerry Wiesner we've talked about.
Gordon Brown we talked about.
John Burchard, who was the first Dean of Humanities and
Social Sciences, and Harold Hazen, who was the Dean of
Engineering at the time that we talked about before.
And there were these problems that were on peoples' mind at
the beginning of the Cold War.
I'll read you a couple of quotes from it, which are
pretty interesting.
"We continue to claim that our primary mission is to teach,
but other activities have assumed an
unprecedented role at MIT.
Service to the community and to the national government has
always been recognized as a primary obligation, but now
the dollar volume of government contracts,
government-sponsored research, amounts to far more than the
academic budget.
Postwar government funds have been used to maintain a very
large technical staff without the privilege of tenure.
And the major part of the Institute's personnel is now
dependent on the continuation of
short-term financial support.
Government money has made available to us magnificent
facilities that have become a permanent part of the
Institute and that involve continued responsibility for
their maintenance."
So there was this problem of just big size.
Like how do you maintain it?
Once the Institute grew that big, people had to-- it's like
a big animal in a cage that you need to shovel money into
all the time.
Whereas before, the Institute was primarily focused on
undergraduate education, and it was really a kind of
technical institute college kind of environment.
It became much more focused on research.
And these sponsored projects, particularly military
sponsored, were bigger and bigger.
They asked, "Is all this work genuinely creative?
Can it, indeed, be justified on the ground that it
strengthens our educational program?
Have our staff members not on occasion been lured by
prestige that accompanies an enlargement of activities
without considering the loss in their professional
competence that the undertaking of added
administrative burdens may entail?
So these were all real questions that come up for the
next 60 years, in a way, about--
are the faculty members now big managers managing big
research projects more than real thinkers sitting down and
actually thinking things through?
"Is there not a danger that the interests and energy of
our faculty are being diverted from education to
income-producing work?
And secondly, many large projects emphasize design and
construction problems--
like Whirlwind, SAGE--
engineering development or applications of science rather
than fundamental scientific inquiry.
We must be careful lest the great preponderance of
activities of this type divert interest from the more
fundamental aspects of scientific research.
And the third concern is the preponderance of military
projects in the sponsored programs.
Two difficulties--
first, national security requires some of
it be done in secret.
And second, it would be unfortunate for MIT to become
regarded as an institution that is dependent on the
development of war weapons as it is for an industrial
organization to be [? required ?]
in a similar light.
We suggest that future planning should look forward
to the possibility of increased emphasis on
activities more directly related to the public
welfare."
This is a very interesting moment where major people at
MIT get together and they say, is this really the world that
we want to live in?
What's happening to MIT?
Is this really a good idea?
And again, that's 1949, right-- really, the year
before the Cold War really hits.
And a lot of people feel those concerns were sort of buried
throughout the '50s, in a way, as the Institute became more
and more dependent on these things.
A couple other things to mention from that period.
Baker House is built in 1947, and it's really the beginning.
We've talked about this before, I think, of the
residential part of campus growing on the west side of
Mass Ave. and then on down the street, of course.
The other dorms are built then.
The mid-century convocation is 1949, when Winston Churchill
comes to town and speaks.
And, again, sort of says MIT has an obligation to think,
not just about the sciences and technology it's creating,
but what are the social implications of those
technologies.
And that's when--
the School of Humanities and Social Sciences is founded,
essentially, right after he says that in 1949.
And also at that mid-century convocation is the
inauguration of James Frank Killian--
James Killian, James R. Killian,
forget his middle name--
as president.
He's the first alumni, alumnus, to become president,
which is kind of interesting.
It took almost 100 years for that to happen.
And he's as much of a kind of executive manager, not a
career scientist, in the way that his predecessor Karl
Compton was.
He really ran MIT during World War II when Compton, as we
mentioned, was off around the globe getting these weapons
into service.
So what is the end of this sort of early Cold War period?
When does the world that this film is describing really come
to a shocking end?
AUDIENCE: Sputnik.
PROFESSOR: Yeah.
October 4, 1957 you have Sputnik.
We read a piece about that.
And there is this just this incredible sense of shock.
You can see from this video--
I actually don't remember what the year on this was--
1956, so right before then.
And there's a sort of sense of arrogant confidence that we're
doing everything right, and the whole world follows us.
Couple people raised this in the response papers, too.
And then Sputnik is launched.
And it's this incredible shock to the American
system because suddenly--
it's somewhat similar to the explosion
of the Soviet H-bomb.
Remember, we come out of the war.
We have this world-changing new weapon and
nobody else has it.
And then, not only the Soviets get that one, but
they get the A-bomb.
They get the H-bomb, also, in very short order.
And there's a lot happening in the '50s, and there's a lot of
debate going on.
And people see space, somewhat like computing, as sort of
like this exotic new field.
Nobody's quite sure what it's good for, but it must be
important for the military somehow.
And there's a lot of debate about that.
Meanwhile, President Eisenhower is this sort of
interesting, ironic figure in that we have a military
general in the White House, which doesn't happen that
often in American history.
And yet, at the same time, he's a conservative
Republican.
He wants to keep government small.
He wants to rein things in and control military spending as
best he can.
He actually calls military spending theft at one point.
But in a certain sense, he's pushed by the forces of
history in ways that he's not able to control and is,
actually, not very sensitive to what Sputnik means.
And a lot of people aren't, even as soon as
it first goes up.
And somebody mentioned this about--
why wasn't the US first?
Well, partly the US wasn't first because they didn't see
that being first was going to be a priority.
And it wasn't, necessarily, an objective comparison of US
technical competence versus Soviet technical competence.
That's how most people in the world, including in Congress
and the American public and the media, read it, but it
wasn't necessarily that way.
Eisenhower was very concerned about some of the legal
implications of--
if you send a satellite over somebody's territory, is that
considered an invasion, or is the space above your--
it had already been legally established that air space is
like territory.
You can't go into it without permission.
But that wasn't established about orbital space.
And they were actually, in some ways, happy.
One of the Assistant Secretaries of Defense
immediately wrote, "The Russians have, in fact, done
us a good turn in establishing the concept of the freedom of
international space." And now we can overfly them with
impunity because they've done it to us.
And so, there was this sort of question.
Eisenhower said, "Sputnik does not rouse my
apprehension not one iota.
They've put one small ball into the air."
Yet, the press assumed that this meant Soviet superiority
in technology.
They sort of pushed the panic button.
People in Congress, particularly Lyndon Johnson,
took every opportunity to rub it in.
Let me see if I have the quote.
Because the US military said, oh, that's not a big deal.
We have four projects that are going to get that
going, at the time.
And Johnson said, in public, he said, knowing that we have
better rockets on the drawing boards is not very reassuring.
It's like being told that, I suppose, our next model will
have tail fins and automatic windshield wipers, which was
sort of the sarcastic comment about what we're going to do.
What they hadn't really recognized was that space was
this incredibly, symbolically, potent thing and that people
responded to it way out of proportion to what the direct
implications of it were.
If the US had decided that being first in space was
important, they probably could have rushed ahead and gone
first in space.
They didn't.
They had some bureaucratic infighting.
They had the unfortunate failure of another rocket
right after there.
And the world really changed, in 1957, from a science and
technology point of view in this country.
I teach a lot about science policy.
And one of the things you learn about science policy in
this country is that practically every agency that
exists in the federal government concerned with
science and technology arose in response to a crisis of one
kind or another.
The most recent example is the Department of Homeland
Security, which was created after 9/11.
No matter what a good idea they thought it might have
been or not been beforehand, it was a response to crisis.
And after Sputnik, you had several things which were
really quite important for MIT and for the development of
technology.
One was reorganizing R&D in the Defense Department to
avoid what they called technological surprise.
And that involved creating a new agency called the Advanced
Research Project Agency, called ARPA, which
was founded in 1958.
Its first director was a professor from MIT named Jack
Ruina, who's still around.
And I'll talk about that a little bit in a minute.
Vastly increased accelerations in R&D funding and also, of
course, the NACA, National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics became what?
NASA, National Air and Space Administration in 1958.
Both those agencies were founded in 1958.
And then there's also the National Defense
Education Act in 1958.
This may sound like a long time ago, but most, if not
many, of your professors--
if they're older, age 50--
were probably educated with funds from that Act, including
President Susan Hockfield.
She came here-- in her inaugural speech she said, I
was a post-Sputnik child.
I was educated and got into science because there was a
huge push in scientific education in the late '50s and
early '60s to get kids into science.
And I was one of the beneficiaries of that.
So we're very much living in this kind of post-Sputnik
world in that way.
And I want to talk then a little bit
about ARPA and DARPA.
Show you a couple more movies that take this whole same
story, in a way, into another realm.
People have heard of DARPA before this, right?
Has anybody not heard of DARPA?
So, obviously, it's most famous because the internet
started as the ARPANET and was created in very much this
period, slightly after, but only in the early '60s.
And one of the things about computing--
one of things that's special about DARPA was that it's not
the Office of Naval Research or the Air Force Office of
Scientific Research or the Army Research Lab.
ARPA reports directly to the Secretary of Defense, so it's
outside of all of these inter-service rivalries.
And it doesn't own-- in fact, it tends to stay away from
things like big ships and big airplanes, much like the OSRD
did, and focus on these technologies that are so far
out and wacky that nobody really knows what
they're good for.
At the time, space was one of them.
In fact, ARPA was responsible for space until--
it was only a few months NASA was created--
and then they had space taken away from them.
And computing was another one.
That everybody had the sense it was good for something but
nobody really knew what.
And so let me show you a coupleof images, couple of
other neat little films about what some of the ARPA
computing work did.
So that's another kind of late '50s version of this whole
idea of machine control, which is Air Force still and not
ARPA funded.
But then you get into the ARPA-funded stuff.
So this is sort of the next logical step in
a lot of this work.
And Ivan Sutherland is someone who's, remarkably, still alive
today, too.
Not that he's remarkably still alive,but.
He went from here out to the University of Utah where he
founded the computer graphics program there.
And practically every fundamental concept in
computer graphics came out of either his work or his lab.
And then his students went on to found Silicon Graphics,
Adobe, many of the other really critical--
a lot of them worked for Industrial Light and Magic,
the George Lucas company and sort of migrated west,
continuing into Hollywood.
Pixar, that was the other one I was trying to think of.
And that, again, comes from this.
We didn't watch that part of the film on SAGE, but they had
these light pens in SAGE, too, as the beginning of this sort
of graphical user interface.
And then the last one I want to show you about has to do
with time-sharing.
So Corbato is still around.
I saw him last week, and he still
teaches in computer science.
And they came up with this time-sharing system where--
I mean, how many of you use a console window ever
on your Mac or PC?
So, basically, that's the idea behind time-sharing.
That you have a computer there, before a graphical
interface, that you could type commands and programs to, and
it would respond to you immediately.
Before that, you had only batch processing, where you'd
put your punch cards in at night, and you go home and
come back the next morning, and there would be the thing.
And they're again, following this thread.
There was this idea that you could be so much more creative
with a computer if you could sit there and hack away at it,
and it would respond to you in real time.
And that's really where time-sharing comes from.
That led to a thing called Project MAC in the 1960s,
which was a DARPA funded--
it was the predecessor to the Laboratory for Computer
Science, which is now CSAIL.
And Project MAC was run by Bob Fano, who I mentioned before.
And had all these different kinds of creative computing
things inside it, including a lot of Minsky's work in AI,
although they split out and formed a separate AI lab.
Then they came together with CSAIL.
And all these sort of time-sharing experiments, the
origins of a lot of the late-night hacker culture from
MIT, come from people working late at night
on Project MAC projects.
A lot of the early computer games, Spacewar and whatnot,
were developed in that context.
And even a lot of the early later stuff for PCs, like
spreadsheets, sort of came out of a
Project MAC sort of setting.
And then I also mentioned, of course, the internet, or the
early ARPANET, one of the first nodes on
the ARPANET was MIT.
A lot of the first routers were built by a company called
Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, which still exists here, sort
of down the street.
So there's this sort of continuous thread that's then
updated through all these different crises and periods
and whatnot.
And through the '60s, that's sort of how this very, very
heavily military still, but sort of different agencies and
different contexts bears on the campus.
I think you're right on.
I mean, I think the atomic bomb had a lot to do with--
it's hard for us to imagine, but before
World War II, two things.
First of all, science was mostly the realm of
pointy-headed professors and was very interesting and
philosophically important but didn't always feel like it had
a big impact on daily life and certainly not on public
policy, per se.
Again, the US government was hardly involved in the
scientific world.
Maybe in the world of agriculture it seemed to have
a big impact.
Most of industry didn't have a lot of science
associated with it.
And it really took the atomic bomb, not just for technology,
but also for science itself, the idea that it--
like something that presidents should care about.
I mean, even--
you look at the scientific revolution and the Copernican
view of the universe--
doesn't affect the way I govern my
kingdom an awful lot.
And secondly, same thing with technology, where the idea
today that whoever has the best technology wins the war
was just not an accepted idea.
And there was no real evidence for it up until that point.
Maybe a little bit here in the Naval arms race around the
turn of the 19th century, the turn of the 20th century.
But today, almost everyone who is a leader in the military is
trained in engineering in one way or another, not everybody
but a very large amount of them.
That was not true, even at the beginning of World War II.
Military science was this other thing.
There was this whole sort of tradition about fighting wars.
There still is, still very prominent.
And it took World War II to really bring
those two ideas together.
And even then it was still a little bit under question
because it was really about who had the most planes and
the most tanks, not always the best tanks and the best guns.
Then, to some degree, you can say that Bush sort of served
as the president's science adviser during the
Second World War.
But, again, most of the decisions to be made were
either grand political decisions for the president as
far as how to be allied with the Soviet Union and how to
work with the British.
And at the same time, military decisions--
where do we invade?
At what time do we do it?
And there's technologies that bear on that, but they're not
things that rise to the presidential level.
It's really during the Cold War that you see the
prevalence of atomic weapons and ICBMs.
Again, ICBMs don't really come out until the late '50s.
It's all through the Cold War you're living with bombers and
nuclear bombs that are as big as this room that you need a
huge bomber to deliver.
That's why something like SAGE came out.
It's only around the late '50s you get this sense of mutual
assured destruction, where we've got all these missiles
ready to go, and they've got all these
missiles ready to go.
That's the world that dominated the
next 30 years or so.
And that's where arms control, different technical issues,
become merged with politics in a way.
And the presidential science adviser--
it varies from administration to administration--
but it's never been as prominent a position as it was
when Killian and Wiesner were in that job.
Nixon actually outright abolished it in the '70s,
didn't want it all.
Anybody know why that's a troubled position?
So it's sort of science policy talk more than an MIT talk,
but it's relevant.
There's an inherent contradiction in being the
president's science advisor.
AUDIENCE: It's not pure science [? anymore ?]
PROFESSOR: That's true.
There's a lot of people who do that.
So, first of all, are you representing to the president
the conclusions of the scientific community, or are
you representing the president's opinion and his
policy goals to the scientific community?
Right?
And those things can easily be 180 degrees at odds.
In fact, the story was-- this was all kind of leaked in the
newspaper--
that George W. Bush asked Chuck Vest
to be science adviser.
And Vest said no because he felt he would be forced to
take positions on things like climate change that he didn't
think were going to be acceptable to him.
So, if you look at what the Secretary of Defense does, or
even the head of NASA, their job is to take the president's
policies and implement them through the agency.
And any time a big decision comes up you'll always see
them on TV saying, well, that's for the
president to decide.
Robert Gates doesn't decide whether we're in
Afghanistan or not.
That's the president's job to decide that.
Well, what happens when--
in the defense world, at least there's an understanding that
decisions on defense are sort of partly
political and whatnot.
In the science world that's not so clear.
And there's any number of cases where the president's
policy preferences are at odds with what the science says,
and that was very clear in the previous administration.
But I'm sure that John Holdren, who is now the
president's science adviser, who is a much more powerful
guy and better-respected science adviser and scientist
than the previous guy was, gets pulled in a lot of
competing directions all the time.
So it's a very difficult job and not
everyone succeeds at that.
I thought it was interesting that, even in the little,
short film clip I showed you about the APT programming
language, the guy on the board said, well, now there's a new
kind of person in here who is the kind of machine-oriented
programmer.
And he's going to take these requirements and--
let me give you a little background on David Noble,
which is actually interesting.
He was a professor here in the kind of early to mid-1980s and
was in STS and did a lot of collaboration with the
engineering departments.
And he wrote this book that was extremely critical of both
the Air Force and MIT's role in numerically-controlled
machine tools.
And he was turned down for tenure a couple years later,
and ended up suing MIT.
He said because he was a Marxist, and they turned him
down for tenure because he was a Marxist.
MIT's response was, you didn't get denied tenure because
you're a Marxist.
You got denied tenure because you're a jerk.
And that's actually legal.
It's not legal to deny tenure to someone
because of their politics.
It is legal to deny tenure to them because of their personal
style of interaction.
I don't know many of the stories there.
And I actually only have met the guy once.
He died about three months ago at a fairly young age.
And he's a well-respected historian.
And he's always raised these sort of questions about these
kinds of arrangements.
And it's very worth reading it because of the questions it
raises, although I do think he misses a couple of things--
kind of like what you said.
In his world-- and I don't remember if this comes through
in that essay or if it's in the larger book--
people who operate computers are managers, and people who
operate machines are workers.
And anything like numerically-controlled machine
tools has that worker--
white-collar managers oppressing the workers.
I mean, first of all today, almost everybody sits in front
of a computer.
Many, many jobs-- some of them are high-level executives and
some of them are blue-collar operatives--
but the fact that you're using a computer has almost nothing
to say about what level job you're in.
And in the world that he came out of, he only had this
association of white-collar managers.
So anytime anything became computerized, it also became
white collarized for him.
Where, actually, we actually know today that the opposite
is often the case.
That when something becomes computerized, the skill level
of the people who operate the computer is lower than the
skill level of the people who did it before it was operated.
And it's funny because he actually wrote an essay, after
he wrote the book, about a study of machine tools in
Sweden, where he was like, oh look, they did it this way.
It's much more democratic and open, the way they use
numerically-controlled machine tools.
And there's an implication in his work that a given
technology has a given social organization that comes along
with it because of what's inherent in the technology.
That's basically what he says in that "Command
Performance" piece.
And the jargon in the field is called, it's deterministic.
A certain technology dictates a certain set of social
conditions.
But actually, if there's one thing we know from research in
the field is that you can have lots of different social
organizations around any particular technology.
You can use the internet as a tool of authoritarian
repression, or you can use the internet as a tool of people's
liberation.
Depends how you use it, but the tool itself can be used in
different ways.
I don't think that Noble would have seen himself, at the
time, as a technological determinist, although, to some
degree, all Marxists are technological determinists
because Marx was a technological determinist.
He said--
I'm not going to get the quote exactly right, but
it's sort of like--
the spinning wheel gives you feudal society.
Industrial production gives you capitalist society.
And he, more or less, put it that way.
And we actually know that's just empirically incorrect.
What Noble did say that I think is really valuable to
keep in mind that underlies a lot of the stuff that we saw
in the video is that--
what are the implications of all of this military funding
going to support university research and engineering
research and scientific research?
And I've tried to show the connections between where the
money comes from and what the ideas are that got created.
And I think one of the most legitimate criticisms of it is
that military systems end up focusing almost exclusively on
performance.
And that's kind of the title of his piece, "Command
Performance." That everyone was always pushing toward
thinner wings and more precise tools and, obviously, faster
airplanes, bigger bombs, heavier rockets.
You don't care about costs.
You don't, necessarily, care as much about schedule, other
things which are sort of related like maintainability,
sustainability.
Lots of other ways to think about how a system performs
besides simply performance.
You know, an interesting example of that was the-- has
anybody ever heard of the SST?
What was the SST?
AUDIENCE: Boeing's supersonic transport [INAUDIBLE].
Newer version of the Concorde.
PROFESSOR: Right.
So Boeing was trying to make, in the '60s, a supersonic
transport--it was actually a competitor to the Concorde--
that would be Mach 3.
And it was a big American project.
And the idea was, gee, the Wright brothers were going at
20 miles an hour, and we went 200 miles an hour in 1940.
And we're doing 500 miles an hour with jet
aircraft in the '60s.
Clearly, the whole world is going to go supersonic.
And if you focus only on performance, as the military
does, and sure enough, military systems go
supersonic.
And that's the faster, the better, generally.
Also just straight economics of--
I just read this the other day.
The Concorde took as much fuel to put 100 people across the
Atlantic as a 747 takes to put 400
people across the Atlantic.
So, just run the numbers on that.
AUDIENCE: Also, there was the huge noise
problem with the Concorde.
PROFESSOR: Noise problems.
AUDIENCE: Anyone who lived anywhere near the place where
it lands with the rumbling.
PROFESSOR: Exactly.
So actually it's a very interesting moment because, in
the civilian world, the cancellation of the SST and a
lot of other things that happened in 1970 are all about
this sort of, like, you know what?
Performance isn't the be all and end all.
There are other things that matter with our systems like,
especially, cost because that's a
straight economic one.
But also environmental impact in a bunch of different ways,
whether it's noise or emissions.
Reliability is a big one that often ends up being cost.
And the reason I'm bringing this up, partly, is it gets us
to a little bit later part of MIT's life in the 1980s.
What's happening in the 1980s?
Maybe this is the Sputnik moment of the 1980s.
Actually, it's not as much of a moment.
What causes the US a big crisis of
confidence in the 1980s?
AUDIENCE: There was a fuel crisis.
PROFESSOR: OK, the fuel crisis precipitates it for sure.
That's in the '70s really, 1973.
What's the big issue in the '80s?
AUDIENCE: Iran-Contra.
Iran-Contra, or is that the late 70's?
PROFESSOR: Yeah, that's political more.
That's '80s.
But it's the Japanese car companies
start eating our lunch.
And we have the greatest car industry in the world--
General Motors and Henry Ford, and we invented it all.
And suddenly, Toyota and Honda, which were making
motorcycles, start coming in.
And not only are they doing well economically, but their
cars are better.
They get better mileage.
They're much higher quality.
And the American car companies just will not listen
or learn from it.
And then people say, very much like with
Sputnik, what do you mean?
We're the most technologically advanced nation in the world
with the biggest economy.
How is it that these car companies from this little
island that we defeated in World War II are now doing so
much better than us?
And it led to this thing called the crisis of
competitiveness.
You may hear that phrase sometimes.
It was a big issue in the '80s.
And one of the things people said was, gee, are we not
spending enough on R&D?
Now we're spending tons and tons on R&D, but it's all in
the military realm or so heavily in the military realm.
And the military is focusing on performance--
very, very high-speed computers, very, very advanced
materials for this, that, and the other thing.
And none of that technology is getting out of the lab into
the field as much.
MIT does a big study in--
I want to say it comes out in about 1988--
called Made in America.
And it's edited by Richard Lester, who is now the head of
nuclear engineering, Michael Dertouzos, who is the Director
of the Computer Science Laboratory, a few others,
Lester Thurow, who is the Noble Prize winner, Dean of
the Sloan School.
And Made in America sort of says--
how do we get the same level of achievement in the
manufacturing industry in this country that we've got in the
military industry?
And there's a whole series of concrete steps that they
suggest to do that.
One of them is creating a dual master's program, which is
still here, called--
it was called Leaders for Manufacturing, where you get a
master's at Sloan and a master's in engineering.
They changed the name, and I think it's Leaders for Global
Systems or something now.
So the competitiveness crisis very much came up as, like,
this military focuses too much on performance,
too much only on--
if you look in AeroAstro, it's all about supersonic, or
dynamics, and not enough about more efficient engines or
cleaner engines.
And there really was a kind of shift after
the '80s toward that.
Interestingly enough, another flip side of that, which a lot
of people don't realize-- because someone mentioned it
in one of your response papers that--
well, you know, it looks like when I'm in my double E
classes, I end up learning a lot about consumer technology.
And I'm building mobile technology and
mobile this and that.
And where does all that stuff come from?
Where do we end up developing advanced, small RF and
microwave integrated circuits?
I can tell you that stuff wasn't originally developed
for the cell phone industry.
That was all military communications stuff.
And Qualcomm and a lot of those other big companies
really developed a lot of those techniques
early in that world.
Then, there is a general consensus, probably somewhere
in the '90s, the sophistication of computation
and information technology in the commercial world exceeded
that of what happens in the military world.
Now I go to meetings and half the problem is, how does the
Navy and the Air Force take advantage of all the amazing
stuff that's coming out instead of having obsolete
electronics and all those things.
But that was somewhere in there.
What's their concern?
Well, actually it was something that was raised by
Norbert Wiener, late in his career in the early '60s, that
all of this automatic technology was going to put
all the workers out of work.
And I think the Air Force was then concerned--
gee, is there going to be a workers' revolt, and we're
going to be facing a communist revolution sort of thing?
So when people talked about social implications of
automation, they talked about technological unemployment,
essentially.
Some of which did come to pass, and there's certainly
fields today.
I think, today, it gets more called outsourcing than it
does called replacing workers, but it has the same effect on
unemployment in this country.
And it is interesting, especially at a place like
Boeing, where all the engineers at Boeing are
basically workers.
They're unionized.
And Boeing, these days, makes big decisions based on their
relationships with their unions, both machinists and
the engineers.
And so, again, the clean distinction between factory
workers as blue collar and white-collar engineers--
engineers in many places are more and more like blue-collar
workers in a lot of ways, partly because of CAD and
computer-aided design.
How many people in here have ever designed a circuit,
actually designed a new circuit that no one's built?
I mean, I can open up my CAD software, and I get a library
of all these demo circuits, and I can sort of copy and
this sort of thing.
And there's certainly changes that have come into what
engineering practice means in a lot of different fields
because of computer-aided design in different ways.
Which, arguably, maybe makes it easier to outsource jobs in
ways than it was before.
Running a university has become a 24-hour job in a way
that maybe it wasn't always before, partly for reasons
that all jobs have become so 24-hours.
And it's just a very big complex place,
and it's harder for--
it's hard to picture an MIT president taking a
simultaneous job in the government.
I don't remember what Killian did, if he stepped down when
he took that job, or if he did them both at the same time and
for how long.
And yet, at the same time, the presidents do--
like, Chuck Vest chaired one of the big review committees
on the space station, and it's called the Vest Report.
And it was kind of a midway design review in the early
'90s, and the cultural authority of being the MIT
president, I think, had a lot of impact there.
And he sat on the President's Council on Competitiveness.
And I don't know what Susan Hockfield's official titles
are that way.
But she does--
when Obama rolled out a big energy initiative two or three
years ago that was part of his administration's science
policy, she was standing right there next
to him on the stage.
So she's very involved with presidential science
advice in that way.
And I think it's also true that different presidents just
emphasize different parts of the role.
There is a sense--
and Chuck Vest was extremely enthusiastic about this--
where, from this earlier history of a lot of these
things you've read about by now, there is a sense that the
president of MIT is not just in Washington speaking for
MIT, but is speaking for the research enterprise in general
and research universities in general.
And that the kind of privilege of the bully pulpit that you
get from being the president of MIT is not used to go down
to Washington to just scoop up more money for Cambridge.
Clearly, we've seen that happen quite
a lot in the history.
But also to go down and speak for research overall and why
it's important to maintain that in the economy.
And when Vest became president, which I think was
'91, was really right after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
And there was this thing people kept talking about
called the peace dividend.
And there was the sense that all of that DOD funding--
and some of it really did-- was about to
fall off the cliff.
And people were really questioning, why are we
spending money on universities at all.
When Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House, he basically
wanted to end it altogether, and Vest, and a lot of related
similar people, really spoke out against that.
By the way, that's about to happen again.
And I do think you'll see Susan Hockfield in Washington
speaking on that behalf.
Anybody see her?
She was on Charlie Rose a couple of months ago with the
President of Harvard talking about almost
exactly that topic.
So I think there's a lot of behind the scenes
work that goes on.
It's not necessarily secret or hidden, but it doesn't have a
big public role.
And at the same time-- you know, MIT has an office in
Washington.
And the guy who runs it is a very experienced guy, and they
are registered lobbyists.
And they're extremely effective at taking MIT
professors and showing them around Washington.
And I know this because about 2 and 1/2 years ago, I was
part of a group that wrote a report on space policy.
And we called these guys up-- we developed it in
parallel with them.
And within a few weeks, we were sitting in the room with
the transition team for Obama, who was working on NASA, and
the people in the White House who work on space policy.
And that's what lobbyists do.
They open the door, and they get you in there.
Now they're not lobbyists in the sense of they go down and
say, give us more money, but they have to be registered
because they are performing that function.
Now, MIT hasn't always had that office in Washington, and
may not always have that office in Washington, but
there's a lot of that sort of stuff that goes on.
So, it is harder to picture--
again, I think it has much to do with just the demands on
one's time than happened before.
Fundraising--
most of what the president does these days is fundraising
as far as out on the road, getting the alumni excited
about what's going on here.
And that's a pretty time-consuming job.
Any other comments about that?
It's not an exaggeration to say the field of computer
science was created by DARPA over about 25-year period from
1960 to 1985 or so.
And then from Star Wars, which is a separate agency but
similar kind of thing.
Just wouldn't exist without that kind of money.
Still today, a lot of the CSAIL funds are from DARPA, in
a lot of different ways, or other parts of the military.
How many people here have worked on an
industrially-funded project?
Nobody?
How many people here know where the funding comes from
for the projects you work on?
Only a few.
OK, interesting.
So you know, again, the military funding is not
as big as it was.
I think it's very clear to say the mindset of that kind of
work does not dominate the way that it did during the period
when we were watching those.
But there's still a lot of it, and the industrial funding has
its own set issues, too.
And then there's always new forms of this kind of thing.
What's down the street there--
down the street, it's right over there-- is the Koch
Institute that opened up just, what, a month ago.
And that would seem to be, oh, how perfect.
It's endowed by a private individual.
Doesn't have any of the strings that government or
industrial funding comes with or any of the sort of
implications, but what were the issues there that came up?
Anybody read about it when the Koch Institute was opened?
Well, that man, David Koch, he has a lot of funding for other
kinds of political--
well, not other kinds-- but political.
He funds a lot of Tea Party, right-wing conservative stuff
in the country.
I mean, MIT is very clear about what the boundaries are
for what's acceptable when money is accepted.
I mean, there's any number times.
It's happened to me.
I had, essentially, a contract with an oil company that
wanted to fund some of the work I did C, but they had a
restriction in what the contract was supposed to say
about intellectual property.
That's actually the place it most comes up.
That was just totally unacceptable, both to me and
to the lawyers at MIT, who looked at it, and we ended up
not taking the money because you couldn't work under those
conditions.
And those things get massaged in a lot of different ways,
but people have a pretty clear sense of their intellectual
freedom and aren't always willing to sell
that off in that way.
So, there's all sorts of things.
Another one that comes up a lot now is foreign
governments.
And we have a lot of potential arrangements with foreign
governments that raise interesting questions.
Like, say the government of India were to come to MIT and
say, we'd like to give you $50 million to help study poverty.
Well, a lot of professors on campus would say, I don't feel
comfortable taking research money from a country that has
x numbers of hundreds of millions of poor people in
their country and shouldn't be MIT's role in the world to
take money from governments that have very, very serious
pressing things.
Or Saudi Arabia, where they don't allow women students or
women professors or Jewish students or Jewish professors
on their campuses.
Should we go into collaborations with them?
So it's actually pretty hard to think about a source of
funding that comes to the Institute that doesn't have
some kind of complicated set of circumstances around it.
And that's one of the interesting things in your own
work but also, as a historian, to look at this about how
those things get negotiated in any given era.
There's certainly, clearly, things that are just off
limits that won't be done.
There are other things that are pretty easy, like the
National Science Foundation, where they come and they give
you money and your only job in response is to write a paper.
And there's a lot of things that are
kind of in the middle.
I actually happen to think that some of the military
funding, particularly the DARPA funding, is actually a
lot freer and has fewer strings attached than the NSF
funding because the NSF is always peer reviewed.
And you're always being pulled by other people in your field
who want you to do what they do.
Whereas with, sometimes, with what-- it's a little bit less
true now than it used to be--
with DARPA funding, they can really just give you the money
and let you do want you want to do because they're a little
bit protected politically because
they're within the DOD.