Hi Abigail and everyone,
Thanks for talking the time to talk today. Here's a quick afterthought I had:
A useful framing question for organizing these computing technologies might be:
How does this form of computing empower the American people?
For most of the technologies you're considering, the answer is very indirect: A tiny set of engineers learn and adopt the technology, and their companies go on to produce consumer products which are purchased and used by the public. Or, a tiny set of scientists learn and adopt the technology, which they use to make scientific discoveries, and then they form a company to produce consumer products.
The 1960's ARPA/IPTO community was thinking about this question in a totally different way. They wanted computing that would directly empower the American people, and the visions that formed around this question led directly to the Internet, interactive computing via timesharing, personal computing, the graphical user interface, and even AI. (John McCarthy pioneered AI in the pursuit of an "advice taker" which would enable the public to make use of computers by talking to them in natural language.)
Like these pioneers, we do not believe that the American people are "empowered" by choosing between product A and product B.
Rather, a society where all technical expertise is contained within a tiny set of powerful organizations, these organizations provide access to computing in an extremely restricted and protective form ("the training wheels are welded on"), and the public is entirely dependent on these infantile products -- this goes completely against American values as I understand them.
Communal computing has some properties which are particularly relevant here:
- A communal computing system is a programming environment for all people, not a consumer product or specialist technology. The full power of computing is available to all, and people can change or entirely rebuild anything they want. Public communities are expected to make their own computing environments for their own needs.
- Communal computing is designed to drastically reduce the complexity of computing, by orders of magnitude. This is is absolutely necessary if top-to-bottom expertise is to belong to public communities. Most other new technologies add ever more complexity, furthering computing's centralization in powerful organizations and its remove from the public.
This is why, when we think about communal computing's relationship to other forms of computing, we see it as a way of integrating them and bringing them to the people.
For example: how will neuromorphic computing empower the American people? One answer might be: neuromorphic sensors are built into consumer products and non-public technical systems (e.g. defense systems). This may indirectly benefit the public, but I would argue that it doesn't directly empower them. A different answer: a communal form of neuromorphic technology is designed such that all people can incorporate rich sensor networks into their communal computing environments, and thereby make use of a wider range of physical materials in their work. People would then have direct access to the technology, but furthermore, people would be able to understand how the technology works and remodel it for their own needs and ideas. Neuromorphic technology would then truly "belong to the public".
Another example: how will quantum computing empower the American people? The typical answers are again indirect: consumer products (e.g. encryption systems) or scientists running physical simulations. But if communal computing were the interface to quantum computing, then everyone, from professional scientists to the general public, could be designing their own physical simulations, and coming to understand both the natural world and quantum computing itself.
We recognize that there is a lot that needs to happen before the general public is designing physics simulations. There was a lot that needed to happen before the American public could achieve universal literacy. And there was a lot a skepticism that such a thing was necessary, or possible. But American leadership recognized that democracy relies on universal literacy, and made it happen. We believe that a 21st century democracy will rely on universal scientific literacy. Technologies that keep the public at a remove from science are doing everyone a disservice.
-Bret