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I have spent the last 20 years still trying to figure out how to make computers as
reliable as I want them to be (they are not nearly there yet) and how to make
them simple to use (a goal that has met with even less relative success). Despite
some progress, the problems that remain seem even more daunting.
But while I was aware of the moral dilemmas surrounding technology's
consequences in fields like weapons research, I did not expect that I would
confront such issues in my own field, or at least not so soon.
Perhaps it is always hard to see the bigger impact while you are in the vortex of a
change. Failing to understand the consequences of our inventions while we are in
the rapture of discovery and innovation seems to be a common fault of scientists
and technologists; we have long been driven by the overarching desire to know
that is the nature of science's quest, not stopping to notice that the progress to
newer and more powerful technologies can take on a life of its own.
I have long realized that the big advances in information technology come not
from the work of computer scientists, computer architects, or electrical engineers,
but from that of physical scientists. The physicists Stephen Wolfram and Brosl
Hasslacher introduced me, in the early 1980s, to chaos theory and nonlinear
systems. In the 1990s, I learned about complex systems from conversations with
Danny Hillis, the biologist Stuart Kauffman, the Nobel-laureate physicist Murray
Gell-Mann, and others
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