On Computing
Editor: Grady Booch
IBM, grady@
computing thehumanexperience.com
The Great and Terrible Oz
Grady Booch
In Frank Baum’s The Wizard of
Oz, there is a wonderful scene in which
Dorothy and her companions reveal the
true wizard. Their quest to destroy the
Wicked Witch of the West over, they
enter Oz’s inner sanctum, where he declares, “I am everywhere, but to the eyes
of common morals, I am invisible.”1
After the Wizard rebuffs our
heroine’s request to return home, Toto
pulls back a curtain and reveals a
humbug, the once Great and Terrible
Oz. He valiantly continues his deceit
shouting, “Pay no attention to that man
behind the curtain.”1
The Curtain of Computing
Our present world is full of Dorothys, scarecrows, lions, tin men—and
yes, humbugs—all on a quest of simply living. And yet, in our increasingly
computing-haunted world, a curtain exists between the general public and computer technology. For the most part, the
public is amazed by and warms itself by
the glow that arises from behind that
curtain but is also content to leave said
curtain closed. Similarly, we geeks labor
behind our curtains, mostly remaining
content in advancing the machinery of
our inner sanctum to some perceived
good. I say this not to disparage the innocence of the public or the technical
focus of the geeks. This is as it is in every domain.
It’s neither possible nor desirable to
know everything about every thing.
It’s no one’s fault that a curtain exists.
However, behind this curtain of computing lies a technology that’s transforming every aspect of the human
experience. As such, it’s reasonable to
ask how much we should open this particular curtain. What should the general public care about the machinery of
computing, and to what degree should
we wizards care about the implications
of the machinery we devise?
The Realm of Mystery
There’s value in mystery. As Einstein
himself noted, “The most beautiful
thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and
science.”2
Much of science is propelled by the
journey of working to pull back the curtain on the mysteries of the universe. As
Neil deGrasse Tyson observed, “Where
ignorance lurks, so do the frontiers of
discovery and imagination.”3
Yet, when we stop asking how, when
we instead surrender to the invisible
itself, then we abandon the better angels of our nature. Carl Sagan said it
best when he wrote of “these demonhaunted worlds, regions of utter darkness” and the role of science in shining
a fierce and bright light on such discoverable mysteries.4
Our failure to even desire to pull
back the curtain that surrounds a mystery is never a good thing. As the Black
Death coursed through medieval England, people fled the cities (if they could
afford to), turned to their faith (which
might attend to their spirit but could
not attend to their bodies), or yielded
to medical practice that had barely advanced beyond Galan’s time (which certainly did not attend to their bodies).
Centuries later, the citizen scien-
14 I E E E S o f t w a r e | p u b l is h e d b y t h e I E E E c o m p u t e r s o c ie t y tist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek peered
through his newly created microscope,
revealing the inner life of cells and bacteria for the first time. His work was
part of the chain of discoveries that
pulled back the curtain on the root
causes of the plague, namely, the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Today, computing
has allowed us to fully sequence its genome. The curtain has been torn—but
much mystery still remains, and that’s a
wonderful thing because it compels us
to keep asking “how?”
Art and Science
Made a century after van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery, the painting An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump by
Joseph Wright has always moved me.
Here, Wright portrays an experiment
of Robert Boyle, recreated by another
citizen scientist and revealed to a diverse group. In the audience, we see a
couple looking at one another in silent
connection; youth expressing varying
degrees of curiosity, concern, and fear;
two men in quiet contemplation and a
third offering a dispassionate explanation of the phenomenon; and finally,
the scientist himself, the only person
looking outside the plane of the painting, inviting us to look inside, behind
the curtain.
The biology of Yersinia pestis and the
physics of a vacuum are examples of organic and natural phenomena that were
once deep mysteries—they can now be
somewhat explained by science. To be
clear, I use the word “somewhat” intentionally: science is like the young child
who recursively asks “why?” There’s no
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On Computing
meaningful end to the chain of questions one can ask about a mystery.
We often delight in mysteries of
our own making. Just before Wright’s
painting, Jacques de Vaucanson unveiled his Canard Digérateur, a mechanical duck that pooped. Following
Wright’s painting was the infamous
Mechanical Turk by Wolfgang von
Kempelen, a “machine” that played
chess. In both cases, their creators delighted and deceived their audiences by
implementing a device that carried out
a very visible act in a very invisible and
mysterious way.
Creating New Realities
Computing has contributed to another
modern industry—a very profitable one
at that—whose business is that of creating illusions. Of course, by this I mean
the movie industry. With modern special
effects, filmmakers can create entirely
new worlds or manipulate simulations of
our current world in ways that are virtually indistinguishable from reality. Actually, that’s not quite correct: with these
illusions, we can create new realities.
Natural phenomena represent discoverable mysteries. With computing,
we build upon certain discoverable
mysteries: information theory, complexity theory, and algorithmic analysis
to name a few, all of which are at the
core of computer science. In our work,
we then wrap the fruits of these discoverable mysteries into illusions of our
own making, illusions in which we hide
great complexity but whose surface delivers value to some set of users.
That brings us back to the Great
and Terrible Oz. Reframing his declaration in our context, we might observe, “Computing is everywhere, but
to the eyes of common mortals, computing is invisible.”
To what degree should we wizards
care about the implications of the machinery we devise? In his provocative
article, “Why The Future Doesn’t Need
Us,” William Joy wrote, “I may be
working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology
that may replace our species. How do I
feel about this? Very uncomfortable.”5
I respect William’s position, but I’ve
always taken a different perspective,
on two fronts. First, I know I’m working on technology that may replace our
species. Computing is a technology that
has the power to extend us, transform
us, and perhaps even destroy us. Second, I’m quite comfortable with that
prospect: it’s a privilege to contribute
to such work, and I am confident in the
strength of the human spirit to absorb,
adapt, and evolve. Indeed, to do otherwise—to resist change, to stagnate—is
a kind of death for our species.
Now, it’s not that every line of code
one writes has moral implications.
However, as Voltaire once said, “No
snowflake in an avalanche ever feels
responsible.” We geeks generate snowflakes and collectively we have started
an irreversible avalanche. It’s therefore
our responsibility to craft the most
beautiful and useful computing artifacts
we can, with the expectation that others
will come after us, using our inventions
in unexpected ways. Code as if your life
depended on it, for in a number of dimensions—some direct, some very subtle—it absolutely does.
W
hat then should the general
public care about the machinery of computing? For
most, it’s simply not important to know
precisely how a computer works. Give
a young child an iPad, and you’ll be
amazed at just how quickly she learns
to work it. Part of this is the beautiful simplicity of a tablet computer, and
part of this is the playful intuition of
a child. As one grows up digital, there
are a certainly a number of basic computational skills that grow in importance. Knowing how to interact with a
computer, how to bend it to our will, is
just as important in our time as knowing how to engage with a horse was in
Wright’s time. To this end, I’m encouraged by the work of Jeannette Wing
and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon
University on computational thinking
(www.cs.cmu.edu/~CompThink).
As they note, “The impact of computing extends far beyond science, however, affecting all aspect of our lives.
To flourish in today’s world, everyone
needs computational thinking.”
For the general public, it’s still important to know a little of what’s behind the curtain of computing. An informed and educated populace is far
more able to reconcile its past, reason
about its present, and intentionally create its future.
Each of us plays the role of the
Wizard and of Dorothy at one time
or another; these are just two of the
masks we wear. In so doing, we may
reasonably place a curtain between us
from time to time, but we should never
fear to pull it open.
References
1. L.F. Baum, The Wizard of Oz, George M. Hill
Company, 1900; www.literature.org/authors/
baum-l-frank/the-wonderful-wizard-of-oz/
chapter-15.html.
2. A. Einstein, Mein Weltbild, Europa Verlag
Znrich, 1931.
3. N.d. Tyson, Death by Black Hole, W.W.
Norton, 2007.
4. C.E. Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World,
Random House, 1995, pp. 115–124.
5. W.N. Joy, “Why The Future Doesn’t Need
Us,” Wired, April 2000; www.wired.com/
wired/archive/8.04/joy.html.
Grady Booch is an IBM Fellow and one of the
UML’s original authors. He’s currently developing
Computing: The Human Experience, a major transmedia project for public broadcast. Contact him at
[email protected].
See www.computer.org/software
-multimedia for multimedia
content related to this article.
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