1 00:00:00,040 --> 00:00:02,470 The following content is provided under a Creative 2 00:00:02,470 --> 00:00:03,880 Commons license. 3 00:00:03,880 --> 00:00:06,920 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to 4 00:00:06,920 --> 00:00:10,570 offer high quality educational resources for free. 5 00:00:10,570 --> 00:00:13,470 To make a donation or view additional materials from 6 00:00:13,470 --> 00:00:19,300 hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at 7 00:00:19,300 --> 00:00:20,550 ocw.mit.edu. 8 00:00:29,080 --> 00:00:30,860 PROFESSOR: I just came across a couple of interesting quotes 9 00:00:30,860 --> 00:00:32,330 about cybernetics. 10 00:00:32,330 --> 00:00:34,630 What did cybernetics have to do with any of this? 11 00:00:34,630 --> 00:00:35,510 Well, an awful lot. 12 00:00:35,510 --> 00:00:37,440 Here's a quote from Jerry Wiesner. 13 00:00:37,440 --> 00:00:40,010 "We were all fired up by Norbert Wiener's cybernetics. 14 00:00:40,010 --> 00:00:42,600 We have explored the far-ranging implications of 15 00:00:42,600 --> 00:00:45,040 the complex concepts of information and 16 00:00:45,040 --> 00:00:46,790 communication theory. 17 00:00:46,790 --> 00:00:49,190 It ranged from man-made communications to computing 18 00:00:49,190 --> 00:00:52,250 systems to the sciences of man, inquiries into the 19 00:00:52,250 --> 00:00:54,890 structure and development of the nervous system, the 20 00:00:54,890 --> 00:00:58,080 phenomena of inner life and behavior in relation to other 21 00:00:58,080 --> 00:00:59,730 men." 22 00:00:59,730 --> 00:01:03,290 So you get the sense of, like, the whole interdisciplinary 23 00:01:03,290 --> 00:01:05,110 thing, which is a big topic, of course, 24 00:01:05,110 --> 00:01:07,160 on our campus today. 25 00:01:07,160 --> 00:01:10,370 RLE was one of the major kind of early points in that. 26 00:01:13,100 --> 00:01:15,780 "Neurophysiologists and other biologists, linguistics, 27 00:01:15,780 --> 00:01:19,380 economists, social scientists, and psychologists recognized 28 00:01:19,380 --> 00:01:22,300 almost intuitively the usefulness and relevance of 29 00:01:22,300 --> 00:01:25,100 feedback information theory to their fields. 30 00:01:25,100 --> 00:01:28,780 For all of them, the concepts of information theory, coding, 31 00:01:28,780 --> 00:01:32,350 feedback, prediction, and filtering provide new pathways 32 00:01:32,350 --> 00:01:35,490 to explore pathways that seemed to wind unendingly." 33 00:01:35,490 --> 00:01:37,720 So this whole idea-- 34 00:01:37,720 --> 00:01:41,240 this is another one of these places where you see the 35 00:01:41,240 --> 00:01:44,670 relationship between the institutional structures at 36 00:01:44,670 --> 00:01:48,330 MIT, how the labs are organized, what the overall 37 00:01:48,330 --> 00:01:50,660 policy is that's coming from the federal government to 38 00:01:50,660 --> 00:01:53,470 support the work, and actually the content of the work, what 39 00:01:53,470 --> 00:01:56,070 sorts of things people are studying, how they're thinking 40 00:01:56,070 --> 00:01:58,220 about these problems, what the innovations are. 41 00:01:58,220 --> 00:02:00,120 And, I think-- and this is one of the threads I want to 42 00:02:00,120 --> 00:02:01,580 communicate to you today-- 43 00:02:01,580 --> 00:02:05,200 there's a real common thread in a lot of what MIT does in 44 00:02:05,200 --> 00:02:08,320 these realms, including SAGE and Lincoln Labs and that 45 00:02:08,320 --> 00:02:13,170 stuff, going back from probably before the war around 46 00:02:13,170 --> 00:02:16,400 computing and interaction and all the different aspects of 47 00:02:16,400 --> 00:02:17,960 communications. 48 00:02:17,960 --> 00:02:20,655 The Department of Linguistics itself is formed by research 49 00:02:20,655 --> 00:02:26,000 from RLE in 1961. 50 00:02:26,000 --> 00:02:28,150 There's actually a real relationship between, for 51 00:02:28,150 --> 00:02:29,070 those of you familiar-- 52 00:02:29,070 --> 00:02:32,020 anybody know what Chomsky and linguistics is? 53 00:02:36,850 --> 00:02:41,370 So Noam Chomsky, who is the sort of founding father, in a 54 00:02:41,370 --> 00:02:44,740 lot of ways, of modern linguistics, created this idea 55 00:02:44,740 --> 00:02:47,270 in the '50s called generative grammar, which is the idea 56 00:02:47,270 --> 00:02:49,120 that the structures of language are 57 00:02:49,120 --> 00:02:50,690 built into the brain. 58 00:02:50,690 --> 00:02:54,510 They're not things that you learn as a toddler or as baby. 59 00:02:54,510 --> 00:02:57,240 And that's one of the special things that makes human brains 60 00:02:57,240 --> 00:02:59,680 different from all other kinds of brains. 61 00:02:59,680 --> 00:03:01,820 And that's called generative grammar-- 62 00:03:01,820 --> 00:03:04,940 that the basic grammars are some that is 63 00:03:04,940 --> 00:03:06,910 inherently inside of you. 64 00:03:06,910 --> 00:03:09,370 A very radical idea, at the time, for a number of 65 00:03:09,370 --> 00:03:13,180 different reasons, partly because it was connected to 66 00:03:13,180 --> 00:03:16,470 what's called the cognitive revolution in psychology. 67 00:03:16,470 --> 00:03:20,040 Up until that point, the kind of leading paradigm, even in 68 00:03:20,040 --> 00:03:25,150 Cambridge psychology, was behaviorism led by B. F. 69 00:03:25,150 --> 00:03:26,600 Skinner at Harvard. 70 00:03:26,600 --> 00:03:29,500 The idea that, well, it's too complicated to understand 71 00:03:29,500 --> 00:03:33,550 what's going on inside either our brains or anybody's, any 72 00:03:33,550 --> 00:03:34,590 animals' brains. 73 00:03:34,590 --> 00:03:36,940 We're just going to look at the behaviors, the inputs and 74 00:03:36,940 --> 00:03:41,720 the outputs, measure the behaviors, and try to 75 00:03:41,720 --> 00:03:44,890 understand that anything that's going on inside only 76 00:03:44,890 --> 00:03:48,420 matters if it's expressed in a particular behavior. 77 00:03:48,420 --> 00:03:51,110 Well, around this time period, led by many people around 78 00:03:51,110 --> 00:03:53,790 here, there's a thing called the cognitive revolution, they 79 00:03:53,790 --> 00:03:57,670 call it now, where people rejected that view. 80 00:03:57,670 --> 00:04:01,460 And they began looking inside what thinking was all about, 81 00:04:01,460 --> 00:04:04,070 very much driven by parallel developments in 82 00:04:04,070 --> 00:04:06,450 computing, in AI. 83 00:04:06,450 --> 00:04:09,860 And in some sense, the whole idea of psychology at MIT was 84 00:04:09,860 --> 00:04:11,360 superseded by what? 85 00:04:16,800 --> 00:04:18,880 Cognitive science. 86 00:04:18,880 --> 00:04:21,050 Which now we have a Department of Brain and Cognitive 87 00:04:21,050 --> 00:04:23,120 Science, which was sort of-- do we have a psychology 88 00:04:23,120 --> 00:04:25,050 department here? 89 00:04:25,050 --> 00:04:25,250 No. 90 00:04:25,250 --> 00:04:27,660 We used to, at one point, but we don't anymore. 91 00:04:27,660 --> 00:04:28,840 It was sort of folded in. 92 00:04:28,840 --> 00:04:29,750 It's interesting. 93 00:04:29,750 --> 00:04:31,640 It's a separate topic and way to think about what those 94 00:04:31,640 --> 00:04:32,790 differences are. 95 00:04:32,790 --> 00:04:35,460 Partly, I'm dwelling on this because tomorrow is the 96 00:04:35,460 --> 00:04:40,440 symposium, the last of the 150th Anniversary Symposia, 97 00:04:40,440 --> 00:04:46,120 which is on Brains, Minds, and Machines, and is a new 98 00:04:46,120 --> 00:04:48,550 research initiative that's trying to look at the problem 99 00:04:48,550 --> 00:04:57,430 of intelligence by combining AI, cognitive science, 100 00:04:57,430 --> 00:04:59,820 neuroscience, and linguistics. 101 00:04:59,820 --> 00:05:02,180 And these things are all not that far apart, again, from 102 00:05:02,180 --> 00:05:04,740 this early history, but they've developed separately, 103 00:05:04,740 --> 00:05:07,925 in some ways, for the last 50 years, and the idea is to tie 104 00:05:07,925 --> 00:05:08,510 them together. 105 00:05:08,510 --> 00:05:11,340 So if you're familiar with AI, there's not been a lot of 106 00:05:11,340 --> 00:05:12,760 neuroscience in AI. 107 00:05:12,760 --> 00:05:15,420 But now there's an attempt to bring a lot of that together. 108 00:05:15,420 --> 00:05:20,770 It's going to be a really interesting, exciting thing. 109 00:05:20,770 --> 00:05:22,940 I have to introduce the symposium tomorrow night, and 110 00:05:22,940 --> 00:05:23,970 I'm working on my comments. 111 00:05:23,970 --> 00:05:26,980 And, usually, when I introduce these symposia, I talk about 112 00:05:26,980 --> 00:05:29,680 what happened at MIT before the people in 113 00:05:29,680 --> 00:05:31,280 the room were there. 114 00:05:31,280 --> 00:05:33,780 And then, when they got up and they talk about their own 115 00:05:33,780 --> 00:05:36,670 experiences, then they cover the last 50 or 60 years. 116 00:05:36,670 --> 00:05:39,940 There's not much that happened at MIT in linguistics or in 117 00:05:39,940 --> 00:05:44,490 psychology or in anything cognitive before Marvin Minsky 118 00:05:44,490 --> 00:05:47,980 and Noam Chomsky and a few of these other 119 00:05:47,980 --> 00:05:51,220 sort of critical people. 120 00:05:51,220 --> 00:05:53,280 Interestingly, the whole efforts-- 121 00:05:53,280 --> 00:05:56,870 these things also manifested themselves in biology. 122 00:05:56,870 --> 00:05:59,730 How do you think, in the 1950s, biology took up some of 123 00:05:59,730 --> 00:06:03,900 this influence from cognitive science or, particularly, from 124 00:06:03,900 --> 00:06:05,150 communications theory? 125 00:06:12,360 --> 00:06:13,960 What's the word that people use to describe DNA? 126 00:06:16,856 --> 00:06:18,620 A code. 127 00:06:18,620 --> 00:06:22,440 The whole idea of DNA as a code and biology as a kind of 128 00:06:22,440 --> 00:06:26,460 informational science emerges right at this time, not only 129 00:06:26,460 --> 00:06:30,550 at MIT, a lot of other places, but very much taken up there. 130 00:06:33,470 --> 00:06:36,640 Last year we read an article about that, but we compressed 131 00:06:36,640 --> 00:06:38,400 the syllabus a little bit. 132 00:06:38,400 --> 00:06:39,650 OK. 133 00:06:41,780 --> 00:06:45,860 The political context during those years-- 134 00:06:45,860 --> 00:06:49,790 after the war, again, the Radiation Lab dies down. 135 00:06:49,790 --> 00:06:52,430 The country is really demobilizing. 136 00:06:52,430 --> 00:06:54,960 Troops are coming back from the war. 137 00:06:54,960 --> 00:06:57,580 Everybody's going away from the military back to civilian 138 00:06:57,580 --> 00:07:01,980 life, until 1949, 1952. 139 00:07:01,980 --> 00:07:03,930 Critical events happen then. 140 00:07:03,930 --> 00:07:05,180 Anybody want to guess? 141 00:07:08,630 --> 00:07:13,580 Russians explode an H-bomb in 1949, much, much sooner than 142 00:07:13,580 --> 00:07:19,240 anybody expected, and the Korean War starts in 1950. 143 00:07:19,240 --> 00:07:21,360 And that's really the beginning of the Cold War. 144 00:07:21,360 --> 00:07:22,700 So you really have this-- 145 00:07:22,700 --> 00:07:25,700 it's not correct to think about the Cold War as just the 146 00:07:25,700 --> 00:07:27,170 continuation of World War II. 147 00:07:27,170 --> 00:07:30,590 There is this sort of brief-- but it is a kind of 5-year 148 00:07:30,590 --> 00:07:33,620 period where everything's shrinking before the Cold War 149 00:07:33,620 --> 00:07:35,460 really gets going. 150 00:07:35,460 --> 00:07:38,350 And then you begin, during the '50s, you really have the 151 00:07:38,350 --> 00:07:42,340 civilian sense of being under threat by nuclear warfare. 152 00:07:42,340 --> 00:07:46,770 It was before my time, but perhaps your parents or even 153 00:07:46,770 --> 00:07:48,700 your grandparents will remember. 154 00:07:48,700 --> 00:07:51,920 In the 1950s, if you were in an elementary school in this 155 00:07:51,920 --> 00:07:55,150 country, you were trained how to respond to a nuclear attack 156 00:07:55,150 --> 00:07:57,150 when you were in school. 157 00:07:57,150 --> 00:07:59,175 And you'll hear the phrase "duck and cover," which so 158 00:07:59,175 --> 00:08:00,890 many people were trained to do. 159 00:08:00,890 --> 00:08:04,080 Hide under your desk, pretty much, which I'll leave it as 160 00:08:04,080 --> 00:08:06,960 an exercise to the reader to what that'll do for you when 161 00:08:06,960 --> 00:08:08,590 there's a nuclear weapon coming. 162 00:08:15,740 --> 00:08:22,730 And so during this period, in some sense, it's the golden 163 00:08:22,730 --> 00:08:24,970 age of science policy. 164 00:08:24,970 --> 00:08:26,670 People often talk about that. 165 00:08:26,670 --> 00:08:29,980 And we'll come back to this after Sputnik, where 166 00:08:29,980 --> 00:08:32,630 scientists are involved in high-level decision making in 167 00:08:32,630 --> 00:08:36,539 a way they've never really been since then. 168 00:08:36,539 --> 00:08:41,618 In the world of computers, all the way up through 1960, 169 00:08:41,618 --> 00:08:45,250 three-quarters of the world of computing was simply run and 170 00:08:45,250 --> 00:08:46,760 funded by the government. 171 00:08:46,760 --> 00:08:50,540 So there was hardly any computation to speak of. 172 00:08:50,540 --> 00:08:53,120 And the quarter that was not there was mostly in the 173 00:08:53,120 --> 00:08:56,370 business world of punch cards and IBM punch card machines. 174 00:09:02,290 --> 00:09:08,575 And a lot of that work was done in high-end computational 175 00:09:08,575 --> 00:09:15,100 at Los Alamos, fluid dynamic simulations and things for 176 00:09:15,100 --> 00:09:17,420 nuclear weapons. 177 00:09:17,420 --> 00:09:21,910 So during the Cold War, you have all kinds of new kinds of 178 00:09:21,910 --> 00:09:26,460 institutions emerging, in addition to new technologies. 179 00:09:26,460 --> 00:09:29,440 Outside of MIT, you have the Rand Corporation. 180 00:09:29,440 --> 00:09:31,520 Anybody hear of the Rand Corporation before? 181 00:09:31,520 --> 00:09:32,300 It's still around. 182 00:09:32,300 --> 00:09:34,180 You still hear them issuing reports and things. 183 00:09:34,180 --> 00:09:36,150 I have colleagues who work there. 184 00:09:36,150 --> 00:09:39,700 Founded in 1946 by the Air Force, and that's the place 185 00:09:39,700 --> 00:09:43,000 that pretty much invented the term "think tank." 186 00:09:43,000 --> 00:09:45,760 So you have these kind of not governmental-- 187 00:09:45,760 --> 00:09:47,220 Rand is not part of the government-- 188 00:09:47,220 --> 00:09:50,910 but it's a not-for-profit corporation where they do a 189 00:09:50,910 --> 00:09:53,230 lot of large-scale strategy, operations 190 00:09:53,230 --> 00:09:57,400 research, nuclear strategy. 191 00:09:57,400 --> 00:10:00,830 I mentioned already the Office of Naval Research, which sort 192 00:10:00,830 --> 00:10:04,320 of carries on the OSRD tradition for the 10 years 193 00:10:04,320 --> 00:10:05,590 after the Second World War. 194 00:10:05,590 --> 00:10:07,370 And they came up in the reading because they funded 195 00:10:07,370 --> 00:10:14,060 the early part of Whirlwind and lots of different types of 196 00:10:14,060 --> 00:10:17,390 new theories, from engineering science-- 197 00:10:17,390 --> 00:10:21,380 you hear that phrase coming up a lot at MIT in that period-- 198 00:10:21,380 --> 00:10:25,140 systems engineering, systems dynamics, systems analysis, 199 00:10:25,140 --> 00:10:26,180 operations research. 200 00:10:26,180 --> 00:10:28,610 I mentioned cybernetics, control theory, general 201 00:10:28,610 --> 00:10:29,970 systems theory. 202 00:10:29,970 --> 00:10:34,560 And all this stuff is sort of buzzing around. 203 00:10:34,560 --> 00:10:41,440 And before I show you this film about Whirlwind-- 204 00:10:41,440 --> 00:10:42,780 well, let me show you the film about Whirlwind. 205 00:10:55,620 --> 00:10:55,990 OK. 206 00:10:55,990 --> 00:11:00,680 And so then, the other one I called up is the-- 207 00:11:00,680 --> 00:11:02,080 you'll remember from the reading 208 00:11:02,080 --> 00:11:05,400 that they build Whirlwind. 209 00:11:05,400 --> 00:11:08,170 It starts out as this sort of flight simulator thing. 210 00:11:08,170 --> 00:11:10,840 Rather quickly, Jay Forrester has these huge ambitions for 211 00:11:10,840 --> 00:11:12,770 it and starts into this just large 212 00:11:12,770 --> 00:11:14,820 machine computation project. 213 00:11:14,820 --> 00:11:18,940 And then they switch their Navy funding into Air Force 214 00:11:18,940 --> 00:11:22,710 funding, and they look at this problem of air defense. 215 00:11:26,530 --> 00:11:29,970 Starting in the early '50s, there's a physicist at MIT 216 00:11:29,970 --> 00:11:32,860 named George Valley. 217 00:11:32,860 --> 00:11:36,310 And they start looking at this whole business about how do we 218 00:11:36,310 --> 00:11:38,910 defend the continent, which is an interesting question. 219 00:11:38,910 --> 00:11:41,340 Remember, we talked last time, or the time before, about 220 00:11:41,340 --> 00:11:42,990 anti-aircraft control. 221 00:11:42,990 --> 00:11:46,340 SAGE is really the exact same thing, just the updated '50s 222 00:11:46,340 --> 00:11:47,490 version of it, right? 223 00:11:47,490 --> 00:11:48,840 How do you shoot down airplanes that 224 00:11:48,840 --> 00:11:49,990 are attacking you? 225 00:11:49,990 --> 00:11:53,190 And air defense is a typical problem that civilian 226 00:11:53,190 --> 00:11:58,340 scientists like, and that government, especially elected 227 00:11:58,340 --> 00:12:01,880 officials, like because it plays well politically. 228 00:12:01,880 --> 00:12:04,240 It seems to be, morally, a little bit more comfortable 229 00:12:04,240 --> 00:12:06,190 than offensive weapons. 230 00:12:06,190 --> 00:12:07,750 Of course, you can shoot someone down if they're are 231 00:12:07,750 --> 00:12:09,210 about to drop bombs on you. 232 00:12:09,210 --> 00:12:17,100 The military, also, generally dislikes it because the people 233 00:12:17,100 --> 00:12:19,790 who run the world regarding aircraft in the military-- 234 00:12:19,790 --> 00:12:21,850 even at this point, they were the Air Force-- 235 00:12:21,850 --> 00:12:23,700 the Air Force doesn't like to think a lot about shooting 236 00:12:23,700 --> 00:12:24,350 down airplanes. 237 00:12:24,350 --> 00:12:27,810 It's not one of their favorite hobby topics. 238 00:12:27,810 --> 00:12:29,610 And they generally aren't big on defense. 239 00:12:29,610 --> 00:12:33,010 They want to go out and kill the enemy and offense. 240 00:12:33,010 --> 00:12:35,780 So you constantly see this question of air defense rising 241 00:12:35,780 --> 00:12:37,460 up in scientific circles. 242 00:12:37,460 --> 00:12:39,630 It's still true today, actually, with things like 243 00:12:39,630 --> 00:12:40,880 missile defense. 244 00:12:43,720 --> 00:12:49,080 And they put this system together called SAGE-- 245 00:12:49,080 --> 00:12:50,870 and, again, you read about it-- 246 00:12:56,960 --> 00:12:59,390 sort of continental air defense system, I think, 247 00:12:59,390 --> 00:13:04,110 partly comes from the way that engineering really dominated 248 00:13:04,110 --> 00:13:05,820 here, above the other sciences. 249 00:13:05,820 --> 00:13:09,490 And in many of these other schools were-- 250 00:13:09,490 --> 00:13:11,690 where the engineering is sort of separated off 251 00:13:11,690 --> 00:13:13,090 as a separate school-- 252 00:13:13,090 --> 00:13:15,230 but the really high-prestige work was going to the 253 00:13:15,230 --> 00:13:16,970 mathematicians. 254 00:13:16,970 --> 00:13:19,480 I also think that, actually, a lot of the history of 255 00:13:19,480 --> 00:13:22,680 computing was written later by mathematicians. 256 00:13:22,680 --> 00:13:25,660 And so they kind of remade it the way they wanted it to. 257 00:13:25,660 --> 00:13:26,590 You can see-- 258 00:13:26,590 --> 00:13:31,780 actually, even Norbert Wiener does that, John Von Neumann. 259 00:13:31,780 --> 00:13:37,130 John Von Neumann plays a role in the ENIAC project very, 260 00:13:37,130 --> 00:13:40,830 very late and does some very important fundamental, 261 00:13:40,830 --> 00:13:42,600 theoretical work, but it's basically 262 00:13:42,600 --> 00:13:45,250 an engineering project. 263 00:13:45,250 --> 00:13:48,360 Whereas here, partly because of the military connection, 264 00:13:48,360 --> 00:13:51,720 partly because of the Rad Lab, there's always this focus on 265 00:13:51,720 --> 00:13:58,240 the human relationship and the real-time interaction, and 266 00:13:58,240 --> 00:14:00,870 partly because they're enabled to do these big projects and 267 00:14:00,870 --> 00:14:03,800 kind of build these big, experimental systems, rather 268 00:14:03,800 --> 00:14:07,150 than having one single. 269 00:14:07,150 --> 00:14:08,340 There's a great quote. 270 00:14:08,340 --> 00:14:14,160 It's from later on, where a university administrator is 271 00:14:14,160 --> 00:14:19,250 told that they just, the University, just bought a 272 00:14:19,250 --> 00:14:22,170 giant computer for millions of dollars, and now they need to 273 00:14:22,170 --> 00:14:24,930 form a department of computer science. 274 00:14:24,930 --> 00:14:27,440 And the administrator says, that's ridiculous. 275 00:14:27,440 --> 00:14:29,880 We just bought a giant air conditioning unit for millions 276 00:14:29,880 --> 00:14:30,770 of dollars. 277 00:14:30,770 --> 00:14:33,180 Nobody's telling me I need to make a department of air 278 00:14:33,180 --> 00:14:35,590 conditioning science. 279 00:14:35,590 --> 00:14:39,850 And so the struggles of sort of-- is the computer just a 280 00:14:39,850 --> 00:14:42,130 big, glorified calculator, or is it something 281 00:14:42,130 --> 00:14:43,480 fundamentally new-- 282 00:14:43,480 --> 00:14:45,700 are all happening during this period, too. 283 00:14:45,700 --> 00:14:46,870 Anybody know when the Computer Science 284 00:14:46,870 --> 00:14:50,260 Department here is founded? 285 00:14:50,260 --> 00:14:51,730 Everything I'm showing you here is from the 286 00:14:51,730 --> 00:14:54,700 '50s, 1950 to 1956. 287 00:14:54,700 --> 00:14:58,550 When does MIT create the CS part of EECS? 288 00:15:01,840 --> 00:15:03,760 1968. 289 00:15:03,760 --> 00:15:07,530 Takes a long time to actually recognize that there's a new 290 00:15:07,530 --> 00:15:08,780 science there. 291 00:15:19,022 --> 00:15:21,700 As I said, this is really IBM PR. 292 00:15:21,700 --> 00:15:26,890 So they were showing this to maybe generals and other 293 00:15:26,890 --> 00:15:29,470 people who would be their military customers or just 294 00:15:29,470 --> 00:15:31,290 generally the public. 295 00:15:31,290 --> 00:15:32,830 It's not very technical. 296 00:15:32,830 --> 00:15:35,450 It's, like, got the kids on the playground, like defending 297 00:15:35,450 --> 00:15:37,580 your people sort of thing. 298 00:15:37,580 --> 00:15:40,170 But you see throughout this the computers are there as 299 00:15:40,170 --> 00:15:41,780 these control centers. 300 00:15:41,780 --> 00:15:45,100 And this is real-time interactive computer graphics, 301 00:15:45,100 --> 00:15:48,160 which is going on nowhere else in the world at the time. 302 00:15:48,160 --> 00:15:50,680 And the idea of a computer, not as this kind of 303 00:15:50,680 --> 00:15:53,480 calculator/switcher, but as this interactive-- 304 00:15:53,480 --> 00:15:56,140 not just interactive but also very much 305 00:15:56,140 --> 00:15:58,970 networked kind of computer. 306 00:15:58,970 --> 00:16:02,050 Some of the things you saw that were really done for the 307 00:16:02,050 --> 00:16:05,830 first time with SAGE and Whirlwind, real time, they 308 00:16:05,830 --> 00:16:07,420 mention graphic displays. 309 00:16:07,420 --> 00:16:11,050 Modems were invented for this system. 310 00:16:11,050 --> 00:16:12,530 You don't even use modems anymore. 311 00:16:12,530 --> 00:16:14,930 Does anybody have a modem that they use these days? 312 00:16:14,930 --> 00:16:17,260 I haven't used one in, probably, close to 10 years at 313 00:16:17,260 --> 00:16:21,790 this point, but used to use them a lot. 314 00:16:21,790 --> 00:16:24,580 Real-time memory allocation, all kinds of stuff that you 315 00:16:24,580 --> 00:16:27,860 use in the software engineering world. 316 00:16:27,860 --> 00:16:30,700 And SAGE was really the first big software project, too. 317 00:16:30,700 --> 00:16:34,380 It really taught the American industry how to organize these 318 00:16:34,380 --> 00:16:35,480 big software projects. 319 00:16:35,480 --> 00:16:37,080 And there were many others that were built that were 320 00:16:37,080 --> 00:16:38,330 similar to it. 321 00:16:41,660 --> 00:16:47,470 And as the film kind of makes clear, it's 322 00:16:47,470 --> 00:16:48,850 oriented towards civilians. 323 00:16:48,850 --> 00:16:53,170 It's built to make civilians feel comfortable. 324 00:16:53,170 --> 00:16:55,580 It's not built because the military wants to go out and 325 00:16:55,580 --> 00:16:56,570 get the Soviet Union. 326 00:16:56,570 --> 00:16:58,760 That's what they do for a living. 327 00:16:58,760 --> 00:17:01,360 And it's built to make people feel comfortable. 328 00:17:01,360 --> 00:17:04,160 And was pretty much obsolete by the time it was 329 00:17:04,160 --> 00:17:07,300 operational, so it had, essentially, no military 330 00:17:07,300 --> 00:17:10,060 impact despite all the money that was spent on it. 331 00:17:10,060 --> 00:17:12,310 But it had some technological input. 332 00:17:12,310 --> 00:17:15,069 Nobody's really ever was able to know if it would have 333 00:17:15,069 --> 00:17:17,540 worked if we were actually attacked. 334 00:17:17,540 --> 00:17:21,240 But there was a brief period where air attack by Soviet 335 00:17:21,240 --> 00:17:24,829 bombers over the North Pole was a great fear of people. 336 00:17:24,829 --> 00:17:28,659 What ended that fear or made it irrelevant? 337 00:17:28,659 --> 00:17:29,520 AUDIENCE: ICBMs. 338 00:17:29,520 --> 00:17:30,610 PROFESSOR: ICBMs. 339 00:17:30,610 --> 00:17:32,950 Where this system wouldn't work against ICBMs. 340 00:17:32,950 --> 00:17:34,510 But you still see that fear. 341 00:17:34,510 --> 00:17:36,410 And all the debates about missile defense 342 00:17:36,410 --> 00:17:37,870 in the last 20 years-- 343 00:17:37,870 --> 00:17:40,340 Patriot missile during the Gulf War and all that stuff-- 344 00:17:40,340 --> 00:17:43,060 is just an extension of this kind of fear. 345 00:17:46,250 --> 00:17:48,290 So this is sort of what's going on 346 00:17:48,290 --> 00:17:51,410 around here in the '50s. 347 00:17:51,410 --> 00:17:53,420 I have a couple more videos, let me see which ones. 348 00:18:08,740 --> 00:18:13,050 And a lot of people really actually did question, is this 349 00:18:13,050 --> 00:18:17,210 really the kind of MIT that we want to be living in-- 350 00:18:17,210 --> 00:18:21,250 big military projects, lots of money flowing in, lots of 351 00:18:21,250 --> 00:18:23,400 focus on building large systems-- 352 00:18:23,400 --> 00:18:26,660 as opposed to research projects or kind of individual 353 00:18:26,660 --> 00:18:29,200 scientists doing things? 354 00:18:29,200 --> 00:18:33,910 And that's where-- and I want to say a little bit before we 355 00:18:33,910 --> 00:18:38,100 move on, and Roz Williams mentioned this. 356 00:18:38,100 --> 00:18:41,810 I don't think we've assigned it this year for reading. 357 00:18:45,780 --> 00:18:52,840 Was a bunch of people at MIT got together in 1949. 358 00:18:52,840 --> 00:18:56,840 It was called the Committee on the Educational Survey, but it 359 00:18:56,840 --> 00:18:59,260 became known as the Lewis Report. 360 00:18:59,260 --> 00:19:01,190 And, again, Roz Williams mentions it. 361 00:19:01,190 --> 00:19:02,000 The Lewis-- 362 00:19:02,000 --> 00:19:04,710 who it was named after was her grandfather, Doc Louis of 363 00:19:04,710 --> 00:19:05,960 chemical engineering. 364 00:19:08,130 --> 00:19:11,840 Other people on the committee were Stratton, who I 365 00:19:11,840 --> 00:19:14,610 mentioned, Elting Morison, who was a historian who actually 366 00:19:14,610 --> 00:19:18,750 founded the department that I head now, Viki Weisskopf, who 367 00:19:18,750 --> 00:19:21,990 was a famous Manhattan Project-era physicist. 368 00:19:21,990 --> 00:19:23,300 Jerry Wiesner we've talked about. 369 00:19:23,300 --> 00:19:25,580 Gordon Brown we talked about. 370 00:19:25,580 --> 00:19:27,710 John Burchard, who was the first Dean of Humanities and 371 00:19:27,710 --> 00:19:31,630 Social Sciences, and Harold Hazen, who was the Dean of 372 00:19:31,630 --> 00:19:34,620 Engineering at the time that we talked about before. 373 00:19:34,620 --> 00:19:37,240 And there were these problems that were on peoples' mind at 374 00:19:37,240 --> 00:19:38,950 the beginning of the Cold War. 375 00:19:38,950 --> 00:19:40,660 I'll read you a couple of quotes from it, which are 376 00:19:40,660 --> 00:19:42,300 pretty interesting. 377 00:19:42,300 --> 00:19:45,590 "We continue to claim that our primary mission is to teach, 378 00:19:45,590 --> 00:19:47,440 but other activities have assumed an 379 00:19:47,440 --> 00:19:49,730 unprecedented role at MIT. 380 00:19:49,730 --> 00:19:51,970 Service to the community and to the national government has 381 00:19:51,970 --> 00:19:55,180 always been recognized as a primary obligation, but now 382 00:19:55,180 --> 00:19:57,600 the dollar volume of government contracts, 383 00:19:57,600 --> 00:20:00,900 government-sponsored research, amounts to far more than the 384 00:20:00,900 --> 00:20:02,390 academic budget. 385 00:20:02,390 --> 00:20:05,060 Postwar government funds have been used to maintain a very 386 00:20:05,060 --> 00:20:08,710 large technical staff without the privilege of tenure. 387 00:20:08,710 --> 00:20:11,030 And the major part of the Institute's personnel is now 388 00:20:11,030 --> 00:20:12,570 dependent on the continuation of 389 00:20:12,570 --> 00:20:15,020 short-term financial support. 390 00:20:15,020 --> 00:20:18,360 Government money has made available to us magnificent 391 00:20:18,360 --> 00:20:21,010 facilities that have become a permanent part of the 392 00:20:21,010 --> 00:20:23,790 Institute and that involve continued responsibility for 393 00:20:23,790 --> 00:20:25,190 their maintenance." 394 00:20:25,190 --> 00:20:27,560 So there was this problem of just big size. 395 00:20:27,560 --> 00:20:28,730 Like how do you maintain it? 396 00:20:28,730 --> 00:20:31,310 Once the Institute grew that big, people had to-- it's like 397 00:20:31,310 --> 00:20:33,960 a big animal in a cage that you need to shovel money into 398 00:20:33,960 --> 00:20:36,560 all the time. 399 00:20:36,560 --> 00:20:39,820 Whereas before, the Institute was primarily focused on 400 00:20:39,820 --> 00:20:42,720 undergraduate education, and it was really a kind of 401 00:20:42,720 --> 00:20:45,120 technical institute college kind of environment. 402 00:20:45,120 --> 00:20:48,600 It became much more focused on research. 403 00:20:48,600 --> 00:20:52,360 And these sponsored projects, particularly military 404 00:20:52,360 --> 00:20:54,800 sponsored, were bigger and bigger. 405 00:20:54,800 --> 00:20:58,460 They asked, "Is all this work genuinely creative? 406 00:20:58,460 --> 00:21:00,670 Can it, indeed, be justified on the ground that it 407 00:21:00,670 --> 00:21:03,420 strengthens our educational program? 408 00:21:03,420 --> 00:21:06,270 Have our staff members not on occasion been lured by 409 00:21:06,270 --> 00:21:09,210 prestige that accompanies an enlargement of activities 410 00:21:09,210 --> 00:21:11,370 without considering the loss in their professional 411 00:21:11,370 --> 00:21:13,230 competence that the undertaking of added 412 00:21:13,230 --> 00:21:15,090 administrative burdens may entail? 413 00:21:15,090 --> 00:21:17,210 So these were all real questions that come up for the 414 00:21:17,210 --> 00:21:20,610 next 60 years, in a way, about-- 415 00:21:20,610 --> 00:21:24,110 are the faculty members now big managers managing big 416 00:21:24,110 --> 00:21:26,870 research projects more than real thinkers sitting down and 417 00:21:26,870 --> 00:21:28,270 actually thinking things through? 418 00:21:32,990 --> 00:21:35,980 "Is there not a danger that the interests and energy of 419 00:21:35,980 --> 00:21:38,670 our faculty are being diverted from education to 420 00:21:38,670 --> 00:21:40,010 income-producing work? 421 00:21:44,090 --> 00:21:48,230 And secondly, many large projects emphasize design and 422 00:21:48,230 --> 00:21:49,420 construction problems-- 423 00:21:49,420 --> 00:21:51,750 like Whirlwind, SAGE-- 424 00:21:51,750 --> 00:21:55,010 engineering development or applications of science rather 425 00:21:55,010 --> 00:21:59,320 than fundamental scientific inquiry. 426 00:21:59,320 --> 00:22:01,720 We must be careful lest the great preponderance of 427 00:22:01,720 --> 00:22:04,930 activities of this type divert interest from the more 428 00:22:04,930 --> 00:22:08,610 fundamental aspects of scientific research. 429 00:22:08,610 --> 00:22:11,230 And the third concern is the preponderance of military 430 00:22:11,230 --> 00:22:13,490 projects in the sponsored programs. 431 00:22:13,490 --> 00:22:14,380 Two difficulties-- 432 00:22:14,380 --> 00:22:17,390 first, national security requires some of 433 00:22:17,390 --> 00:22:20,040 it be done in secret. 434 00:22:20,040 --> 00:22:22,710 And second, it would be unfortunate for MIT to become 435 00:22:22,710 --> 00:22:25,530 regarded as an institution that is dependent on the 436 00:22:25,530 --> 00:22:28,200 development of war weapons as it is for an industrial 437 00:22:28,200 --> 00:22:29,370 organization to be [? required ?] 438 00:22:29,370 --> 00:22:32,050 in a similar light. 439 00:22:32,050 --> 00:22:34,100 We suggest that future planning should look forward 440 00:22:34,100 --> 00:22:36,340 to the possibility of increased emphasis on 441 00:22:36,340 --> 00:22:38,640 activities more directly related to the public 442 00:22:38,640 --> 00:22:38,920 welfare." 443 00:22:38,920 --> 00:22:41,770 This is a very interesting moment where major people at 444 00:22:41,770 --> 00:22:44,470 MIT get together and they say, is this really the world that 445 00:22:44,470 --> 00:22:45,740 we want to live in? 446 00:22:45,740 --> 00:22:47,030 What's happening to MIT? 447 00:22:47,030 --> 00:22:48,640 Is this really a good idea? 448 00:22:48,640 --> 00:22:52,630 And again, that's 1949, right-- really, the year 449 00:22:52,630 --> 00:22:54,930 before the Cold War really hits. 450 00:22:54,930 --> 00:22:57,830 And a lot of people feel those concerns were sort of buried 451 00:22:57,830 --> 00:23:01,550 throughout the '50s, in a way, as the Institute became more 452 00:23:01,550 --> 00:23:04,630 and more dependent on these things. 453 00:23:04,630 --> 00:23:08,700 A couple other things to mention from that period. 454 00:23:08,700 --> 00:23:12,730 Baker House is built in 1947, and it's really the beginning. 455 00:23:12,730 --> 00:23:14,470 We've talked about this before, I think, of the 456 00:23:14,470 --> 00:23:17,980 residential part of campus growing on the west side of 457 00:23:17,980 --> 00:23:22,810 Mass Ave. and then on down the street, of course. 458 00:23:22,810 --> 00:23:24,880 The other dorms are built then. 459 00:23:24,880 --> 00:23:28,870 The mid-century convocation is 1949, when Winston Churchill 460 00:23:28,870 --> 00:23:30,600 comes to town and speaks. 461 00:23:30,600 --> 00:23:34,420 And, again, sort of says MIT has an obligation to think, 462 00:23:34,420 --> 00:23:37,160 not just about the sciences and technology it's creating, 463 00:23:37,160 --> 00:23:39,110 but what are the social implications of those 464 00:23:39,110 --> 00:23:40,200 technologies. 465 00:23:40,200 --> 00:23:42,670 And that's when-- 466 00:23:42,670 --> 00:23:45,330 the School of Humanities and Social Sciences is founded, 467 00:23:45,330 --> 00:23:51,180 essentially, right after he says that in 1949. 468 00:23:51,180 --> 00:23:54,130 And also at that mid-century convocation is the 469 00:23:54,130 --> 00:23:58,760 inauguration of James Frank Killian-- 470 00:23:58,760 --> 00:24:00,620 James Killian, James R. Killian, 471 00:24:00,620 --> 00:24:02,100 forget his middle name-- 472 00:24:02,100 --> 00:24:03,890 as president. 473 00:24:03,890 --> 00:24:08,700 He's the first alumni, alumnus, to become president, 474 00:24:08,700 --> 00:24:09,660 which is kind of interesting. 475 00:24:09,660 --> 00:24:14,640 It took almost 100 years for that to happen. 476 00:24:14,640 --> 00:24:19,010 And he's as much of a kind of executive manager, not a 477 00:24:19,010 --> 00:24:22,330 career scientist, in the way that his predecessor Karl 478 00:24:22,330 --> 00:24:23,700 Compton was. 479 00:24:23,700 --> 00:24:27,220 He really ran MIT during World War II when Compton, as we 480 00:24:27,220 --> 00:24:31,480 mentioned, was off around the globe getting these weapons 481 00:24:31,480 --> 00:24:33,210 into service. 482 00:24:33,210 --> 00:24:37,435 So what is the end of this sort of early Cold War period? 483 00:24:44,100 --> 00:24:47,940 When does the world that this film is describing really come 484 00:24:47,940 --> 00:24:49,190 to a shocking end? 485 00:24:52,786 --> 00:24:53,720 AUDIENCE: Sputnik. 486 00:24:53,720 --> 00:24:54,020 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 487 00:24:54,020 --> 00:24:57,740 October 4, 1957 you have Sputnik. 488 00:24:57,740 --> 00:24:59,770 We read a piece about that. 489 00:24:59,770 --> 00:25:02,230 And there is this just this incredible sense of shock. 490 00:25:02,230 --> 00:25:04,670 You can see from this video-- 491 00:25:04,670 --> 00:25:09,600 I actually don't remember what the year on this was-- 492 00:25:09,600 --> 00:25:15,310 1956, so right before then. 493 00:25:15,310 --> 00:25:19,400 And there's a sort of sense of arrogant confidence that we're 494 00:25:19,400 --> 00:25:23,300 doing everything right, and the whole world follows us. 495 00:25:23,300 --> 00:25:26,760 Couple people raised this in the response papers, too. 496 00:25:26,760 --> 00:25:28,280 And then Sputnik is launched. 497 00:25:28,280 --> 00:25:31,510 And it's this incredible shock to the American 498 00:25:31,510 --> 00:25:33,660 system because suddenly-- 499 00:25:33,660 --> 00:25:37,700 it's somewhat similar to the explosion 500 00:25:37,700 --> 00:25:39,640 of the Soviet H-bomb. 501 00:25:39,640 --> 00:25:40,980 Remember, we come out of the war. 502 00:25:40,980 --> 00:25:43,410 We have this world-changing new weapon and 503 00:25:43,410 --> 00:25:44,860 nobody else has it. 504 00:25:44,860 --> 00:25:47,420 And then, not only the Soviets get that one, but 505 00:25:47,420 --> 00:25:50,750 they get the A-bomb. 506 00:25:50,750 --> 00:25:55,860 They get the H-bomb, also, in very short order. 507 00:25:55,860 --> 00:25:59,950 And there's a lot happening in the '50s, and there's a lot of 508 00:25:59,950 --> 00:26:00,960 debate going on. 509 00:26:00,960 --> 00:26:05,680 And people see space, somewhat like computing, as sort of 510 00:26:05,680 --> 00:26:07,140 like this exotic new field. 511 00:26:07,140 --> 00:26:09,210 Nobody's quite sure what it's good for, but it must be 512 00:26:09,210 --> 00:26:11,710 important for the military somehow. 513 00:26:11,710 --> 00:26:13,700 And there's a lot of debate about that. 514 00:26:13,700 --> 00:26:16,930 Meanwhile, President Eisenhower is this sort of 515 00:26:16,930 --> 00:26:19,360 interesting, ironic figure in that we have a military 516 00:26:19,360 --> 00:26:21,480 general in the White House, which doesn't happen that 517 00:26:21,480 --> 00:26:24,030 often in American history. 518 00:26:24,030 --> 00:26:26,870 And yet, at the same time, he's a conservative 519 00:26:26,870 --> 00:26:27,450 Republican. 520 00:26:27,450 --> 00:26:29,410 He wants to keep government small. 521 00:26:29,410 --> 00:26:34,300 He wants to rein things in and control military spending as 522 00:26:34,300 --> 00:26:35,150 best he can. 523 00:26:35,150 --> 00:26:38,460 He actually calls military spending theft at one point. 524 00:26:41,810 --> 00:26:46,550 But in a certain sense, he's pushed by the forces of 525 00:26:46,550 --> 00:26:49,050 history in ways that he's not able to control and is, 526 00:26:49,050 --> 00:26:57,030 actually, not very sensitive to what Sputnik means. 527 00:26:57,030 --> 00:26:59,550 And a lot of people aren't, even as soon as 528 00:26:59,550 --> 00:27:01,220 it first goes up. 529 00:27:01,220 --> 00:27:04,010 And somebody mentioned this about-- 530 00:27:04,010 --> 00:27:05,550 why wasn't the US first? 531 00:27:05,550 --> 00:27:08,330 Well, partly the US wasn't first because they didn't see 532 00:27:08,330 --> 00:27:10,740 that being first was going to be a priority. 533 00:27:10,740 --> 00:27:16,300 And it wasn't, necessarily, an objective comparison of US 534 00:27:16,300 --> 00:27:20,200 technical competence versus Soviet technical competence. 535 00:27:20,200 --> 00:27:23,035 That's how most people in the world, including in Congress 536 00:27:23,035 --> 00:27:26,310 and the American public and the media, read it, but it 537 00:27:26,310 --> 00:27:30,060 wasn't necessarily that way. 538 00:27:30,060 --> 00:27:32,270 Eisenhower was very concerned about some of the legal 539 00:27:32,270 --> 00:27:33,380 implications of-- 540 00:27:33,380 --> 00:27:36,260 if you send a satellite over somebody's territory, is that 541 00:27:36,260 --> 00:27:41,080 considered an invasion, or is the space above your-- 542 00:27:41,080 --> 00:27:43,840 it had already been legally established that air space is 543 00:27:43,840 --> 00:27:44,620 like territory. 544 00:27:44,620 --> 00:27:46,480 You can't go into it without permission. 545 00:27:46,480 --> 00:27:49,690 But that wasn't established about orbital space. 546 00:27:49,690 --> 00:27:51,530 And they were actually, in some ways, happy. 547 00:27:51,530 --> 00:27:53,590 One of the Assistant Secretaries of Defense 548 00:27:53,590 --> 00:27:56,400 immediately wrote, "The Russians have, in fact, done 549 00:27:56,400 --> 00:28:00,180 us a good turn in establishing the concept of the freedom of 550 00:28:00,180 --> 00:28:04,630 international space." And now we can overfly them with 551 00:28:04,630 --> 00:28:06,430 impunity because they've done it to us. 552 00:28:09,020 --> 00:28:11,240 And so, there was this sort of question. 553 00:28:11,240 --> 00:28:13,810 Eisenhower said, "Sputnik does not rouse my 554 00:28:13,810 --> 00:28:15,700 apprehension not one iota. 555 00:28:15,700 --> 00:28:19,950 They've put one small ball into the air." 556 00:28:19,950 --> 00:28:24,790 Yet, the press assumed that this meant Soviet superiority 557 00:28:24,790 --> 00:28:26,100 in technology. 558 00:28:26,100 --> 00:28:27,960 They sort of pushed the panic button. 559 00:28:27,960 --> 00:28:30,670 People in Congress, particularly Lyndon Johnson, 560 00:28:30,670 --> 00:28:33,865 took every opportunity to rub it in. 561 00:28:33,865 --> 00:28:36,610 Let me see if I have the quote. 562 00:28:36,610 --> 00:28:41,750 Because the US military said, oh, that's not a big deal. 563 00:28:41,750 --> 00:28:43,660 We have four projects that are going to get that 564 00:28:43,660 --> 00:28:44,980 going, at the time. 565 00:28:44,980 --> 00:28:49,190 And Johnson said, in public, he said, knowing that we have 566 00:28:49,190 --> 00:28:53,800 better rockets on the drawing boards is not very reassuring. 567 00:28:53,800 --> 00:28:56,370 It's like being told that, I suppose, our next model will 568 00:28:56,370 --> 00:28:59,960 have tail fins and automatic windshield wipers, which was 569 00:28:59,960 --> 00:29:03,590 sort of the sarcastic comment about what we're going to do. 570 00:29:03,590 --> 00:29:05,700 What they hadn't really recognized was that space was 571 00:29:05,700 --> 00:29:10,030 this incredibly, symbolically, potent thing and that people 572 00:29:10,030 --> 00:29:13,240 responded to it way out of proportion to what the direct 573 00:29:13,240 --> 00:29:14,740 implications of it were. 574 00:29:14,740 --> 00:29:17,690 If the US had decided that being first in space was 575 00:29:17,690 --> 00:29:20,340 important, they probably could have rushed ahead and gone 576 00:29:20,340 --> 00:29:21,200 first in space. 577 00:29:21,200 --> 00:29:22,020 They didn't. 578 00:29:22,020 --> 00:29:23,970 They had some bureaucratic infighting. 579 00:29:23,970 --> 00:29:26,860 They had the unfortunate failure of another rocket 580 00:29:26,860 --> 00:29:28,780 right after there. 581 00:29:28,780 --> 00:29:33,430 And the world really changed, in 1957, from a science and 582 00:29:33,430 --> 00:29:35,025 technology point of view in this country. 583 00:29:38,680 --> 00:29:45,620 I teach a lot about science policy. 584 00:29:45,620 --> 00:29:47,760 And one of the things you learn about science policy in 585 00:29:47,760 --> 00:29:50,500 this country is that practically every agency that 586 00:29:50,500 --> 00:29:52,780 exists in the federal government concerned with 587 00:29:52,780 --> 00:29:56,240 science and technology arose in response to a crisis of one 588 00:29:56,240 --> 00:29:57,930 kind or another. 589 00:29:57,930 --> 00:30:00,130 The most recent example is the Department of Homeland 590 00:30:00,130 --> 00:30:02,720 Security, which was created after 9/11. 591 00:30:02,720 --> 00:30:04,700 No matter what a good idea they thought it might have 592 00:30:04,700 --> 00:30:07,760 been or not been beforehand, it was a response to crisis. 593 00:30:07,760 --> 00:30:11,200 And after Sputnik, you had several things which were 594 00:30:11,200 --> 00:30:16,470 really quite important for MIT and for the development of 595 00:30:16,470 --> 00:30:17,530 technology. 596 00:30:17,530 --> 00:30:25,390 One was reorganizing R&D in the Defense Department to 597 00:30:25,390 --> 00:30:28,300 avoid what they called technological surprise. 598 00:30:28,300 --> 00:30:32,750 And that involved creating a new agency called the Advanced 599 00:30:32,750 --> 00:30:36,280 Research Project Agency, called ARPA, which 600 00:30:36,280 --> 00:30:37,910 was founded in 1958. 601 00:30:37,910 --> 00:30:42,120 Its first director was a professor from MIT named Jack 602 00:30:42,120 --> 00:30:44,650 Ruina, who's still around. 603 00:30:44,650 --> 00:30:47,420 And I'll talk about that a little bit in a minute. 604 00:30:47,420 --> 00:30:52,880 Vastly increased accelerations in R&D funding and also, of 605 00:30:52,880 --> 00:30:55,940 course, the NACA, National Advisory Committee for 606 00:30:55,940 --> 00:30:59,430 Aeronautics became what? 607 00:30:59,430 --> 00:31:03,520 NASA, National Air and Space Administration in 1958. 608 00:31:03,520 --> 00:31:11,040 Both those agencies were founded in 1958. 609 00:31:11,040 --> 00:31:12,820 And then there's also the National Defense 610 00:31:12,820 --> 00:31:15,190 Education Act in 1958. 611 00:31:15,190 --> 00:31:20,050 This may sound like a long time ago, but most, if not 612 00:31:20,050 --> 00:31:21,410 many, of your professors-- 613 00:31:21,410 --> 00:31:23,080 if they're older, age 50-- 614 00:31:23,080 --> 00:31:26,920 were probably educated with funds from that Act, including 615 00:31:26,920 --> 00:31:28,010 President Susan Hockfield. 616 00:31:28,010 --> 00:31:31,600 She came here-- in her inaugural speech she said, I 617 00:31:31,600 --> 00:31:33,000 was a post-Sputnik child. 618 00:31:33,000 --> 00:31:35,850 I was educated and got into science because there was a 619 00:31:35,850 --> 00:31:39,970 huge push in scientific education in the late '50s and 620 00:31:39,970 --> 00:31:41,800 early '60s to get kids into science. 621 00:31:41,800 --> 00:31:43,400 And I was one of the beneficiaries of that. 622 00:31:43,400 --> 00:31:46,380 So we're very much living in this kind of post-Sputnik 623 00:31:46,380 --> 00:31:47,650 world in that way. 624 00:31:50,730 --> 00:31:53,900 And I want to talk then a little bit 625 00:31:53,900 --> 00:31:56,420 about ARPA and DARPA. 626 00:31:56,420 --> 00:31:59,140 Show you a couple more movies that take this whole same 627 00:31:59,140 --> 00:32:01,870 story, in a way, into another realm. 628 00:32:11,170 --> 00:32:12,950 People have heard of DARPA before this, right? 629 00:32:12,950 --> 00:32:15,260 Has anybody not heard of DARPA? 630 00:32:15,260 --> 00:32:17,980 So, obviously, it's most famous because the internet 631 00:32:17,980 --> 00:32:23,210 started as the ARPANET and was created in very much this 632 00:32:23,210 --> 00:32:27,090 period, slightly after, but only in the early '60s. 633 00:32:27,090 --> 00:32:29,430 And one of the things about computing-- 634 00:32:29,430 --> 00:32:32,240 one of things that's special about DARPA was that it's not 635 00:32:32,240 --> 00:32:35,230 the Office of Naval Research or the Air Force Office of 636 00:32:35,230 --> 00:32:38,560 Scientific Research or the Army Research Lab. 637 00:32:38,560 --> 00:32:41,580 ARPA reports directly to the Secretary of Defense, so it's 638 00:32:41,580 --> 00:32:45,610 outside of all of these inter-service rivalries. 639 00:32:45,610 --> 00:32:48,170 And it doesn't own-- in fact, it tends to stay away from 640 00:32:48,170 --> 00:32:51,990 things like big ships and big airplanes, much like the OSRD 641 00:32:51,990 --> 00:32:55,000 did, and focus on these technologies that are so far 642 00:32:55,000 --> 00:32:56,840 out and wacky that nobody really knows what 643 00:32:56,840 --> 00:32:57,780 they're good for. 644 00:32:57,780 --> 00:32:59,530 At the time, space was one of them. 645 00:32:59,530 --> 00:33:02,530 In fact, ARPA was responsible for space until-- 646 00:33:02,530 --> 00:33:04,900 it was only a few months NASA was created-- 647 00:33:04,900 --> 00:33:06,780 and then they had space taken away from them. 648 00:33:06,780 --> 00:33:08,290 And computing was another one. 649 00:33:08,290 --> 00:33:10,370 That everybody had the sense it was good for something but 650 00:33:10,370 --> 00:33:12,170 nobody really knew what. 651 00:33:12,170 --> 00:33:17,630 And so let me show you a coupleof images, couple of 652 00:33:17,630 --> 00:33:19,960 other neat little films about what some of the ARPA 653 00:33:19,960 --> 00:33:21,210 computing work did. 654 00:33:31,130 --> 00:33:34,550 So that's another kind of late '50s version of this whole 655 00:33:34,550 --> 00:33:40,750 idea of machine control, which is Air Force still and not 656 00:33:40,750 --> 00:33:41,560 ARPA funded. 657 00:33:41,560 --> 00:33:44,125 But then you get into the ARPA-funded stuff. 658 00:34:03,710 --> 00:34:09,199 So this is sort of the next logical step in 659 00:34:09,199 --> 00:34:10,400 a lot of this work. 660 00:34:10,400 --> 00:34:14,860 And Ivan Sutherland is someone who's, remarkably, still alive 661 00:34:14,860 --> 00:34:17,710 today, too. 662 00:34:17,710 --> 00:34:20,360 Not that he's remarkably still alive,but. 663 00:34:20,360 --> 00:34:22,270 He went from here out to the University of Utah where he 664 00:34:22,270 --> 00:34:24,230 founded the computer graphics program there. 665 00:34:24,230 --> 00:34:27,050 And practically every fundamental concept in 666 00:34:27,050 --> 00:34:30,150 computer graphics came out of either his work or his lab. 667 00:34:30,150 --> 00:34:33,389 And then his students went on to found Silicon Graphics, 668 00:34:33,389 --> 00:34:41,060 Adobe, many of the other really critical-- 669 00:34:41,060 --> 00:34:43,560 a lot of them worked for Industrial Light and Magic, 670 00:34:43,560 --> 00:34:47,889 the George Lucas company and sort of migrated west, 671 00:34:47,889 --> 00:34:49,969 continuing into Hollywood. 672 00:34:49,969 --> 00:34:53,949 Pixar, that was the other one I was trying to think of. 673 00:34:53,949 --> 00:34:56,219 And that, again, comes from this. 674 00:34:56,219 --> 00:34:58,860 We didn't watch that part of the film on SAGE, but they had 675 00:34:58,860 --> 00:35:01,580 these light pens in SAGE, too, as the beginning of this sort 676 00:35:01,580 --> 00:35:04,180 of graphical user interface. 677 00:35:04,180 --> 00:35:07,050 And then the last one I want to show you about has to do 678 00:35:07,050 --> 00:35:08,300 with time-sharing. 679 00:35:17,940 --> 00:35:21,010 So Corbato is still around. 680 00:35:21,010 --> 00:35:22,530 I saw him last week, and he still 681 00:35:22,530 --> 00:35:23,770 teaches in computer science. 682 00:35:23,770 --> 00:35:28,090 And they came up with this time-sharing system where-- 683 00:35:28,090 --> 00:35:30,335 I mean, how many of you use a console window ever 684 00:35:30,335 --> 00:35:33,550 on your Mac or PC? 685 00:35:33,550 --> 00:35:36,030 So, basically, that's the idea behind time-sharing. 686 00:35:36,030 --> 00:35:39,000 That you have a computer there, before a graphical 687 00:35:39,000 --> 00:35:41,910 interface, that you could type commands and programs to, and 688 00:35:41,910 --> 00:35:43,770 it would respond to you immediately. 689 00:35:43,770 --> 00:35:46,190 Before that, you had only batch processing, where you'd 690 00:35:46,190 --> 00:35:49,710 put your punch cards in at night, and you go home and 691 00:35:49,710 --> 00:35:52,380 come back the next morning, and there would be the thing. 692 00:35:52,380 --> 00:35:54,500 And they're again, following this thread. 693 00:35:54,500 --> 00:35:57,300 There was this idea that you could be so much more creative 694 00:35:57,300 --> 00:36:01,580 with a computer if you could sit there and hack away at it, 695 00:36:01,580 --> 00:36:03,830 and it would respond to you in real time. 696 00:36:03,830 --> 00:36:08,170 And that's really where time-sharing comes from. 697 00:36:08,170 --> 00:36:13,980 That led to a thing called Project MAC in the 1960s, 698 00:36:13,980 --> 00:36:16,010 which was a DARPA funded-- 699 00:36:16,010 --> 00:36:18,530 it was the predecessor to the Laboratory for Computer 700 00:36:18,530 --> 00:36:22,030 Science, which is now CSAIL. 701 00:36:22,030 --> 00:36:25,750 And Project MAC was run by Bob Fano, who I mentioned before. 702 00:36:25,750 --> 00:36:28,860 And had all these different kinds of creative computing 703 00:36:28,860 --> 00:36:32,180 things inside it, including a lot of Minsky's work in AI, 704 00:36:32,180 --> 00:36:36,030 although they split out and formed a separate AI lab. 705 00:36:36,030 --> 00:36:39,000 Then they came together with CSAIL. 706 00:36:39,000 --> 00:36:42,640 And all these sort of time-sharing experiments, the 707 00:36:42,640 --> 00:36:47,150 origins of a lot of the late-night hacker culture from 708 00:36:47,150 --> 00:36:49,400 MIT, come from people working late at night 709 00:36:49,400 --> 00:36:51,790 on Project MAC projects. 710 00:36:51,790 --> 00:36:55,140 A lot of the early computer games, Spacewar and whatnot, 711 00:36:55,140 --> 00:36:57,180 were developed in that context. 712 00:36:57,180 --> 00:37:00,920 And even a lot of the early later stuff for PCs, like 713 00:37:00,920 --> 00:37:05,090 spreadsheets, sort of came out of a 714 00:37:05,090 --> 00:37:08,030 Project MAC sort of setting. 715 00:37:08,030 --> 00:37:10,540 And then I also mentioned, of course, the internet, or the 716 00:37:10,540 --> 00:37:13,950 early ARPANET, one of the first nodes on 717 00:37:13,950 --> 00:37:15,820 the ARPANET was MIT. 718 00:37:15,820 --> 00:37:18,740 A lot of the first routers were built by a company called 719 00:37:18,740 --> 00:37:21,640 Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, which still exists here, sort 720 00:37:21,640 --> 00:37:22,390 of down the street. 721 00:37:22,390 --> 00:37:25,970 So there's this sort of continuous thread that's then 722 00:37:25,970 --> 00:37:33,620 updated through all these different crises and periods 723 00:37:33,620 --> 00:37:34,260 and whatnot. 724 00:37:34,260 --> 00:37:39,760 And through the '60s, that's sort of how this very, very 725 00:37:39,760 --> 00:37:42,930 heavily military still, but sort of different agencies and 726 00:37:42,930 --> 00:37:47,250 different contexts bears on the campus. 727 00:37:47,250 --> 00:37:47,730 I think you're right on. 728 00:37:47,730 --> 00:37:51,780 I mean, I think the atomic bomb had a lot to do with-- 729 00:37:51,780 --> 00:37:55,420 it's hard for us to imagine, but before 730 00:37:55,420 --> 00:37:56,690 World War II, two things. 731 00:37:56,690 --> 00:37:59,430 First of all, science was mostly the realm of 732 00:37:59,430 --> 00:38:02,840 pointy-headed professors and was very interesting and 733 00:38:02,840 --> 00:38:05,610 philosophically important but didn't always feel like it had 734 00:38:05,610 --> 00:38:08,930 a big impact on daily life and certainly not on public 735 00:38:08,930 --> 00:38:10,510 policy, per se. 736 00:38:10,510 --> 00:38:13,250 Again, the US government was hardly involved in the 737 00:38:13,250 --> 00:38:16,470 scientific world. 738 00:38:16,470 --> 00:38:18,820 Maybe in the world of agriculture it seemed to have 739 00:38:18,820 --> 00:38:20,460 a big impact. 740 00:38:20,460 --> 00:38:22,410 Most of industry didn't have a lot of science 741 00:38:22,410 --> 00:38:24,380 associated with it. 742 00:38:24,380 --> 00:38:26,950 And it really took the atomic bomb, not just for technology, 743 00:38:26,950 --> 00:38:29,800 but also for science itself, the idea that it-- 744 00:38:29,800 --> 00:38:32,740 like something that presidents should care about. 745 00:38:32,740 --> 00:38:34,490 I mean, even-- 746 00:38:34,490 --> 00:38:38,070 you look at the scientific revolution and the Copernican 747 00:38:38,070 --> 00:38:39,170 view of the universe-- 748 00:38:39,170 --> 00:38:40,430 doesn't affect the way I govern my 749 00:38:40,430 --> 00:38:43,210 kingdom an awful lot. 750 00:38:43,210 --> 00:38:46,470 And secondly, same thing with technology, where the idea 751 00:38:46,470 --> 00:38:49,370 today that whoever has the best technology wins the war 752 00:38:49,370 --> 00:38:51,490 was just not an accepted idea. 753 00:38:51,490 --> 00:38:54,620 And there was no real evidence for it up until that point. 754 00:38:54,620 --> 00:38:57,020 Maybe a little bit here in the Naval arms race around the 755 00:38:57,020 --> 00:39:02,040 turn of the 19th century, the turn of the 20th century. 756 00:39:02,040 --> 00:39:08,480 But today, almost everyone who is a leader in the military is 757 00:39:08,480 --> 00:39:11,020 trained in engineering in one way or another, not everybody 758 00:39:11,020 --> 00:39:12,560 but a very large amount of them. 759 00:39:12,560 --> 00:39:16,150 That was not true, even at the beginning of World War II. 760 00:39:16,150 --> 00:39:18,490 Military science was this other thing. 761 00:39:18,490 --> 00:39:20,640 There was this whole sort of tradition about fighting wars. 762 00:39:20,640 --> 00:39:23,580 There still is, still very prominent. 763 00:39:23,580 --> 00:39:25,850 And it took World War II to really bring 764 00:39:25,850 --> 00:39:28,970 those two ideas together. 765 00:39:28,970 --> 00:39:31,110 And even then it was still a little bit under question 766 00:39:31,110 --> 00:39:33,140 because it was really about who had the most planes and 767 00:39:33,140 --> 00:39:36,320 the most tanks, not always the best tanks and the best guns. 768 00:39:39,320 --> 00:39:43,030 Then, to some degree, you can say that Bush sort of served 769 00:39:43,030 --> 00:39:45,010 as the president's science adviser during the 770 00:39:45,010 --> 00:39:45,870 Second World War. 771 00:39:45,870 --> 00:39:48,870 But, again, most of the decisions to be made were 772 00:39:48,870 --> 00:39:51,370 either grand political decisions for the president as 773 00:39:51,370 --> 00:39:57,510 far as how to be allied with the Soviet Union and how to 774 00:39:57,510 --> 00:40:02,440 work with the British. 775 00:40:02,440 --> 00:40:05,130 And at the same time, military decisions-- 776 00:40:05,130 --> 00:40:06,160 where do we invade? 777 00:40:06,160 --> 00:40:07,560 At what time do we do it? 778 00:40:07,560 --> 00:40:09,770 And there's technologies that bear on that, but they're not 779 00:40:09,770 --> 00:40:11,990 things that rise to the presidential level. 780 00:40:11,990 --> 00:40:14,480 It's really during the Cold War that you see the 781 00:40:14,480 --> 00:40:16,970 prevalence of atomic weapons and ICBMs. 782 00:40:16,970 --> 00:40:22,300 Again, ICBMs don't really come out until the late '50s. 783 00:40:22,300 --> 00:40:26,170 It's all through the Cold War you're living with bombers and 784 00:40:26,170 --> 00:40:28,730 nuclear bombs that are as big as this room that you need a 785 00:40:28,730 --> 00:40:30,350 huge bomber to deliver. 786 00:40:30,350 --> 00:40:32,340 That's why something like SAGE came out. 787 00:40:32,340 --> 00:40:37,030 It's only around the late '50s you get this sense of mutual 788 00:40:37,030 --> 00:40:39,150 assured destruction, where we've got all these missiles 789 00:40:39,150 --> 00:40:40,345 ready to go, and they've got all these 790 00:40:40,345 --> 00:40:41,670 missiles ready to go. 791 00:40:41,670 --> 00:40:42,980 That's the world that dominated the 792 00:40:42,980 --> 00:40:46,310 next 30 years or so. 793 00:40:46,310 --> 00:40:49,820 And that's where arms control, different technical issues, 794 00:40:49,820 --> 00:40:52,180 become merged with politics in a way. 795 00:40:52,180 --> 00:40:54,710 And the presidential science adviser-- 796 00:40:54,710 --> 00:40:57,610 it varies from administration to administration-- 797 00:40:57,610 --> 00:41:01,150 but it's never been as prominent a position as it was 798 00:41:01,150 --> 00:41:05,290 when Killian and Wiesner were in that job. 799 00:41:05,290 --> 00:41:09,620 Nixon actually outright abolished it in the '70s, 800 00:41:09,620 --> 00:41:11,460 didn't want it all. 801 00:41:11,460 --> 00:41:14,000 Anybody know why that's a troubled position? 802 00:41:14,000 --> 00:41:16,360 So it's sort of science policy talk more than an MIT talk, 803 00:41:16,360 --> 00:41:17,610 but it's relevant. 804 00:41:19,990 --> 00:41:21,700 There's an inherent contradiction in being the 805 00:41:21,700 --> 00:41:22,950 president's science advisor. 806 00:41:29,830 --> 00:41:32,290 AUDIENCE: It's not pure science [? anymore ?] 807 00:41:32,290 --> 00:41:32,800 PROFESSOR: That's true. 808 00:41:32,800 --> 00:41:34,050 There's a lot of people who do that. 809 00:41:36,610 --> 00:41:40,920 So, first of all, are you representing to the president 810 00:41:40,920 --> 00:41:46,510 the conclusions of the scientific community, or are 811 00:41:46,510 --> 00:41:49,650 you representing the president's opinion and his 812 00:41:49,650 --> 00:41:53,860 policy goals to the scientific community? 813 00:41:53,860 --> 00:41:55,170 Right? 814 00:41:55,170 --> 00:42:01,440 And those things can easily be 180 degrees at odds. 815 00:42:01,440 --> 00:42:03,960 In fact, the story was-- this was all kind of leaked in the 816 00:42:03,960 --> 00:42:04,640 newspaper-- 817 00:42:04,640 --> 00:42:07,300 that George W. Bush asked Chuck Vest 818 00:42:07,300 --> 00:42:08,550 to be science adviser. 819 00:42:08,550 --> 00:42:11,460 And Vest said no because he felt he would be forced to 820 00:42:11,460 --> 00:42:13,900 take positions on things like climate change that he didn't 821 00:42:13,900 --> 00:42:16,280 think were going to be acceptable to him. 822 00:42:16,280 --> 00:42:19,740 So, if you look at what the Secretary of Defense does, or 823 00:42:19,740 --> 00:42:22,670 even the head of NASA, their job is to take the president's 824 00:42:22,670 --> 00:42:25,670 policies and implement them through the agency. 825 00:42:25,670 --> 00:42:27,980 And any time a big decision comes up you'll always see 826 00:42:27,980 --> 00:42:29,760 them on TV saying, well, that's for the 827 00:42:29,760 --> 00:42:31,060 president to decide. 828 00:42:31,060 --> 00:42:33,450 Robert Gates doesn't decide whether we're in 829 00:42:33,450 --> 00:42:34,460 Afghanistan or not. 830 00:42:34,460 --> 00:42:37,060 That's the president's job to decide that. 831 00:42:37,060 --> 00:42:38,370 Well, what happens when-- 832 00:42:41,310 --> 00:42:44,300 in the defense world, at least there's an understanding that 833 00:42:44,300 --> 00:42:46,160 decisions on defense are sort of partly 834 00:42:46,160 --> 00:42:47,760 political and whatnot. 835 00:42:47,760 --> 00:42:49,830 In the science world that's not so clear. 836 00:42:49,830 --> 00:42:52,810 And there's any number of cases where the president's 837 00:42:52,810 --> 00:42:57,060 policy preferences are at odds with what the science says, 838 00:42:57,060 --> 00:43:00,650 and that was very clear in the previous administration. 839 00:43:00,650 --> 00:43:03,290 But I'm sure that John Holdren, who is now the 840 00:43:03,290 --> 00:43:06,310 president's science adviser, who is a much more powerful 841 00:43:06,310 --> 00:43:10,770 guy and better-respected science adviser and scientist 842 00:43:10,770 --> 00:43:15,970 than the previous guy was, gets pulled in a lot of 843 00:43:15,970 --> 00:43:18,520 competing directions all the time. 844 00:43:18,520 --> 00:43:21,400 So it's a very difficult job and not 845 00:43:21,400 --> 00:43:23,080 everyone succeeds at that. 846 00:43:23,080 --> 00:43:24,600 I thought it was interesting that, even in the little, 847 00:43:24,600 --> 00:43:27,470 short film clip I showed you about the APT programming 848 00:43:27,470 --> 00:43:30,300 language, the guy on the board said, well, now there's a new 849 00:43:30,300 --> 00:43:34,320 kind of person in here who is the kind of machine-oriented 850 00:43:34,320 --> 00:43:35,730 programmer. 851 00:43:35,730 --> 00:43:40,150 And he's going to take these requirements and-- 852 00:43:40,150 --> 00:43:41,840 let me give you a little background on David Noble, 853 00:43:41,840 --> 00:43:44,410 which is actually interesting. 854 00:43:44,410 --> 00:43:49,670 He was a professor here in the kind of early to mid-1980s and 855 00:43:49,670 --> 00:43:54,580 was in STS and did a lot of collaboration with the 856 00:43:54,580 --> 00:43:55,690 engineering departments. 857 00:43:55,690 --> 00:44:00,060 And he wrote this book that was extremely critical of both 858 00:44:00,060 --> 00:44:02,740 the Air Force and MIT's role in numerically-controlled 859 00:44:02,740 --> 00:44:04,060 machine tools. 860 00:44:04,060 --> 00:44:07,010 And he was turned down for tenure a couple years later, 861 00:44:07,010 --> 00:44:09,790 and ended up suing MIT. 862 00:44:09,790 --> 00:44:13,660 He said because he was a Marxist, and they turned him 863 00:44:13,660 --> 00:44:16,210 down for tenure because he was a Marxist. 864 00:44:16,210 --> 00:44:19,050 MIT's response was, you didn't get denied tenure because 865 00:44:19,050 --> 00:44:19,700 you're a Marxist. 866 00:44:19,700 --> 00:44:21,890 You got denied tenure because you're a jerk. 867 00:44:21,890 --> 00:44:23,510 And that's actually legal. 868 00:44:23,510 --> 00:44:25,430 It's not legal to deny tenure to someone 869 00:44:25,430 --> 00:44:26,460 because of their politics. 870 00:44:26,460 --> 00:44:29,590 It is legal to deny tenure to them because of their personal 871 00:44:29,590 --> 00:44:31,060 style of interaction. 872 00:44:31,060 --> 00:44:32,500 I don't know many of the stories there. 873 00:44:32,500 --> 00:44:33,980 And I actually only have met the guy once. 874 00:44:33,980 --> 00:44:37,490 He died about three months ago at a fairly young age. 875 00:44:40,250 --> 00:44:46,280 And he's a well-respected historian. 876 00:44:46,280 --> 00:44:48,720 And he's always raised these sort of questions about these 877 00:44:48,720 --> 00:44:50,330 kinds of arrangements. 878 00:44:50,330 --> 00:44:52,980 And it's very worth reading it because of the questions it 879 00:44:52,980 --> 00:44:56,050 raises, although I do think he misses a couple of things-- 880 00:44:56,050 --> 00:44:58,850 kind of like what you said. 881 00:44:58,850 --> 00:45:01,640 In his world-- and I don't remember if this comes through 882 00:45:01,640 --> 00:45:03,670 in that essay or if it's in the larger book-- 883 00:45:06,600 --> 00:45:10,980 people who operate computers are managers, and people who 884 00:45:10,980 --> 00:45:14,680 operate machines are workers. 885 00:45:14,680 --> 00:45:17,900 And anything like numerically-controlled machine 886 00:45:17,900 --> 00:45:20,170 tools has that worker-- 887 00:45:20,170 --> 00:45:23,150 white-collar managers oppressing the workers. 888 00:45:23,150 --> 00:45:25,100 I mean, first of all today, almost everybody sits in front 889 00:45:25,100 --> 00:45:26,870 of a computer. 890 00:45:26,870 --> 00:45:30,050 Many, many jobs-- some of them are high-level executives and 891 00:45:30,050 --> 00:45:32,140 some of them are blue-collar operatives-- 892 00:45:32,140 --> 00:45:35,220 but the fact that you're using a computer has almost nothing 893 00:45:35,220 --> 00:45:39,610 to say about what level job you're in. 894 00:45:39,610 --> 00:45:42,170 And in the world that he came out of, he only had this 895 00:45:42,170 --> 00:45:44,660 association of white-collar managers. 896 00:45:44,660 --> 00:45:48,160 So anytime anything became computerized, it also became 897 00:45:48,160 --> 00:45:49,620 white collarized for him. 898 00:45:49,620 --> 00:45:52,570 Where, actually, we actually know today that the opposite 899 00:45:52,570 --> 00:45:53,500 is often the case. 900 00:45:53,500 --> 00:45:56,140 That when something becomes computerized, the skill level 901 00:45:56,140 --> 00:45:58,510 of the people who operate the computer is lower than the 902 00:45:58,510 --> 00:46:04,290 skill level of the people who did it before it was operated. 903 00:46:04,290 --> 00:46:06,640 And it's funny because he actually wrote an essay, after 904 00:46:06,640 --> 00:46:09,010 he wrote the book, about a study of machine tools in 905 00:46:09,010 --> 00:46:11,570 Sweden, where he was like, oh look, they did it this way. 906 00:46:11,570 --> 00:46:14,210 It's much more democratic and open, the way they use 907 00:46:14,210 --> 00:46:16,330 numerically-controlled machine tools. 908 00:46:16,330 --> 00:46:21,860 And there's an implication in his work that a given 909 00:46:21,860 --> 00:46:25,540 technology has a given social organization that comes along 910 00:46:25,540 --> 00:46:28,290 with it because of what's inherent in the technology. 911 00:46:28,290 --> 00:46:31,180 That's basically what he says in that "Command 912 00:46:31,180 --> 00:46:33,790 Performance" piece. 913 00:46:33,790 --> 00:46:38,370 And the jargon in the field is called, it's deterministic. 914 00:46:38,370 --> 00:46:41,030 A certain technology dictates a certain set of social 915 00:46:41,030 --> 00:46:41,970 conditions. 916 00:46:41,970 --> 00:46:44,105 But actually, if there's one thing we know from research in 917 00:46:44,105 --> 00:46:46,730 the field is that you can have lots of different social 918 00:46:46,730 --> 00:46:49,940 organizations around any particular technology. 919 00:46:49,940 --> 00:46:53,150 You can use the internet as a tool of authoritarian 920 00:46:53,150 --> 00:46:56,050 repression, or you can use the internet as a tool of people's 921 00:46:56,050 --> 00:46:57,260 liberation. 922 00:46:57,260 --> 00:47:02,020 Depends how you use it, but the tool itself can be used in 923 00:47:02,020 --> 00:47:02,890 different ways. 924 00:47:02,890 --> 00:47:05,270 I don't think that Noble would have seen himself, at the 925 00:47:05,270 --> 00:47:08,240 time, as a technological determinist, although, to some 926 00:47:08,240 --> 00:47:10,630 degree, all Marxists are technological determinists 927 00:47:10,630 --> 00:47:12,620 because Marx was a technological determinist. 928 00:47:12,620 --> 00:47:14,620 He said-- 929 00:47:14,620 --> 00:47:16,350 I'm not going to get the quote exactly right, but 930 00:47:16,350 --> 00:47:17,680 it's sort of like-- 931 00:47:17,680 --> 00:47:20,800 the spinning wheel gives you feudal society. 932 00:47:20,800 --> 00:47:25,080 Industrial production gives you capitalist society. 933 00:47:25,080 --> 00:47:26,920 And he, more or less, put it that way. 934 00:47:26,920 --> 00:47:31,290 And we actually know that's just empirically incorrect. 935 00:47:31,290 --> 00:47:33,410 What Noble did say that I think is really valuable to 936 00:47:33,410 --> 00:47:37,400 keep in mind that underlies a lot of the stuff that we saw 937 00:47:37,400 --> 00:47:40,680 in the video is that-- 938 00:47:40,680 --> 00:47:45,030 what are the implications of all of this military funding 939 00:47:45,030 --> 00:47:49,160 going to support university research and engineering 940 00:47:49,160 --> 00:47:51,260 research and scientific research? 941 00:47:51,260 --> 00:47:54,770 And I've tried to show the connections between where the 942 00:47:54,770 --> 00:47:57,910 money comes from and what the ideas are that got created. 943 00:47:57,910 --> 00:48:00,860 And I think one of the most legitimate criticisms of it is 944 00:48:00,860 --> 00:48:07,780 that military systems end up focusing almost exclusively on 945 00:48:07,780 --> 00:48:09,530 performance. 946 00:48:09,530 --> 00:48:11,760 And that's kind of the title of his piece, "Command 947 00:48:11,760 --> 00:48:17,710 Performance." That everyone was always pushing toward 948 00:48:17,710 --> 00:48:23,210 thinner wings and more precise tools and, obviously, faster 949 00:48:23,210 --> 00:48:28,140 airplanes, bigger bombs, heavier rockets. 950 00:48:28,140 --> 00:48:29,440 You don't care about costs. 951 00:48:29,440 --> 00:48:32,180 You don't, necessarily, care as much about schedule, other 952 00:48:32,180 --> 00:48:35,280 things which are sort of related like maintainability, 953 00:48:35,280 --> 00:48:37,090 sustainability. 954 00:48:37,090 --> 00:48:40,080 Lots of other ways to think about how a system performs 955 00:48:40,080 --> 00:48:43,440 besides simply performance. 956 00:48:43,440 --> 00:48:46,100 You know, an interesting example of that was the-- has 957 00:48:46,100 --> 00:48:48,792 anybody ever heard of the SST? 958 00:48:48,792 --> 00:48:51,666 What was the SST? 959 00:48:51,666 --> 00:48:54,558 AUDIENCE: Boeing's supersonic transport [INAUDIBLE]. 960 00:48:54,558 --> 00:48:56,010 Newer version of the Concorde. 961 00:48:56,010 --> 00:48:56,410 PROFESSOR: Right. 962 00:48:56,410 --> 00:49:01,210 So Boeing was trying to make, in the '60s, a supersonic 963 00:49:01,210 --> 00:49:03,600 transport--it was actually a competitor to the Concorde-- 964 00:49:03,600 --> 00:49:05,100 that would be Mach 3. 965 00:49:05,100 --> 00:49:06,880 And it was a big American project. 966 00:49:06,880 --> 00:49:10,290 And the idea was, gee, the Wright brothers were going at 967 00:49:10,290 --> 00:49:13,750 20 miles an hour, and we went 200 miles an hour in 1940. 968 00:49:13,750 --> 00:49:15,730 And we're doing 500 miles an hour with jet 969 00:49:15,730 --> 00:49:17,040 aircraft in the '60s. 970 00:49:17,040 --> 00:49:19,660 Clearly, the whole world is going to go supersonic. 971 00:49:19,660 --> 00:49:22,070 And if you focus only on performance, as the military 972 00:49:22,070 --> 00:49:24,000 does, and sure enough, military systems go 973 00:49:24,000 --> 00:49:24,670 supersonic. 974 00:49:24,670 --> 00:49:27,240 And that's the faster, the better, generally. 975 00:49:27,240 --> 00:49:29,510 Also just straight economics of-- 976 00:49:29,510 --> 00:49:30,470 I just read this the other day. 977 00:49:30,470 --> 00:49:33,480 The Concorde took as much fuel to put 100 people across the 978 00:49:33,480 --> 00:49:36,380 Atlantic as a 747 takes to put 400 979 00:49:36,380 --> 00:49:37,490 people across the Atlantic. 980 00:49:37,490 --> 00:49:40,300 So, just run the numbers on that. 981 00:49:40,300 --> 00:49:41,396 AUDIENCE: Also, there was the huge noise 982 00:49:41,396 --> 00:49:42,460 problem with the Concorde. 983 00:49:42,460 --> 00:49:43,340 PROFESSOR: Noise problems. 984 00:49:43,340 --> 00:49:45,956 AUDIENCE: Anyone who lived anywhere near the place where 985 00:49:45,956 --> 00:49:50,170 it lands with the rumbling. 986 00:49:50,170 --> 00:49:50,960 PROFESSOR: Exactly. 987 00:49:50,960 --> 00:49:53,450 So actually it's a very interesting moment because, in 988 00:49:53,450 --> 00:49:57,390 the civilian world, the cancellation of the SST and a 989 00:49:57,390 --> 00:50:01,430 lot of other things that happened in 1970 are all about 990 00:50:01,430 --> 00:50:02,470 this sort of, like, you know what? 991 00:50:02,470 --> 00:50:04,700 Performance isn't the be all and end all. 992 00:50:04,700 --> 00:50:07,590 There are other things that matter with our systems like, 993 00:50:07,590 --> 00:50:10,070 especially, cost because that's a 994 00:50:10,070 --> 00:50:12,790 straight economic one. 995 00:50:12,790 --> 00:50:16,840 But also environmental impact in a bunch of different ways, 996 00:50:16,840 --> 00:50:20,180 whether it's noise or emissions. 997 00:50:20,180 --> 00:50:23,600 Reliability is a big one that often ends up being cost. 998 00:50:23,600 --> 00:50:27,920 And the reason I'm bringing this up, partly, is it gets us 999 00:50:27,920 --> 00:50:33,490 to a little bit later part of MIT's life in the 1980s. 1000 00:50:33,490 --> 00:50:35,130 What's happening in the 1980s? 1001 00:50:35,130 --> 00:50:37,470 Maybe this is the Sputnik moment of the 1980s. 1002 00:50:37,470 --> 00:50:39,330 Actually, it's not as much of a moment. 1003 00:50:39,330 --> 00:50:41,700 What causes the US a big crisis of 1004 00:50:41,700 --> 00:50:44,510 confidence in the 1980s? 1005 00:50:44,510 --> 00:50:45,890 AUDIENCE: There was a fuel crisis. 1006 00:50:45,890 --> 00:50:48,850 PROFESSOR: OK, the fuel crisis precipitates it for sure. 1007 00:50:48,850 --> 00:50:51,880 That's in the '70s really, 1973. 1008 00:50:51,880 --> 00:50:58,710 What's the big issue in the '80s? 1009 00:50:58,710 --> 00:51:00,168 AUDIENCE: Iran-Contra. 1010 00:51:00,168 --> 00:51:01,630 Iran-Contra, or is that the late 70's? 1011 00:51:01,630 --> 00:51:04,070 PROFESSOR: Yeah, that's political more. 1012 00:51:04,070 --> 00:51:04,790 That's '80s. 1013 00:51:04,790 --> 00:51:07,230 But it's the Japanese car companies 1014 00:51:07,230 --> 00:51:09,393 start eating our lunch. 1015 00:51:09,393 --> 00:51:12,620 And we have the greatest car industry in the world-- 1016 00:51:12,620 --> 00:51:15,410 General Motors and Henry Ford, and we invented it all. 1017 00:51:15,410 --> 00:51:17,710 And suddenly, Toyota and Honda, which were making 1018 00:51:17,710 --> 00:51:20,180 motorcycles, start coming in. 1019 00:51:20,180 --> 00:51:23,440 And not only are they doing well economically, but their 1020 00:51:23,440 --> 00:51:24,810 cars are better. 1021 00:51:24,810 --> 00:51:25,720 They get better mileage. 1022 00:51:25,720 --> 00:51:27,060 They're much higher quality. 1023 00:51:27,060 --> 00:51:31,650 And the American car companies just will not listen 1024 00:51:31,650 --> 00:51:32,920 or learn from it. 1025 00:51:32,920 --> 00:51:36,110 And then people say, very much like with 1026 00:51:36,110 --> 00:51:37,260 Sputnik, what do you mean? 1027 00:51:37,260 --> 00:51:39,680 We're the most technologically advanced nation in the world 1028 00:51:39,680 --> 00:51:40,710 with the biggest economy. 1029 00:51:40,710 --> 00:51:44,040 How is it that these car companies from this little 1030 00:51:44,040 --> 00:51:46,530 island that we defeated in World War II are now doing so 1031 00:51:46,530 --> 00:51:47,860 much better than us? 1032 00:51:47,860 --> 00:51:50,670 And it led to this thing called the crisis of 1033 00:51:50,670 --> 00:51:51,880 competitiveness. 1034 00:51:51,880 --> 00:51:53,250 You may hear that phrase sometimes. 1035 00:51:53,250 --> 00:51:55,160 It was a big issue in the '80s. 1036 00:51:55,160 --> 00:51:57,980 And one of the things people said was, gee, are we not 1037 00:51:57,980 --> 00:51:59,680 spending enough on R&D? 1038 00:51:59,680 --> 00:52:02,460 Now we're spending tons and tons on R&D, but it's all in 1039 00:52:02,460 --> 00:52:06,050 the military realm or so heavily in the military realm. 1040 00:52:06,050 --> 00:52:09,270 And the military is focusing on performance-- 1041 00:52:09,270 --> 00:52:13,460 very, very high-speed computers, very, very advanced 1042 00:52:13,460 --> 00:52:15,450 materials for this, that, and the other thing. 1043 00:52:15,450 --> 00:52:18,990 And none of that technology is getting out of the lab into 1044 00:52:18,990 --> 00:52:21,060 the field as much. 1045 00:52:21,060 --> 00:52:23,740 MIT does a big study in-- 1046 00:52:23,740 --> 00:52:25,910 I want to say it comes out in about 1988-- 1047 00:52:25,910 --> 00:52:28,090 called Made in America. 1048 00:52:28,090 --> 00:52:31,160 And it's edited by Richard Lester, who is now the head of 1049 00:52:31,160 --> 00:52:34,220 nuclear engineering, Michael Dertouzos, who is the Director 1050 00:52:34,220 --> 00:52:37,520 of the Computer Science Laboratory, a few others, 1051 00:52:37,520 --> 00:52:40,510 Lester Thurow, who is the Noble Prize winner, Dean of 1052 00:52:40,510 --> 00:52:43,410 the Sloan School. 1053 00:52:43,410 --> 00:52:45,890 And Made in America sort of says-- 1054 00:52:45,890 --> 00:52:49,190 how do we get the same level of achievement in the 1055 00:52:49,190 --> 00:52:51,910 manufacturing industry in this country that we've got in the 1056 00:52:51,910 --> 00:52:53,680 military industry? 1057 00:52:53,680 --> 00:52:55,770 And there's a whole series of concrete steps that they 1058 00:52:55,770 --> 00:52:56,670 suggest to do that. 1059 00:52:56,670 --> 00:52:59,580 One of them is creating a dual master's program, which is 1060 00:52:59,580 --> 00:53:00,885 still here, called-- 1061 00:53:00,885 --> 00:53:03,190 it was called Leaders for Manufacturing, where you get a 1062 00:53:03,190 --> 00:53:06,290 master's at Sloan and a master's in engineering. 1063 00:53:06,290 --> 00:53:08,650 They changed the name, and I think it's Leaders for Global 1064 00:53:08,650 --> 00:53:11,300 Systems or something now. 1065 00:53:11,300 --> 00:53:16,420 So the competitiveness crisis very much came up as, like, 1066 00:53:16,420 --> 00:53:19,270 this military focuses too much on performance, 1067 00:53:19,270 --> 00:53:21,050 too much only on-- 1068 00:53:21,050 --> 00:53:24,100 if you look in AeroAstro, it's all about supersonic, or 1069 00:53:24,100 --> 00:53:28,580 dynamics, and not enough about more efficient engines or 1070 00:53:28,580 --> 00:53:29,540 cleaner engines. 1071 00:53:29,540 --> 00:53:32,570 And there really was a kind of shift after 1072 00:53:32,570 --> 00:53:35,310 the '80s toward that. 1073 00:53:35,310 --> 00:53:38,640 Interestingly enough, another flip side of that, which a lot 1074 00:53:38,640 --> 00:53:40,400 of people don't realize-- because someone mentioned it 1075 00:53:40,400 --> 00:53:42,830 in one of your response papers that-- 1076 00:53:42,830 --> 00:53:45,530 well, you know, it looks like when I'm in my double E 1077 00:53:45,530 --> 00:53:49,880 classes, I end up learning a lot about consumer technology. 1078 00:53:49,880 --> 00:53:52,330 And I'm building mobile technology and 1079 00:53:52,330 --> 00:53:53,340 mobile this and that. 1080 00:53:53,340 --> 00:53:57,100 And where does all that stuff come from? 1081 00:53:57,100 --> 00:54:00,850 Where do we end up developing advanced, small RF and 1082 00:54:00,850 --> 00:54:03,880 microwave integrated circuits? 1083 00:54:03,880 --> 00:54:06,230 I can tell you that stuff wasn't originally developed 1084 00:54:06,230 --> 00:54:08,130 for the cell phone industry. 1085 00:54:08,130 --> 00:54:10,950 That was all military communications stuff. 1086 00:54:10,950 --> 00:54:13,850 And Qualcomm and a lot of those other big companies 1087 00:54:13,850 --> 00:54:15,770 really developed a lot of those techniques 1088 00:54:15,770 --> 00:54:17,030 early in that world. 1089 00:54:17,030 --> 00:54:20,070 Then, there is a general consensus, probably somewhere 1090 00:54:20,070 --> 00:54:23,200 in the '90s, the sophistication of computation 1091 00:54:23,200 --> 00:54:27,450 and information technology in the commercial world exceeded 1092 00:54:27,450 --> 00:54:29,570 that of what happens in the military world. 1093 00:54:29,570 --> 00:54:32,880 Now I go to meetings and half the problem is, how does the 1094 00:54:32,880 --> 00:54:35,380 Navy and the Air Force take advantage of all the amazing 1095 00:54:35,380 --> 00:54:37,920 stuff that's coming out instead of having obsolete 1096 00:54:37,920 --> 00:54:39,370 electronics and all those things. 1097 00:54:39,370 --> 00:54:42,070 But that was somewhere in there. 1098 00:54:42,070 --> 00:54:42,870 What's their concern? 1099 00:54:42,870 --> 00:54:45,120 Well, actually it was something that was raised by 1100 00:54:45,120 --> 00:54:48,570 Norbert Wiener, late in his career in the early '60s, that 1101 00:54:48,570 --> 00:54:51,260 all of this automatic technology was going to put 1102 00:54:51,260 --> 00:54:53,600 all the workers out of work. 1103 00:54:53,600 --> 00:54:56,140 And I think the Air Force was then concerned-- 1104 00:54:56,140 --> 00:54:58,140 gee, is there going to be a workers' revolt, and we're 1105 00:54:58,140 --> 00:55:02,170 going to be facing a communist revolution sort of thing? 1106 00:55:02,170 --> 00:55:04,720 So when people talked about social implications of 1107 00:55:04,720 --> 00:55:08,740 automation, they talked about technological unemployment, 1108 00:55:08,740 --> 00:55:10,510 essentially. 1109 00:55:10,510 --> 00:55:12,960 Some of which did come to pass, and there's certainly 1110 00:55:12,960 --> 00:55:14,160 fields today. 1111 00:55:14,160 --> 00:55:17,030 I think, today, it gets more called outsourcing than it 1112 00:55:17,030 --> 00:55:22,230 does called replacing workers, but it has the same effect on 1113 00:55:22,230 --> 00:55:23,740 unemployment in this country. 1114 00:55:26,510 --> 00:55:28,390 And it is interesting, especially at a place like 1115 00:55:28,390 --> 00:55:30,810 Boeing, where all the engineers at Boeing are 1116 00:55:30,810 --> 00:55:31,700 basically workers. 1117 00:55:31,700 --> 00:55:33,030 They're unionized. 1118 00:55:33,030 --> 00:55:36,090 And Boeing, these days, makes big decisions based on their 1119 00:55:36,090 --> 00:55:39,270 relationships with their unions, both machinists and 1120 00:55:39,270 --> 00:55:40,570 the engineers. 1121 00:55:40,570 --> 00:55:43,710 And so, again, the clean distinction between factory 1122 00:55:43,710 --> 00:55:47,780 workers as blue collar and white-collar engineers-- 1123 00:55:47,780 --> 00:55:50,460 engineers in many places are more and more like blue-collar 1124 00:55:50,460 --> 00:55:53,590 workers in a lot of ways, partly because of CAD and 1125 00:55:53,590 --> 00:55:55,160 computer-aided design. 1126 00:55:55,160 --> 00:55:58,870 How many people in here have ever designed a circuit, 1127 00:55:58,870 --> 00:56:01,320 actually designed a new circuit that no one's built? 1128 00:56:05,740 --> 00:56:08,570 I mean, I can open up my CAD software, and I get a library 1129 00:56:08,570 --> 00:56:11,680 of all these demo circuits, and I can sort of copy and 1130 00:56:11,680 --> 00:56:12,380 this sort of thing. 1131 00:56:12,380 --> 00:56:15,380 And there's certainly changes that have come into what 1132 00:56:15,380 --> 00:56:18,210 engineering practice means in a lot of different fields 1133 00:56:18,210 --> 00:56:21,970 because of computer-aided design in different ways. 1134 00:56:21,970 --> 00:56:26,500 Which, arguably, maybe makes it easier to outsource jobs in 1135 00:56:26,500 --> 00:56:28,130 ways than it was before. 1136 00:56:28,130 --> 00:56:31,520 Running a university has become a 24-hour job in a way 1137 00:56:31,520 --> 00:56:35,610 that maybe it wasn't always before, partly for reasons 1138 00:56:35,610 --> 00:56:37,870 that all jobs have become so 24-hours. 1139 00:56:37,870 --> 00:56:40,600 And it's just a very big complex place, 1140 00:56:40,600 --> 00:56:42,410 and it's harder for-- 1141 00:56:42,410 --> 00:56:45,470 it's hard to picture an MIT president taking a 1142 00:56:45,470 --> 00:56:47,960 simultaneous job in the government. 1143 00:56:47,960 --> 00:56:50,330 I don't remember what Killian did, if he stepped down when 1144 00:56:50,330 --> 00:56:54,850 he took that job, or if he did them both at the same time and 1145 00:56:54,850 --> 00:56:57,360 for how long. 1146 00:56:57,360 --> 00:57:00,470 And yet, at the same time, the presidents do-- 1147 00:57:00,470 --> 00:57:03,040 like, Chuck Vest chaired one of the big review committees 1148 00:57:03,040 --> 00:57:08,180 on the space station, and it's called the Vest Report. 1149 00:57:08,180 --> 00:57:11,310 And it was kind of a midway design review in the early 1150 00:57:11,310 --> 00:57:14,780 '90s, and the cultural authority of being the MIT 1151 00:57:14,780 --> 00:57:17,240 president, I think, had a lot of impact there. 1152 00:57:17,240 --> 00:57:21,030 And he sat on the President's Council on Competitiveness. 1153 00:57:21,030 --> 00:57:25,560 And I don't know what Susan Hockfield's official titles 1154 00:57:25,560 --> 00:57:28,520 are that way. 1155 00:57:28,520 --> 00:57:30,040 But she does-- 1156 00:57:30,040 --> 00:57:34,230 when Obama rolled out a big energy initiative two or three 1157 00:57:34,230 --> 00:57:36,600 years ago that was part of his administration's science 1158 00:57:36,600 --> 00:57:38,760 policy, she was standing right there next 1159 00:57:38,760 --> 00:57:40,140 to him on the stage. 1160 00:57:40,140 --> 00:57:43,750 So she's very involved with presidential science 1161 00:57:43,750 --> 00:57:46,750 advice in that way. 1162 00:57:46,750 --> 00:57:51,820 And I think it's also true that different presidents just 1163 00:57:51,820 --> 00:57:54,210 emphasize different parts of the role. 1164 00:57:54,210 --> 00:57:55,440 There is a sense-- 1165 00:57:55,440 --> 00:57:59,950 and Chuck Vest was extremely enthusiastic about this-- 1166 00:57:59,950 --> 00:58:04,120 where, from this earlier history of a lot of these 1167 00:58:04,120 --> 00:58:06,660 things you've read about by now, there is a sense that the 1168 00:58:06,660 --> 00:58:10,370 president of MIT is not just in Washington speaking for 1169 00:58:10,370 --> 00:58:14,520 MIT, but is speaking for the research enterprise in general 1170 00:58:14,520 --> 00:58:16,980 and research universities in general. 1171 00:58:16,980 --> 00:58:21,850 And that the kind of privilege of the bully pulpit that you 1172 00:58:21,850 --> 00:58:25,130 get from being the president of MIT is not used to go down 1173 00:58:25,130 --> 00:58:28,440 to Washington to just scoop up more money for Cambridge. 1174 00:58:28,440 --> 00:58:29,930 Clearly, we've seen that happen quite 1175 00:58:29,930 --> 00:58:31,310 a lot in the history. 1176 00:58:31,310 --> 00:58:34,820 But also to go down and speak for research overall and why 1177 00:58:34,820 --> 00:58:37,490 it's important to maintain that in the economy. 1178 00:58:37,490 --> 00:58:41,580 And when Vest became president, which I think was 1179 00:58:41,580 --> 00:58:45,910 '91, was really right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 1180 00:58:45,910 --> 00:58:47,590 And there was this thing people kept talking about 1181 00:58:47,590 --> 00:58:49,460 called the peace dividend. 1182 00:58:49,460 --> 00:58:52,230 And there was the sense that all of that DOD funding-- 1183 00:58:52,230 --> 00:58:53,600 and some of it really did-- was about to 1184 00:58:53,600 --> 00:58:54,980 fall off the cliff. 1185 00:58:54,980 --> 00:58:56,800 And people were really questioning, why are we 1186 00:58:56,800 --> 00:58:59,400 spending money on universities at all. 1187 00:58:59,400 --> 00:59:01,610 When Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House, he basically 1188 00:59:01,610 --> 00:59:06,150 wanted to end it altogether, and Vest, and a lot of related 1189 00:59:06,150 --> 00:59:08,840 similar people, really spoke out against that. 1190 00:59:08,840 --> 00:59:11,110 By the way, that's about to happen again. 1191 00:59:11,110 --> 00:59:14,040 And I do think you'll see Susan Hockfield in Washington 1192 00:59:14,040 --> 00:59:15,980 speaking on that behalf. 1193 00:59:15,980 --> 00:59:16,510 Anybody see her? 1194 00:59:16,510 --> 00:59:19,610 She was on Charlie Rose a couple of months ago with the 1195 00:59:19,610 --> 00:59:21,780 President of Harvard talking about almost 1196 00:59:21,780 --> 00:59:23,930 exactly that topic. 1197 00:59:23,930 --> 00:59:26,300 So I think there's a lot of behind the scenes 1198 00:59:26,300 --> 00:59:27,750 work that goes on. 1199 00:59:27,750 --> 00:59:30,290 It's not necessarily secret or hidden, but it doesn't have a 1200 00:59:30,290 --> 00:59:31,760 big public role. 1201 00:59:31,760 --> 00:59:34,280 And at the same time-- you know, MIT has an office in 1202 00:59:34,280 --> 00:59:35,400 Washington. 1203 00:59:35,400 --> 00:59:38,685 And the guy who runs it is a very experienced guy, and they 1204 00:59:38,685 --> 00:59:41,350 are registered lobbyists. 1205 00:59:41,350 --> 00:59:43,860 And they're extremely effective at taking MIT 1206 00:59:43,860 --> 00:59:47,230 professors and showing them around Washington. 1207 00:59:47,230 --> 00:59:50,520 And I know this because about 2 and 1/2 years ago, I was 1208 00:59:50,520 --> 00:59:53,530 part of a group that wrote a report on space policy. 1209 00:59:53,530 --> 00:59:56,800 And we called these guys up-- we developed it in 1210 00:59:56,800 --> 00:59:58,080 parallel with them. 1211 00:59:58,080 --> 01:00:00,850 And within a few weeks, we were sitting in the room with 1212 01:00:00,850 --> 01:00:04,430 the transition team for Obama, who was working on NASA, and 1213 01:00:04,430 --> 01:00:06,820 the people in the White House who work on space policy. 1214 01:00:06,820 --> 01:00:08,120 And that's what lobbyists do. 1215 01:00:08,120 --> 01:00:10,840 They open the door, and they get you in there. 1216 01:00:10,840 --> 01:00:13,640 Now they're not lobbyists in the sense of they go down and 1217 01:00:13,640 --> 01:00:16,890 say, give us more money, but they have to be registered 1218 01:00:16,890 --> 01:00:20,040 because they are performing that function. 1219 01:00:20,040 --> 01:00:22,950 Now, MIT hasn't always had that office in Washington, and 1220 01:00:22,950 --> 01:00:25,390 may not always have that office in Washington, but 1221 01:00:25,390 --> 01:00:29,000 there's a lot of that sort of stuff that goes on. 1222 01:00:29,000 --> 01:00:34,940 So, it is harder to picture-- 1223 01:00:34,940 --> 01:00:37,430 again, I think it has much to do with just the demands on 1224 01:00:37,430 --> 01:00:41,080 one's time than happened before. 1225 01:00:41,080 --> 01:00:42,440 Fundraising-- 1226 01:00:42,440 --> 01:00:45,310 most of what the president does these days is fundraising 1227 01:00:45,310 --> 01:00:48,770 as far as out on the road, getting the alumni excited 1228 01:00:48,770 --> 01:00:50,010 about what's going on here. 1229 01:00:50,010 --> 01:00:55,520 And that's a pretty time-consuming job. 1230 01:00:55,520 --> 01:00:57,250 Any other comments about that? 1231 01:00:57,250 --> 01:01:00,610 It's not an exaggeration to say the field of computer 1232 01:01:00,610 --> 01:01:04,740 science was created by DARPA over about 25-year period from 1233 01:01:04,740 --> 01:01:07,270 1960 to 1985 or so. 1234 01:01:07,270 --> 01:01:10,550 And then from Star Wars, which is a separate agency but 1235 01:01:10,550 --> 01:01:11,380 similar kind of thing. 1236 01:01:11,380 --> 01:01:14,990 Just wouldn't exist without that kind of money. 1237 01:01:14,990 --> 01:01:19,030 Still today, a lot of the CSAIL funds are from DARPA, in 1238 01:01:19,030 --> 01:01:21,480 a lot of different ways, or other parts of the military. 1239 01:01:21,480 --> 01:01:22,660 How many people here have worked on an 1240 01:01:22,660 --> 01:01:26,450 industrially-funded project? 1241 01:01:26,450 --> 01:01:27,700 Nobody? 1242 01:01:29,450 --> 01:01:31,110 How many people here know where the funding comes from 1243 01:01:31,110 --> 01:01:32,360 for the projects you work on? 1244 01:01:36,260 --> 01:01:36,950 Only a few. 1245 01:01:36,950 --> 01:01:38,200 OK, interesting. 1246 01:01:42,920 --> 01:01:47,240 So you know, again, the military funding is not 1247 01:01:47,240 --> 01:01:49,020 as big as it was. 1248 01:01:49,020 --> 01:01:52,240 I think it's very clear to say the mindset of that kind of 1249 01:01:52,240 --> 01:01:55,510 work does not dominate the way that it did during the period 1250 01:01:55,510 --> 01:01:57,290 when we were watching those. 1251 01:01:57,290 --> 01:02:00,150 But there's still a lot of it, and the industrial funding has 1252 01:02:00,150 --> 01:02:01,710 its own set issues, too. 1253 01:02:04,710 --> 01:02:09,170 And then there's always new forms of this kind of thing. 1254 01:02:09,170 --> 01:02:10,920 What's down the street there-- 1255 01:02:10,920 --> 01:02:12,560 down the street, it's right over there-- is the Koch 1256 01:02:12,560 --> 01:02:21,060 Institute that opened up just, what, a month ago. 1257 01:02:21,060 --> 01:02:23,590 And that would seem to be, oh, how perfect. 1258 01:02:23,590 --> 01:02:26,560 It's endowed by a private individual. 1259 01:02:26,560 --> 01:02:28,330 Doesn't have any of the strings that government or 1260 01:02:28,330 --> 01:02:31,070 industrial funding comes with or any of the sort of 1261 01:02:31,070 --> 01:02:35,192 implications, but what were the issues there that came up? 1262 01:02:41,580 --> 01:02:43,560 Anybody read about it when the Koch Institute was opened? 1263 01:02:46,100 --> 01:02:51,360 Well, that man, David Koch, he has a lot of funding for other 1264 01:02:51,360 --> 01:02:52,880 kinds of political-- 1265 01:02:52,880 --> 01:02:55,350 well, not other kinds-- but political. 1266 01:02:55,350 --> 01:02:58,420 He funds a lot of Tea Party, right-wing conservative stuff 1267 01:02:58,420 --> 01:02:59,330 in the country. 1268 01:02:59,330 --> 01:03:02,440 I mean, MIT is very clear about what the boundaries are 1269 01:03:02,440 --> 01:03:05,720 for what's acceptable when money is accepted. 1270 01:03:05,720 --> 01:03:07,070 I mean, there's any number times. 1271 01:03:07,070 --> 01:03:08,850 It's happened to me. 1272 01:03:08,850 --> 01:03:13,390 I had, essentially, a contract with an oil company that 1273 01:03:13,390 --> 01:03:17,040 wanted to fund some of the work I did C, but they had a 1274 01:03:17,040 --> 01:03:19,450 restriction in what the contract was supposed to say 1275 01:03:19,450 --> 01:03:20,600 about intellectual property. 1276 01:03:20,600 --> 01:03:23,060 That's actually the place it most comes up. 1277 01:03:23,060 --> 01:03:25,560 That was just totally unacceptable, both to me and 1278 01:03:25,560 --> 01:03:28,230 to the lawyers at MIT, who looked at it, and we ended up 1279 01:03:28,230 --> 01:03:31,040 not taking the money because you couldn't work under those 1280 01:03:31,040 --> 01:03:32,750 conditions. 1281 01:03:32,750 --> 01:03:35,440 And those things get massaged in a lot of different ways, 1282 01:03:35,440 --> 01:03:39,290 but people have a pretty clear sense of their intellectual 1283 01:03:39,290 --> 01:03:41,880 freedom and aren't always willing to sell 1284 01:03:41,880 --> 01:03:44,360 that off in that way. 1285 01:03:44,360 --> 01:03:46,750 So, there's all sorts of things. 1286 01:03:46,750 --> 01:03:48,800 Another one that comes up a lot now is foreign 1287 01:03:48,800 --> 01:03:49,810 governments. 1288 01:03:49,810 --> 01:03:54,890 And we have a lot of potential arrangements with foreign 1289 01:03:54,890 --> 01:03:56,810 governments that raise interesting questions. 1290 01:03:56,810 --> 01:04:01,130 Like, say the government of India were to come to MIT and 1291 01:04:01,130 --> 01:04:06,480 say, we'd like to give you $50 million to help study poverty. 1292 01:04:06,480 --> 01:04:09,900 Well, a lot of professors on campus would say, I don't feel 1293 01:04:09,900 --> 01:04:14,180 comfortable taking research money from a country that has 1294 01:04:14,180 --> 01:04:16,400 x numbers of hundreds of millions of poor people in 1295 01:04:16,400 --> 01:04:19,030 their country and shouldn't be MIT's role in the world to 1296 01:04:19,030 --> 01:04:25,070 take money from governments that have very, very serious 1297 01:04:25,070 --> 01:04:25,830 pressing things. 1298 01:04:25,830 --> 01:04:30,920 Or Saudi Arabia, where they don't allow women students or 1299 01:04:30,920 --> 01:04:33,420 women professors or Jewish students or Jewish professors 1300 01:04:33,420 --> 01:04:34,670 on their campuses. 1301 01:04:34,670 --> 01:04:36,600 Should we go into collaborations with them? 1302 01:04:36,600 --> 01:04:40,110 So it's actually pretty hard to think about a source of 1303 01:04:40,110 --> 01:04:43,640 funding that comes to the Institute that doesn't have 1304 01:04:43,640 --> 01:04:50,700 some kind of complicated set of circumstances around it. 1305 01:04:50,700 --> 01:04:53,360 And that's one of the interesting things in your own 1306 01:04:53,360 --> 01:04:55,850 work but also, as a historian, to look at this about how 1307 01:04:55,850 --> 01:04:59,720 those things get negotiated in any given era. 1308 01:04:59,720 --> 01:05:01,780 There's certainly, clearly, things that are just off 1309 01:05:01,780 --> 01:05:04,380 limits that won't be done. 1310 01:05:04,380 --> 01:05:06,350 There are other things that are pretty easy, like the 1311 01:05:06,350 --> 01:05:08,940 National Science Foundation, where they come and they give 1312 01:05:08,940 --> 01:05:12,240 you money and your only job in response is to write a paper. 1313 01:05:12,240 --> 01:05:13,300 And there's a lot of things that are 1314 01:05:13,300 --> 01:05:14,540 kind of in the middle. 1315 01:05:14,540 --> 01:05:17,540 I actually happen to think that some of the military 1316 01:05:17,540 --> 01:05:20,030 funding, particularly the DARPA funding, is actually a 1317 01:05:20,030 --> 01:05:24,060 lot freer and has fewer strings attached than the NSF 1318 01:05:24,060 --> 01:05:26,690 funding because the NSF is always peer reviewed. 1319 01:05:26,690 --> 01:05:30,280 And you're always being pulled by other people in your field 1320 01:05:30,280 --> 01:05:32,340 who want you to do what they do. 1321 01:05:32,340 --> 01:05:37,280 Whereas with, sometimes, with what-- it's a little bit less 1322 01:05:37,280 --> 01:05:38,600 true now than it used to be-- 1323 01:05:38,600 --> 01:05:40,760 with DARPA funding, they can really just give you the money 1324 01:05:40,760 --> 01:05:43,300 and let you do want you want to do because they're a little 1325 01:05:43,300 --> 01:05:44,960 bit protected politically because 1326 01:05:44,960 --> 01:05:46,210 they're within the DOD.