We pick up where we left them in the initial post of the transcript of the Keynote Conversation at OODAcon 2022: OODA CTO Bob Gourley and Internet Pioneer Vint Cerf.  In this part of the conversation, Gourley and Cerf discuss the legacy of J.C.R. Licklider and the Information Processing Techniques Office of DARPA, Doug Englebart’s “Demo of All Demos” and the origins of the mouse, the future of neural interfaces, and the Influence of science fiction.

https://oodaloop.com/archive/2023/06/12/the-keynote-conversation-at-oodacon-2022-ooda-cto-bob-gourley-and-internet-pioneer-vint-cerf/

The Legacy of J.C.R. Licklider and the Information Processing Techniques Office of DARPA 

“We had University College London…doing tests of TCP protocols over satellites. So I mean, he got to see the beginning, you know: chapter one.”

Bob Gourley:  Let me ask another question, Vint. And first I want to go back in time and talk about this guy J.C.R. Licklider.  Because I found it interesting. He never lived to see the internet, but he was an early networking pioneer…

Vint Cerf: …No, that’s not true. That is not true.

Gourley: Is that right?

Cerf:  You’re wrong. No, he survived to see that network. He didn’t get to…well go ahead and ask you your question and I’ll always,

Gourley:  What I really want to ask is about the series of memos he wrote in 1962, calling together meetings of researchers to build the intergalactic computer network.

Cerf:  Yes. Well, that was tongue-in-cheek. He was a psychologist, by the way. He was not a computer scientist, but he saw  – this is really wonderful- Licklider saw non-numerical uses of computing. That was his thing. He could see how computational power could be used in ways that were other than just calculating ballistics, which was the original purpose of some of the early EDSAC and ENIAC machines.  So he saw that, and of course, being quite a character in his own right, the intergalactic idea was simply to say, you know, this is an expansive, crazy idea.

But that was 1962. You’re quite right. Then by 1969, of course, we started working on the ARPAnet. And he was certainly around for that. He was the founding lead of the Information Processing Techniques Office of DARPA. And starting around that 1962 period, then in 1969, of course, we start building the ARPAnet and he was well aware of that.

Cerf:  But he was on the Stanford campus in 1973 when I was already beginning work with Bob Kahn on the Internet. He was well aware of that. He saw what our plans were. He didn’t get to see what had unfolded today, of course. But we were doing intercontinental internet testing during his lifetime. We had Stanford University, we had Bolt Bear Neck, and Newman. We had University College London all doing tests of TCP protocols over satellites. So I mean, he got to see the beginning, you know, chapter one.

Gourley:  Do you think he was also thinking about space?

Cerf:  Oh, I’m sure he was. Remember we were already starting to do surveillance in space. And being at DARPA, I’m pretty sure he had been briefed.  So the answer is yes to that. But that wasn’t what excited him.  What excited him was this non-numerical stuff.

The “Demo of All Demos” and the Origins of the Mouse

“But what’s really important is his belief in the use of computers to get better at getting better.”

Some of you will know another important name in this space and that’s Doug Engelbart. And Engelbart also had this intense belief that computing could augment our human capabilities. And so he had a research center at SRI International supported by Lider at DARPA called the Augmentation Research Center. And it was all about how to use computer cycles to extend our capacities to make use of computation in ways that we couldn’t do our ourselves  – as a way of extending our ability to understand the world around us.

So Licklider and Engelbart were two peas in a pod. Some of you will remember that the big thing that Engelbart built was called the online system, which was an editing system that was shareable by multiple parties. And we’re talking 1968, he does a demonstration in San Francisco. And if you go to the net and search for the Mother of All Demos, you’ll see a 1968 video of Engelbart showing how to do this editing system. And it was dramatic. And at the end of his talk, there was a standing ovation and it was all done remotely.

He was in San Francisco in this big auditorium, and the actual computing and everything else was going on in Menlo Park, and they had a microwave link that was connecting the two. So it was just mind-boggling. But in order to invent his editing system, he had to be able to point the things on the screen. And so he invented the mouse in order to do that, along with Bill English, if I remember right. And you know, there was a little wooden thing with wheels that were, you know, 90 degrees. And of course, they’ve gotten more sophisticated. They are optical mice now. And now you don’t need a mouse.  You need a trackpad or trackball. But Engelbart’s often remembered for inventing the mouse. But what’s really important is his belief in the use of computers to get better at getting better.

The Future of Neural Interfaces – “I was Going to Be I Heard”

“And then in 1996, she goes on the internet, and she discovers cochlear implants.”

Gourley: Vince, I have so many other questions for you. So let me ask this. Many of us are tracking and we’re all becoming cyborgs, right? We’re all using technology of some sort. Many of us are tracking this advanced research into things like neural links where people are researching putting things in brains. And one day that will be common, I’m sure. What do you think about this? Can that be made safe if we directly connect our brains to the internet? Well,

Cerf:  Well, I don’t know about connecting our brains to the internet. I could sure use a memory implant. If I, you know, as I get older, let me talk to you for a moment about where we are in terms of neural interfaces. My wife is a perfect example of this. When she was born with normal hearing, but when she was three, she had spinal meningitis. And the result was the destruction of the inner cilia hairs in the cochlea  – which is where the auditory nerve is, is all curled up like a little snail shell. So she becomes profoundly deaf at the age of three. Her mother takes her to the John Tracy Clinic in Los Angeles where they learn how to preserve her speech even though she can’t hear herself speaking. So she’s profoundly deaf. She learns to lip read.

They didn’t send her anyplace else. She never learned to do the signing. She simply learned to lip-read. So for 50 years, she lived in a silent world and communicated by lip-reading other people, of course, people are, are not uniformly easily lip readable. In some couples, you know, one of the pair is perfectly lip readable and the other one is impossible. So she went to school went to college, got a degree in interior design, went to work as an interior designer and illustrator all in this silent world, has two sons, and raises them in this silent world. And then in 1996, she goes on the internet, and she discovers cochlear implants. And after several interactions, she discovers somebody in Israel who sends her to Johns Hopkins, where they test her to see whether or not she is a good subject for a cochlear implant.

And they say yes. So she scheduled the surgery, it is an outpatient surgery. Takes 45 minutes to insert the implants, a lot of electronics, plus a magnet that goes inside with a wire with a bunch of electrodes that wind around and touch the auditory nerve, in her case, in 16 places. Then she comes home and waits for a couple of weeks while everything heals. Then she goes back to Jones Hopkins to be activated, which sounds vaguely religious, but in any case, I’m not there for this activation – I have to go to a board meeting – so she gets activated, she comes home 20 minutes after they turn on the speech processor.

Okay. Just a small detail. There is a speech processor, which in 1996 was about the size of a mobile [phone]. It takes sound in from a microphone that is part of the headpiece that has a magnet in it, and it is attached to the side of her head magnetically.  So she has to be careful when she walks past the refrigerator. 

So the speech processor takes sound in from the microphone and does a 480 transform to figure out which frequencies are present and in which amplitudes. Then it decides which electrodes to stimulate, whether it is continuous stimulation or pulse mode stimulation, depending on how it is mapped. So she gets mapped 20 minutes after this processor has been mapped. She picked up the phone and she called me – and we had a conversation on the phone for the first time in 30 years of marriage.

“But she’s getting a good sound. She knows the term signal-to-noise ratio. She’s an artist, right?”

Gourley: That’s amazing.

Cerf:  I get home and I discovered I have a 53-year-old teenager at home. I can’t get her off the phone. <Laughs>.  She takes any phone call that comes in. So now I’m a senior VP of Engineering at MCI.  She gets a call from AT&T and they want her to switch. So she’s talking to this person, she says, Where are you? And he says, Well, I’m in India. And she says, “Well, your English is pretty good, you know, where did you learn that? So she goes on for half an hour. Okay, so there is a poor soul, on the other line, says, you’re going to switch, aren’t you? And she says, no, my husband works at MCI, but thanks for calling. She hangs up <laugh>.

Then she decides that she wants to hear words that she hasn’t heard before. So she calls the library, remember she’s calling the library on the phone. She says, can I sign up for recorded books for the blind? And they say, sure, no problem. You know, name, address, phone number. Now you’re blind, aren’t you?  And she says, no, I’m deaf. And there is this long pause while they are trying to figure out how that’s going to work. <Laugh>,

She listens to 500 books on tape. She now can recognize accents and of course, knows when people are mispronouncing words. And it doesn’t stop there. No decibel will go undetected. So she gets patch cords. So when she’s in the airplane, she can plug in the speech processor on one end and the audio on the other. So she is hearing only the sound from the movie. And not the screaming kid two seats away because she’s cut off all the acoustics.  Or she’s got a patch cord to connect with the Sony Walkman.  So she could listen to DVDs or CDs. She has microphones that can plug in, and she’ll clip them to the lapel. So if she’s being taken on a tour of the art gallery, she’s got somebody attached to her like on a leash. 

But she’s getting a good sound. She knows the term signal-to-noise ratio. She’s an artist, right? That’s the only technical term she actually knows. But she uses it all the time because she knows that if the mouth is not far from the microphone, the signal-to-noise ratio goes up and she gets better sound. And she has an FM transceiver as well. So if she were here in the audience, I’d be wearing a little FM microphone and transmitter. She could be 150 feet away and be able to hear perfectly. So her favorite trick is to go to a restaurant with friends and excuse herself to go to the ladies’ room, but leave the microphone and the transmitter on the table <laugh>. And so we have to tell everybody, don’t say anything that you don’t want Sigrid to hear because she’s listening <laugh>. So I want to write her biography and I have a title –  I was Going to Be I Heard  – because that’s what she kept saying over and over again after she got the implant.

“There is one place where sensory-motor has turned out to be really interesting – and that is subvocal speech.”

Gourley: Vint, this is a great point.  I think from there it is just going to be an explosion, like a Cambrian explosion, of devices that are going to be able to help people that are going to keep us connected.

Cerf:  I hope so. Now, so what we’ve been talking about is sensory neural. So we really understand how our sensory systems work and how neural signaling works. We can do sensory-motor as well. That’s something observable.  Cognitive signaling, however, we do not understand.  We understand the biochemistry of short-term memory, for example. We actually know how the signaling causes changes in the cells that are a part of our short-term memory system.

But we don’t understand how to interpret the cognition. Now some people will say, well, can’t you wear a headset, and you can think about something and cause something to happen? The answer is yes. But it is a very crude kind of detection and usually only some small number, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 10 different kinds of signals can be generated by your thinking about something.

There is one place where sensory-motor has turned out to be really interesting – and that is subvocal speech. If you are thinking about saying something, sometimes the signals to the muscles of the vocal tract are actually being generated. Even though you were voluntarily not speaking, you could detect the signals that were going to the vocal tract. You might be able to figure out what it was you were going to say or what you were thinking.

Gourley:  You know, the intelligence community ought to be all over that.

Cerf: <Laugh> Well, you do have to wear this thing on your head, so it is a little hard to do that in a subtle way.

The Influence of Science Fiction

“…science fiction is a great exercise in thinking.”

Gourley:  Today.  Vint, one last question as we transition to our next panel, which is one of the world’s greatest sci-fi authors, Karl Schroeder. You mentioned that you signed up for a sci-fi distro list early on…

Cert…Yes, I did…

Gourley:  Last night I had a conversation with Mike Capps and Jen Haberman and Sean Gourley, and they brought up sci-fi and how important it is to them and how it helped them conceptualize and think through things. And can you just give us a minute on your view of sci-fi and its importance as we transition to Karl and Matt?

Cerf:  I love hard nuts and bolts science fiction. I love it when the authors start out with known physics and then they extrapolate. Because this is a willing suspension of disbelief where you are willing to accept the possibility that that idea might actually work. And, for me, it is an exercise in thinking a little bit beyond what we know into a space where we don’t know, but we might know.

And it is almost as exciting as the film that I just watched last night called Particle Fever.  It was all about the detection of the Higgs Boson and what led up to that in the twenty years of development that had to take place to build this gigantic thing, to detect this teeny-weeny little particle. So, for me, science fiction is a great exercise in thinking.

Gourley:  Great.  Well, with that ladies and gentlemen, do you agree this is the world’s most interesting man?

Cerf:  Thank you. I appreciate that.

OODAcon 2023

https://oodaloop.com/archive/2022/10/18/welcome-to-oodacon-2022-final-agenda-and-event-details/

https://oodaloop.com/archive/2023/06/12/the-keynote-conversation-at-oodacon-2022-ooda-cto-bob-gourley-and-internet-pioneer-vint-cerf/

https://oodaloop.com/archive/2023/06/05/the-oodacon-2022-welcome-address-by-ooda-ceo-matt-devost-surviving-exponential-disruption/