one cannot speculate for very long about
life in the 21st century without
mentioning the computer
since the early 1940s its amazing
development
has influenced our discoveries our
progress our knowledge and most of all
the way we think
by looking ahead to the future of
computing
we can glimpse our own future
and in thinking about the machines of
tomorrow we must also ask ourselves
questions like
where do we want to be
what kind of society do we want what do
we want to do
what changes must we make
just as
sharing a network amplifies the power
and intelligence of individual computers
so too dialogue amplifies and extends
human vision
with this in mind we at the lewis
research center
offer our hopes and our dreams about the
future of computing
by sharing just a few of the many
diverse perspectives that exist
we hope
to begin a provocative chain of thought
that begins with you
the viewer of this dialogue
and ends with the magic of tomorrow
i think
everything's going to come down to to
information and communication computers
today are about the same stage that the
automobile was in about 1915 or so and
the networks are going to have to expand
in the same way that the highway system
has expanded since then the most
important component
of division of the future
is the emerging
information super highway
this information super highway will
operate at 2.4
gigabits per second
that's 2.4 almost two and a half
thousand million
bits per second
this highway will have
entrance and exit ramps that will reach
into every facet of your life
this highway
unlike the concrete highway that carries
your car
will be composed
of fiber optics
i just kind of picture that that most
people will just have
kind of the equivalent to a to a hand
calculator that will just patch them
into the local network wherever they
happen to be just because of their
their presence to it in the future i
think 30 years from now you'll see a
combination of a telephone and a
computer probably in
in 20 or 30 years
everyone will have a pc
then like we carry around credit cards
now
maybe they'll even be that small
i remember looking at the cartoon the
jetsons and for some reason i have in my
vision that eventually that would
actually happen to where computers would
be everywhere something that part of you
will respond to you it will respond to
voice commands we respond to motion
we'll respond to video
it will be an extension of you as a
human being
it'll just be all around us and we won't
even think about it anymore
i think the classroom of the future
won't be in one place
we've all heard about
distance learning
in most aspects this is still
in pilot project form
i imagine with the super highway i
vision or my vision is
it will be part of our way of doing
business
as we are able to provide
remote communication
and remote methods of access and much
more user-friendly access the librarian
will no longer be needed to
identify what types of information to
collect but more
they will be needed to collect
information beyond the factual level
towards the knowledge level at oai one
of the things that we've started to do
is to put in a television classroom at
each of our member universities
distances will disappear
we are linking together students
here
at in the workplace at nasa lewis
research center and instructors and
students
at universities all over the state if
you
have team members who are located at
geographically separated distances
and can be connected so that
they really feel like they are together
it's got to help it's just got to add to
this this ability
on demand
you will form dialogue groups
well beyond anything that group
philosopher plato ever envisioned as he
lectured his student aristotle
i think you see in the world today that
there's more of a common global
understanding and maybe a lot of the
barriers that we have international
barriers will begin to melt at least i
hope so
so
the ability to design
a
system that's closer to the edge is
going to free us up with the computer
freeing up
the engineer in the sense that his
wildest thoughts can be tested out in a
sense of reality will free him almost
from the rigid
constraints of of the past
you may have a theory you may have an
equation or formula that tells you how
something is supposed to behave
but most people i know can't visualize
formulas very effectively it would be
very nice to be able to have a system
for example a truly intelligent computer
system that allowed you to interact with
a with the computer capabilities that
you have both symbolic and numeric and
graphic
on a high level it is what you might
want to really like to do is go into a
rotating engine if you could in a
numerical model and perhaps using a
glove
or
your body walking through the engine and
positioning through it to see a
graphical image of whether it's pressure
data temperature data accelerometers
velocimeters displacement transducers
whatever phenomenon physical phenomena
you're trying to see to see a graphical
image or video image of that data as you
would move around through the engine i
envision some kind of holographic type
workstation where you'll have
an imaging setup where you'll actually
see engineering models in the
three-dimensional form and that that
might change a little bit exactly
instead of having a monitor you're gonna
more have more or less have a stage
where a lot of these things will be uh
projected and you might even be able to
do tests and run them and see the 3d
holographic image move into animation
while you're doing some kind of test on
it we're already seeing some changes in
that because you can do parametric
studies with mathematical models you
very seldom do parametric studies in the
experiment anymore
you do experiments very carefully with
lots of instrumentation and you do a few
experiments very very well instead of
doing lots of different experiments
where you would just change a parameter
slightly and rerun the experiment you
also use mathematical models and
computers to
predict where the interesting phenomena
will occur i think that the future of
computers to predict the performance of
liquid chemical rocket engine systems
entire systems from tank to nozzle exit
is very promising and we'll be able to
do some amazing technical things at that
point
people already are doing
some some calculations with the direct
numerical simulation of turbulence and
transition types of studies for
navier-stokes equations you'll be able
to do that for chemically reacting flows
you'll be able to do very complex
problems
one of the projects that's going on at
lewis right now is this project of
trying to simulate an entire jet engine
as it's running we'll have a much better
handle i think on on
methods of failure and materials on on
things that allow us to design things
design
objects airplanes spacecraft whatever
a lot more cutting edge in the sense
that
we can make things strong where they
need to be strong we don't need to put
excess weight where they don't need to
be heavy i do see
developing as time goes on and is
starting to happen now is a change in
the way we develop algorithms
in particular what i'm talking about
first is that if you're going to specify
the algorithm explicitly you would be
writing a
dealing with a program which is writing
the program that his programs will be
writing programs to the extent that
computing can model and help us
understand and deal with irrational
things fuzzy logic neural network
whatever
i'm not sure what those will be but i
think the challenge for computing is
in modeling what goes on in the world
computing particularly high performance
computing offers us a chance of
investigating those concepts
another thing that it allows us to do
which we weren't able to do in the very
early days
is to work together
in teams when we're not living together
or at least co-located in teams with
high-speed networking and with powerful
workstations
it's possible to carry on a conversation
among four or five people right through
the uh the computer
where ideas can be bounced off each
other and
tested
and with simulation of what's actually
going to happen
ideas can be tested
quickly
and
that makes it kind of neat it's it's the
ability to do things that not only are
going to be cheaper to do now that we
couldn't do
but in ways we can get information that
we couldn't have gotten
and so we can make decisions based on
more information now with the computing
than we could have in the past
i i have seen computing change from uh
from the card program calculator where
you had those horrible cards to what
we're having now we put the cards uh in
a uh in a tray and be picked up in a
truck from the deb and carried over to
the 10 by 10 where the computer was and
then run
and then transported back one of the
first big machines we got was the 704
that had 32k
words of 36
words of memory
and that now i can get on a pc for about
less than two thousand dollars at that
point we paid a good deal of money for
that machine
and thought we had something really
great
we had theories and theories
always were far ahead of what we were
capable of doing and in less than five
years most of the theories were all
caught up with in terms of the calculate
the computers as of today i think that
we're seeing the the seeds of a
different type of machine that i think
is going to become
much more
predominant in the future and the seeds
i'm referring to is the infant work in
neural networks so
what you're looking for is a symbiosis
between
the number crunching capabilities of
current day computers
the qualitative decision making
capability of expert system
style ai
and then the intuition
sort of
that neurons can capture
then you have something that
starts to look like and behave like
perhaps
like us humans do with
one side of our brain being the logical
decision maker another side uh bringing
the
intuition there's different parts of our
brain that specialize in areas i see a
parallel computer doing the same sort of
thing a part of the parallel computer
would handle the vision part part would
handle the number crunching part
it would specialize in different areas i
think we're going to be moving to arena
where you won't ask
questions relative to the speed of a
machine or its memory but how fast can
it learn you could almost send him to
training or to school
maybe overnight with computer speeds
and they would become a technician in
some limited
area of application the society of these
technicians working together in various
fields
then we have another
level of
collective
pseudo or virtual intelligences
operating together and where my role is
in that of course is to utilize them and
input my creativity which will be very
hard to duplicate in machines we have
two eyes two ears and that's all we
really can hear and see and we basically
have one line of language in our mind we
can't listen to six or seven
conversations at once this machine would
could and would handle just tons of
input you will have a
very capable companion
not given certain sense but you'll have
a much bigger memory if you ever have
and recall
we can be able to make decisions much
faster than you can
using millions of facts instead of four
or five that you can juggle in your head
they may way exceed our ability to
assimilate and and digest facts
but
there is uh really uh
not even a seed
of creative intelligence in that
different thinking machines will will
actually have different personalities in
a sense the idea that they're a servant
that execute just what you've defined
that era is is going to end and we're
going to be in a whole different arena
where they're going to be operating with
the human as a partner
i think some of the biggest problems in
computing are going to be social and
political
uh rather than technical the more stuff
about yourself that you put online
um the more
the less control you have over it the
more people are going to have access to
it that
maybe you don't want to have access to
as fast as a society as we have today i
think it's only going to get faster i
think the biggest uh problem that
computers can cause is the
lack of personal contact in the human
touch sometimes the fascination with the
power of the tool steers you away from
actually applying it to solve human
problems i also have a fear of losing
craftsmanship and skills i think that as
we
have a computer capability that is going
to be able to handle more and more of
our routine
tasks that one of the incredible
challenges we face
is to
educate kids how to solve problems how
to be creative how to be innovative as
opposed to regurgitating facts and
figures because that's what computers
are going to be able to do best for us
we'll probably have social programs to
make sure that we get
cellular computers to
everyone
so they can have a say in the way the
world operates you know we talked today
about the
potential rift between the
calves and haves not
growing wider
i kind of turned that into the future
concern for the nose and the nose knots
it's one of those equalizer tools i
think that can be useful to a lot of
people to help them
overcome some of the disadvantages they
might have as an individual or a small
group i'm interested mostly in adaptive
technology since it applies to me both
in my professional and personal life my
hopes maybe
like i said in my professional life is
to have things that i can use in the
office so that i can identify
much more than i do now as far as
documents and things like that
and some added additions hopefully being
able to
be compatible with graphical user
interface using speech or maybe even
using voice recognition systems
and for my personal life maybe a
computerized car have a lot more
dynamism a lot more mobility a lot more
adaptability
a lot more independence a lot more
requirement for responsibility for
education for initiative while we have
all of these things they have not
brought brought the world happiness it's
brought it closer together made a
smaller world
we seem not to understand one another
that seems to be quite uh prevalent
computing can only be a tool that's
going to help
bringing information to us i think that
uh
the thing that
humans are
probably
for the next 20 or 30 years i'm going to
always be uh more capable in computers
is of imagination
of conceptualizing and visualizing
things and and
asking the question of
how could this be different or why is
this
and then posing that question the
computer and maybe finding an answer
more and more i think what i see
is that what knowledgeable people are
capable of imagining they're capable of
doing
you