Philosophy Mondays: Human-AI Collaboration
Today's Philosophy Monday is an important interlude. I want to reveal that I have not been writing the posts in this series entirely by myself. Instead I have been working with Claude, not just for the graphic illustrations, but also for the text. My method has been to write a rough draft and then ask Claude for improvement suggestions. I will expand this collaboration to other intelligences going forward, including open source models such as Llama and DeepSeek. I will also explore other moda...
Intent-based Collaboration Environments
AI Native IDEs for Code, Engineering, Science
Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?
One thing that keeps surprising me is how quite a few people see absolutely nothing redeeming in web3 (née crypto). Maybe this is their genuine belief. Maybe it is a reaction to the extreme boosterism of some proponents who present web3 as bringing about a libertarian nirvana. From early on I have tried to provide a more rounded perspective, pointing to both the good and the bad that can come from it as in my talks at the Blockstack Summits. Today, however, I want to attempt to provide a coge...
Philosophy Mondays: Human-AI Collaboration
Today's Philosophy Monday is an important interlude. I want to reveal that I have not been writing the posts in this series entirely by myself. Instead I have been working with Claude, not just for the graphic illustrations, but also for the text. My method has been to write a rough draft and then ask Claude for improvement suggestions. I will expand this collaboration to other intelligences going forward, including open source models such as Llama and DeepSeek. I will also explore other moda...
Intent-based Collaboration Environments
AI Native IDEs for Code, Engineering, Science
Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?
One thing that keeps surprising me is how quite a few people see absolutely nothing redeeming in web3 (née crypto). Maybe this is their genuine belief. Maybe it is a reaction to the extreme boosterism of some proponents who present web3 as bringing about a libertarian nirvana. From early on I have tried to provide a more rounded perspective, pointing to both the good and the bad that can come from it as in my talks at the Blockstack Summits. Today, however, I want to attempt to provide a coge...
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This has been a strange month with several of the giants of computing passing away within weeks of each other. I have already written about Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie. Now John McCarthy, the father of Lisp and early AI pioneer has died.
It is not just that these three had a huge impact on the field, but each stood for very different and somewhat opposing ideas of how computing should work. I have already pointed out the tension between Ritchie’s and Jobs’ legacies. But there was also a tension between the legacies of McCarthy and Ritchie.
John McCarthy was a man ahead of his time. His seminal 1960 (!) paper “Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine” not only launched (somewhat inadvertently) a long lasting programming language (LISP) but more than that provided the foundations for symbolic computing. A quick aside on Lisp: I have been a fan since I first encountered Lisp as a teenager. The title of this blog is a reference to Lisp continuations. And over the years I have accumulated a number of great Lisp books including Paul Graham’s “On Lisp.”
For McCarthy this type of computing was about more than just the manipulation of symbols (as opposed to numbers). One of my favorite McCarthy quotes is from a speech he gave at MIT in 1961 (!) where he
Share Dialog
This has been a strange month with several of the giants of computing passing away within weeks of each other. I have already written about Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie. Now John McCarthy, the father of Lisp and early AI pioneer has died.
It is not just that these three had a huge impact on the field, but each stood for very different and somewhat opposing ideas of how computing should work. I have already pointed out the tension between Ritchie’s and Jobs’ legacies. But there was also a tension between the legacies of McCarthy and Ritchie.
John McCarthy was a man ahead of his time. His seminal 1960 (!) paper “Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine” not only launched (somewhat inadvertently) a long lasting programming language (LISP) but more than that provided the foundations for symbolic computing. A quick aside on Lisp: I have been a fan since I first encountered Lisp as a teenager. The title of this blog is a reference to Lisp continuations. And over the years I have accumulated a number of great Lisp books including Paul Graham’s “On Lisp.”
For McCarthy this type of computing was about more than just the manipulation of symbols (as opposed to numbers). One of my favorite McCarthy quotes is from a speech he gave at MIT in 1961 (!) where he
Of course it is now 2011 and we are only slowly approaching the era of utility computing. What went wrong? Dennis Ritchie came along in the late 60s early 70s. The amazing success of C and Unix established a computing paradigm that was at once portable across hardware but also really close to hardware. It’s primitives are bits and bytes and files (of bits and bytes). C and Unix are fast because they are a surprisingly thin layer above the hardware. Put differently - we didn’t get computers of the kinds McCarthy had advocated. We got something much more primitive but at the benefit of much lower cost and higher speed (anyone remember Symbolics Lisp machines by contrast?).
We are still a ways from the utility computing world that McCarthy had envisioned but we have recently started to make some real progress. Much of that has been ushered in by web services and by having URLs for addressing them. These are still a bit clunky but a huge improvement over the older abstractions. At the same time we are seeing the rise in popularity of languages that are close in spirit to Lisp and have modern libraries (e.g. Python and Ruby).
As an optimist this makes me think that eventually we will get to computing that combines the legacies of Jobs, Ricthie and McCarthy: beautiful, open and intelligent.
Of course it is now 2011 and we are only slowly approaching the era of utility computing. What went wrong? Dennis Ritchie came along in the late 60s early 70s. The amazing success of C and Unix established a computing paradigm that was at once portable across hardware but also really close to hardware. It’s primitives are bits and bytes and files (of bits and bytes). C and Unix are fast because they are a surprisingly thin layer above the hardware. Put differently - we didn’t get computers of the kinds McCarthy had advocated. We got something much more primitive but at the benefit of much lower cost and higher speed (anyone remember Symbolics Lisp machines by contrast?).
We are still a ways from the utility computing world that McCarthy had envisioned but we have recently started to make some real progress. Much of that has been ushered in by web services and by having URLs for addressing them. These are still a bit clunky but a huge improvement over the older abstractions. At the same time we are seeing the rise in popularity of languages that are close in spirit to Lisp and have modern libraries (e.g. Python and Ruby).
As an optimist this makes me think that eventually we will get to computing that combines the legacies of Jobs, Ricthie and McCarthy: beautiful, open and intelligent.
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