David Clark Senior Research Scientist, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
When we started designing the Internet, local networks and personal computers were a vision lurking inside research labs like Xerox PARC. We were hooking up large time-sharing systems. Along one dimension, the trajectory of the Internet has been expanding our vision of what to hook up. The PC. The home. With broadband. "Things." The phone in your pocket.
I am actually an optimist about some of these endeavors. We are getting rural broadband. Slowly, but it is happening. But a lesson I learned, starting around 1995, is that the technology is necessary, but it was money that made the future happen. Every time I thought some new technology would shape the future, I learned this lesson again. I hired an economist to work with me.
More recently, my focus has shifted from the physical and protocol layers to the higher layers, where what we are connecting up is not computers but people. We were techno-optimists when we designed the Internet, but what we were optimistic about was the ways people would use it. I now see that this optimism must be tempered with some concern. In 1995, I hired an economist to work with me. I am now collaborating with a behavioral psychologist to understand why people behave as they do and how technology and people interact.
In this talk, I will explore my own trajectory of learning over the past 50 years and offer some suggestions for the future.