Machines of Loving Grace (43 page)

In the midst of all of this, Cheyer approached SRI management to ask for some IR & D funding and told them, “I want a little side project where I’m going to build my own CALO the way it should be done.”
He wanted to build a single integrated system, not a patchwork quilt from dozens of different organizations.
SRI agreed, and he named his project “Active Ontologies.”
He ran it quietly alongside the much larger operation.

The project gained more traction when a key group of SRI technical leaders met for a daylong retreat in Half Moon Bay, a beach town close to the Menlo Park laboratory.
There had been growing pressure to commercialize SRI research from the CEO, Curt Carlson, and CALO was an obvious candidate.
The retreat was crucial for hashing out answers to basic questions about the goals for the software, like: What should a personal assistant “feel” like?
Should they use an avatar design?
Avatars had always been a controversial aspect of the design of virtual assistants.
Apple’s Knowledge Navigator video had envisioned a prim young male with a bow tie who looked a bit like Steve Jobs.
The CALO project, on the other hand, did not have an avatar.
The developers went back and forth on whether the system should be a chatbot, the kind of personal companion that researchers had explored for decades in programs like Eliza that engaged human users in keyboard “conversations.”
In the end, they came to a compromise.
They decided that nobody was going to sit and chat with a virtual robot all day.
Instead, they were going to design a system for people who needed help managing their busy day-to-day lives.

The group came up with the notion of “delight nuggets.”
Because they were trying to create a humanlike persona, they decided to sprinkle endearing phrases into the software.
For example, if a user asked the system about the forecast for the day,
the system would answer—and if the forecast indicated that it would rain, the system would add: “And don’t forget your umbrella!”
The developers wanted to give the user what he or she wanted and to make the design goal about helping them manage their lives—and then to surprise them, just a little bit.
Including these phrases added a touch of humanity to the interaction, even though systems did not yet feature speech synthesis and speech recognition.

The 2007 meeting served as a launchpad.
SRI’s commercialization board gave the team the approval to begin looking for outside money in August.
The name Siri ended up working on a wonderful range of levels.
Not only did it mean “secret” in Swahili, but Cheyer had once worked on a project called Iris, which was Siri spelled backward.
And of course, everyone liked that the name was also a riff on SRI.

I
n 1987 Apple’s chief executive John Sculley gave a keynote address at Educom, the national educational technology conference.
He showed a promotional video that a small Apple team had produced to illustrate the idea of something he described as the Knowledge Navigator.
At the time, the video, which caught the public’s eye (went “viral” in today’s parlance), seemed impossibly far out.
The Knowledge Navigator was a tour de force that pointed the way to a computing world beyond the desktop computer of the mid-1980s.
Knowledge Navigator ultimately spawned a seemingly endless stream of high-tech Silicon Valley “vision statements,” including one from Microsoft in 1991 presented by Bill Gates called “Information at Your Fingertips.”
Yet at that time, the Knowledge Navigator was early to offer a compelling vision for a future beyond desktop personal computing.
The video centered on a conversation between an absentminded professor and a perky, bow-tied on-screen avatar as a guide for both the professor’s research and his day-to-day affairs.
It sketched a future in which computer interaction
was no longer based on a keyboard and mouse.
Instead, the Knowledge Navigator envisioned a natural conversation with an intelligent machine that both recognized and synthesized human speech.

Brought to Apple as chief executive during the personal computing boom, Sculley started his tenure in 1983 with a well-chronicled romance with Apple’s cofounder Steve Jobs.
Later, when the company’s growth stalled in the face of competition from IBM and others, Sculley fought Jobs for control of the company, and won.

However, in 1986, Jobs launched a new computer company, NeXT.
Jobs wanted to make beautiful workstations for college students and faculty researchers.
That placed pressure on Sculley to demonstrate that Apple could still innovate without its original visionary.
Sculley turned to Alan Kay, who had left Xerox PARC first to create Atari Labs and then came to Apple, for guidance on the future of the computer market.
Kay’s conversations with Apple’s chief executive were summarized in a final chapter in Sculley’s autobiographical
Odyssey
.
Kay’s idea centered on “a wonderful fantasy machine called the Knowledge Navigator,”
⁴
which wove together a number of his original Dynabook ideas with concepts that would ultimately take shape in the form of the World Wide Web.

Alan Kay would later say that John Sculley had asked him to come up with a “modern Dynabook,” which he found humorous, since at the time his original Dynabook still didn’t exist.
He said that in response to Sculley’s request, he had pulled together a variety of ideas from his original Dynabook research and the artificial intelligence community, as well as from MIT Media Laboratory director Nicholas Negroponte, an advocate of speech interfaces.
⁵
Negroponte had created the Architecture Machine Group at MIT in 1967, in part inspired by the ideas of Ivan Sutherland, whose “Sketchpad” Ph.D.
thesis was a seminal work in both computer graphics and interface design.

Historians have underestimated Negroponte’s influence on
Apple and the computer industry as a whole.
Although Negroponte’s “Architecture Machine” idea never gained popular traction, it did have a very specific impact on Bill Atkinson, one of the principal designers of Apple’s Lisa and Macintosh computers.
Many of the ideas for Lisa and Macintosh were generated from Negroponte’s early efforts to envision what the field of architecture would be like with the aid of computers.
Negroponte’s group created something called “DataLand,” a prototype of a visual data management system.
In many ways, DataLand was a much broader exploration of how human computer users might interact with information more fluidly.
It was certainly broader in scope than the projects at PARC, which focused more narrowly on a creating a virtual desktop.
Indeed, Negroponte’s goal was expansive.
DataLand allowed users to view, in a special room, an immersive information environment back-projected on a giant piece of polished glass as a series of thumbnails representing everything from documents to maps.
It was like using a Macintosh or a Windows computer, but having the control screen surround you rather than appear on a small display.
It was possible to zoom in on and “fly” through the virtual environment by using a joystick, and when you got close to objects like files, they would talk to you (e.g., “This is Nicholas’s Calendar”) in a soothing voice.
Atkinson visited Negroponte’s lab and thought this kind of interface could solve Apple’s document filing problem.
He wanted to organize documents spatially and place them in proximity to other related documents.
Although it was a fascinating concept, it proved unwieldy in practice, and the group returned to something closer to the PARC desktop ideas.

Kay “channeled” ideas that he had gathered in his discussions with Negroponte, passing them on both to Sculley and to the group that created the Knowledge Navigator video.
Kay credited Negroponte with playing what he called the “Wayne Gretzky Game”—skating to where the puck was going, rather than where it was.
Kay had eagerly read Gordon Moore’s early
Electronics
article, which was bold enough to sketch the progress
of computing power ten years into the future—1975.
⁶
He drew the line out to 1995 and beyond.
This future-oriented approach meant that he could assume that 3-D graphics would be commercially available within just several decades.

Negroponte represents the “missing link” between Norbert Wiener’s early insights into computing and its consequences, the early world of artificial intelligence, and the explosive rise of the personal computer industry during the 1980s.
In the late sixties, Negroponte was teaching a course on computer-aided design for architects at MIT.
He was not a great fan of lecturing and so had perfected a Tom Sawyer approach to his course—he brought in many guest lecturers.
He attracted a dazzling and diverse array of talent.
Isaac Asimov, for example, was living in Cambridge at the time and came to Negroponte’s class to speak each year, as did Gordon Pask, a British cyberneticist who was traveling widely in U.S.
computer research circles in the 1960s and 1970s.
If Kay was influenced by Negroponte, he in turn would point to the influence and inspiration of Gordon Pask.
At the beginning of the interactive computing era Pask had a broad but generally unchronicled influence on computer and cognitive science research in the United States.
Ted Nelson met him in the hallways of the University of Illinois Chicago Circle campus and fell under his spell as well.
He described Pask affectionately in his
Computer Lib
manifesto as the “maddest of mad scientists.”

In 1968, Negroponte, like many in the computing world, was deeply influenced by Ivan Sutherland’s 1963 Ph.D.
project, Sketchpad, a graphical and interactive computing tool that pioneered human-computer interaction design.
Following in Sutherland’s footsteps, Negroponte began work on an “Architecture Machine” that was intended to help human architects build systems that exceeded their individual intellectual grasp.
His first effort to build the machine was a software program called URBAN5.
The year after he created it, he took a video of his early Architecture Machine project to the London art exhibition
known as
Cybernetic Serendipity,
which was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
The exhibition had assembled a wild variety of mechanical and computerized art exhibits, including large mobiles created by Gordon Pask, designed with interactive parts to permit viewers to enter into a “conversation” with his installations.

The two met at the exhibition and became good friends.
Pask would come to visit the Architecture Machine Group three or four times a year for a week at a time and always stayed as a guest at Marvin Minsky’s home.
He was a striking character who dressed the part of an Edwardian dandy, complete with a cape, and who occasionally lapsed into double-talk and wordplay.
He was squarely in the Norbert Wiener cybernetics tradition, which had taken hold with more force in Europe than in the United States.
Pask was also subtly but significantly at odds with the prevailing artificial intelligence world.
If AI was about making smart machines that mimicked human capabilities, cybernetics was focused instead on the idea of creating systems to achieve goals.
⁷
Gordon Pask’s insight into the nature of intelligence, which he situated not in the individual but in a conversation between people, strongly influenced Negroponte.
Indeed, it was Pask who laid the groundwork for viewing human-machine interactions as conversations that would be later demonstrated by Knowledge Navigator and still later realized in Siri as a conversation: he “conceived human-machine interaction as a form of conversation, a dynamical process, in which the participants learn about each other.”
⁸

Negroponte was early to grasp Pask’s ideas about computer interaction.
Later in the 1970s, Pask’s ideas also influenced Negroponte’s thinking and design at the MIT Media Laboratory as he broadened the original mission of the Architecture Machine Group.
Ideas from the Media Lab filtered into Apple’s strategic direction because Kay was close to Negroponte and was spending time teaching there.
Few noticed it at the time, but Apple’s release of Siri as a critical addition to the iPhone
4S in October of 2011 fell within two weeks of Kay’s predicted release date for the Knowledge Navigator.
The idea traced a direct path from Pask to Negroponte to Kay to the Siri team.
A parallel thread ran through Gruber’s original work on computing tools for the disabled, to his work on Intraspect, and to the new project at SRI.
In the space of just a generation, a wave of computer-mediated communication technology had inaugurated a new way of facilitating collaboration between humans and machines.
Gruber recognized that humans had evolved from using tribal communication to written language, and then quickly to using the telephone and computer communications.