Danny Hillis Quotes
Technology is everything that doesn’t work yet.
Hillis, W. Daniel. Quoted in The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, by Stewart Brand, Basic Books, 1999.
Although a conservative Republican, he and most other CEOs of modern companies do not denigrate and ignore science the way many other conservatives have done over the years.
The thing that make this an even more difficult problem to deal with is that until the failure, enthusiasts and supports of the technology point to the perfect track record to justify continued use, opposing even more safety measure, and trying to reduce anxiety.
This is why the American Government has played such a major role in most of the great technologies in American History. Interchangable Parts (A federal contract with Eli Whitney), Canal Construction (New York State built the Erie Canal), the Railroad (federal government gave hugh tracts of land to build the rail lines to the West), the Telegraph (No one would use it until the government financed the experiment to prove it by creating a line between Baltimore and Washington), AC Electricity, there the city of Rochester NY hired Tessler and Westinghouse to Demonstrate Generating Electricity at Niagra Falls and transmitting it over 20 miles which Edison’s Direct Current could not do), immunization (the Army Medical Corps gave the first grants to universities to develop the science of vaccines and immunization, the computer (in WWII the U. S. financed the development of computers sent to England to implement Turing’s breaking of the German “unbreakable” code), atiomic energy (the Manhattan Project—the largest scientific endeavor the world has known), the Internet (Developed with long term research funds for DARPA the future technology research arm of the Defense Department. American investors and businesspeople took each of these and developed them but the initial steps, when no capitalist dared risk on such basic and futureistic efforts were taken by American Government which probably could never have developed these technologies but the private sector could not do it with government in the role Moritz herein describes.
William Daniel "Danny" Hillis is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and scientist, who pioneered parallel computers and their use in artificial intelligence. He founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a parallel supercomputer manufacturer, and subsequently was a fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering. More recently, Hillis co-founded Applied Minds and Applied Invention, an interdisciplinary group of engineers, scientists, and artists. He is a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab.
