When computers emerged, we willfully followed them down every twist and turn—some good and some bad. In one lifetime, computers have grown to saturate nearly every element of life—¬from food transportation and household gadgets, to the cars we drive, to global finances.
By presenting this history, world-renowned computer scientist Grady Booch, and a team of experts in the field, hope to make us think about our relationships to computers and whether we choose to control our futures or be controlled by the very machines we created.
Booch will present this in a documentary series, “Computing: The Human Experience,” that he’s funding through Kickstarter. He is known for his work on several other projects, being an original creator of the Unified Model Language (UML), and helping to build Watson at IBM—which won a Jeopardy game against human players earlier this year.
“In a world with abundant computational power, where nothing is forgotten, and where we are connected in pervasive, unexpected ways beyond our choice, it is reasonable to stop and ask ourselves just what kind of world we hope to intentionally create,” Booch said via email.
“The goal of Computing: The Human Experience is to present a basic picture of the past and the present of computing so that we as a people can be intentional how about how we will shape the future of computing as well as how we might choose to be shaped by it,” he said.
According to Booch, the crossroad mankind has reached with the proliferation of computers “is a phenomenon that rises with every such disruptive event in the human story.”
“When Gutenberg began printing books, it challenged the power of the Church and fueled an informed middle class. When inventions such as the cotton gin, or the sewing machine, or the telephone reached critical mass, the world shifted. When the Manhattan Project reached its goal, the face of warfare and the fate of humanity was forever altered,” he said.
Yet with computing, there is a fundamental difference. The technology, according to Booch, “has a pervasive and immediate impact on every element of the human experience, thereby amplifying the good as well as the bad at a pace that outruns the ability of human culture to reasonably absorb it.”
Complex systems—including human civilization—share a common factor: they can only adapt by way of natural mechanisms that allow it to grow with the change. But if there is too much change at once, or if the disruptive force is too heavy, “then that system will collapse until it finds a new stable state,” Booch said.
