Rethinking the Digital Future (David Gelernter/Internet)

WSJ ^ | 12/3/2011 | HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.

[woofie]

Is it David Gelernter's time to be rich?

Mr. Gelernter, a professor at Yale, is already destined to be remembered as the man nearly murdered by the Unabomber. After a painful recovery, he blossomed as a conservative social critic and continued to pursue his personal vocation of painting. He's also written books on subjects as diverse as the future of technology, the meaning of Judaism, and the 1939 World's Fair. Today, the still-revolutionary opportunities of computing are again taking a central place among his varied interests.

To him, Facebook and Twitter are partial fulfillment of something he's been writing about and thinking about since the early 1990s, an evolution of the Internet into a form far less chaotic and more useful than today's. His preferred term is "lifestream." Whatever you call it, the cybersphere as it now exists is due for an overhaul.

Prophecy comes naturally to Mr. Gelernter. He is credited in some circles for having coined the term "the cloud." But what preoccupies him is the inadequacy of our conventions and practices for organizing the wildly expanding array of digital objects that populate the cybersphere.

On the desktop, he says, "The file system was already broken in the early '90s, the hierarchical system. Namespaces were saturated. I was sick of making up names like nsfproposal319. The file system got too crowded and people started crowding their desktops with icons."

On top of this complexity soon arrived the complexity of the Web, the mass of digital objects we know today, connected by hyperlinks but organized in a way satisfying to no one, except possibly Google. "The current shape of the Web is the same shape as the Internet hardware," says Mr. Gelernter. "The Internet hardware is lots of computers wired together into a nothing-shaped cobweb.

[woofie]

"I can visualize the worldstream," says Mr. Gelernter, explaining its advantages. "I know what it looks like. I know what my chunk of it looks like. When I focus on my stuff, I get a stream that is a subset of the worldstream. So when I focus the stream, by doing a search on Sam Schwartz"—a hypothetical student—"I do stream subtraction. Everything that isn't related to Schwartz that I'm allowed to see vanishes. And then the stream moves much more slowly. Because Sam Schwartz documents are being added at a much slower rate than all the documents in the world. So now I have a manageable trickle of stuff."

Do I understand this? no

[HiTech RedNeck]

a highfalutin way of saying he focuses on a topic

[Jonty30]

I think he’s basically saying that computing should adapt to your personal way of thinking, not have you adapt to it’s way of thinking.

It would be an extension of you and how you do things. A symbiotic relationship between you and the machine.

[Bobalu]

He’s thinking of an intelligent agent that can control access to data for you.

A way to hand off all the mind numbing complexity of accessing an ever expanding mountain of data.

That’s what computers are supposed to do after all. We should not be dealing with so much data without smart digital assistants.

Instead of searching the web for stuff of interest our agents should scour it 24/7 and alert us to what we might have interest in. We only do this in a very simplistic way now. We still must deal with things like “where are my files and what are they named” , “what are my friends up to today” , “are there any new books, films, TV shows, articles..etc that I should take a look at” “Has anyone been trying to find me?”

[Mobilemitter]

To date my experiences with software designed to help me end up more like HAL 9000, “I'm afraid I can't do that Dave.”
I can't argue about the ‘cloud’ or ‘ digital universe’ being polluted and cluttered. If you think of it in those terms then a well designed ship with indestructible shields, unlimited fuel and a smoking hyper-drive would come in pretty handy.
Call me old fashioned, but I really do like having a bridge on a ship. I only want the ship to go exactly where I tell it go and do exactly what I tell it to do. I can learn from my mistakes and improve my navigational skills and develop an instinctive feel for the real potential of the vessel. I don't want any vessel trying to ‘feel’ my pain or have it ’guessing’ what I want.

[dr_lew]

Mr. Gelernter sold his first company, Mirror Worlds Technologies, and its intellectual property to an investor group years ago. The buyer insisted on giving him a small stake in the outcome of its patent lawsuits, and last year a jury handed down an eye-popping $625 million verdict against Apple for infringing lifestream-related patents in its Macintosh and iPhone operating systems. In April, the judge in the case overruled the jury and tossed out the award. The matter is now under appeal.

I know this act. You patent everything you can think of in sweeping terms, then wait for someone to invent something like it, and sue them. This happened with industrial robots.

[trebb]

Do I understand this? no

Instead of getting Gunwalker data dumps with mostly extraneous info and more info that's not relevant, you would get all relevant data and no irrelevant data - meaning a smaller number of hits to a search over a longer time span instead of a huge dump of "possibles" that takes a long time to filter through.

[woofie]

Bump