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Computing for the People A talk about technology with MIT's Michael Dertouzos, the guru of user-friendliness Michael Dertouzos, 62, grew up in a poor neighborhood of Athens, Greece, but has spent most of his life at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As director of the Laboratory for Computer Science, Dertouzos presided over a 35th anniversary symposium on Apr. 13-14. The event was punctuated by Bill Gates's announcement that he will donate $20 million toward the construction of a new LCS building designed by architect Frank Gehry. Dertouzos also gave his new benefactor something to think about: He unveiled plans for a new computer operating system dubbed Oxygen that a team of LCS researchers will develop with a $40 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and for burying a time capsule with a cryptographic puzzle. Business Week correspondent Paul C. Judge interviewed him in Cambridge, Mass. Note: This is a longer, online-only extended version of the interview that appears in the May 31, 1999, issue of Business Week. Q: For a long time, you've been advocating that computers need to be more useful, that most of the productivity potential is being left on the table because the machines don't understand our needs well enough. Where are we now in that evolution?  A: At the infantile stage. For the first 40 years of computing, we correctly focused on making our machines do what they like to do. We were driven by technology. Most of the software today caters to the wishes of the machine. The image I get is that of a car at the turn of the century, with the user in the driver's seat with a bunch of wires tied to each finger, and one controls the ignition, one controls the fuel injection, another one controls the carburetor, another one controls the brakes. And I say, "Go from Boston to New York." What we need is the gas pedal, the steering wheel. We need the fundamental human controls. One of the biggest things here is bringing the technology into our lives rather than the other way around. I am absolutely tired of hearing about us going to cyberspace. The image it conjures is gigabyte-infected, metallic bodysuits, full of virtual reality -- exciting things that are going to sweep us off our feet. That's not how socioeconomic revolutions are made. The way revolutions are made is by truly bringing this stuff into our lives. For example, the motor. You never say "motor," you say "refrigerator" to keep your food fresh, you say "car" for going to pick up your kids. Those things have become assimilated, and the functions they perform solve ancient human problems. Q: What is the media missing about the revolution in information technology? A: The biggest thing the media is missing is a value judgement about technical veracity, what is doable vs. what is exciting. Q: Do we have a dangerous cultural obsession with glitzy technology? A: I don't think so. I think the human race is so robust that we are losing no ground. I have so much faith in the ability of humans to throw away things that threaten their survival. I'm convening a group here at the Lab for Computer Science to figure out how to deal with the evils of E-mail. E-mail has a threshold. If you are below that threshold you are as happy as a clam. If you are above that threshold, you are ready to kill. The threshold is approximately 30 messages a day for most human beings, though it can be pushed to 80 or 100 for real freaks. Q: How many do you get? A: Dare I say? I am around 80 to 100 a day, but I have help. I say 30 messages because it takes about 3 minutes to process an E-mail. That's the average, you can kill a mail in 10 seconds, but another one takes 5 minutes to respond. Those 30 messages occupy one hour of the day, or one-eighth of the working day, and that's about the human limit of communication vs. work. If you start increasing the communication, it cuts into your working day, and the productivity goes way down. When you reach 30 times 8, which is 240 messages a day, your productivity is zero. Unless answering E-mail happens to be your job. Before you hit that threshold, you get letters from your buddies, your wife, your grandchildren, especially if you're at the low end, and you're dying to get more. Above that threshold, you are looking for ways to save yourself. So what I'm doing now, I'm declaring war. Since I think I understand the mechanics of E-mail, I'm going to pull together a group here and try to come up with some effective strategies for when you cross that threshold. You don't want to be oblivious to the contacts, but you don't have to respond within one day to an unsolicited E-mail. And you can declare regions of friends and colleagues to whom you respond within seconds. And you can declare regions to which you don't respond at all. I don't think as a scoiety we are obliged to respond to everything we receve just because we are interconnected. Human will has to supersede. I see a sort of ethics evolving to deal with this. Most of my friends who are in the same position -- and I've been talking to [Hewlett-Packard CEO] Lew Platt and [Microsoft CEO] Bill Gates and [Intel Chairman] Andy Grove -- they all love to spend about an hour a day on their E-mail because they get a sense of the pulse of their corporation. And Bill, I know, loves it. But for the time being, there are only a few Bill Gateses. So it's not such a big thing for the world. But when the interconnected population shifts from around 1.5% today to 30% or 40% of the world, which will happen in the next 20 or 30 years, and when the fever of electronic commerce takes over, and the $50 billion a year today goes to the $4 trillion I am predicting 30 years from now, everyone in the world will be in the same situation I am in today. Q: Is there an engineering solution to this? A: No, the solution is human, because a human has only so many clicks in him or her. There is something that can be handled by automation. But a message that can be handled by automation is not really communication. It's a transaction. Real messages that require participation of the human brain and psyche for communicating in the human sense of the word will remain forever confined to a smaller number. Maybe the 30 can grow to 50 with the help of some tools. But there will always be a limit. And people will always value their ability to live, to eat, to nurture, to congregate, and to enjoy the sunshine. So they are not going to take much more than an hour or two to communicate. I see this as a hard limit. Q: The money being made by technologists who might have been doing research in an earlier era is huge. Is this a distraction and potentially harmful? Has it gone too far? A: No more and no less than the amount of money that was available to be made in the time of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford. It is not a distraction. I think it is the fuel that will propel the Information Revolution forward. I think there are some bubbles that are going to burst. Just look at the price-earnings valuations on some of these stocks. Some others will rise. But if the money flowing over the Internet today is $50 billion -- and I believe my numbers -- and if you believe as I do that it's going to rise to $4 trillion in 30 years, then the kind of money pouring in 30 years from now is one hell of a lot bigger. Q: What do you think is the significance of the Microsoft antitrust case, for us as a business community and as a society? A: I have to personalize this a little bit because I've known Bill for many years. And one part of the antitrust case is rubbing against a technology and business belief for me that is inviolate: Browsers and operating systems are destined to merge. No judge can keep them from merging, and I don't think any judge wants to keep them from merging. The reason is very simple: People want to deal with information the same way, whether that information is sitting on their local machine or on a distinct machine somewhere on the network. When you turn the steering wheel on your car to go right in your neighborhood, it should go right. And when you turn the wheel to go right on the highway, it should still go right. This is a miniature of a bigger problem, which is helping people do more by doing less. Wherever they deal with information, they ought to deal with it in the same way. The same few commands ought to do the same things about viewing information, hearing it, massaging it, displaying it, and printing it, acting on it with programs. There are only seven or eight things you do with information, and you ought to have the same gas and brake pedals. I've had big discussions with Bill on which we disagree. He wants to go there incrementally, he wants to modify Windows, and he has to -- he's got 100 million copies out there. I believe that's ultimately not as useful to people. It's still very difficult to use, and I'm not picking on Bill. Whether it's Macintosh or Unix or Windows, the systems are impossible. Let's not kid ourselves. Most of my friends, like me, spend their lives randomly, trial and error. We are professionals, we are gurus, and we keep shifting things around trying to figure out how to make them work. Sometimes it works in 20 minutes, sometimes it takes seven hours. It shouldn't be like that. Q: Is there some other signal in the prosecution of a company at the peak of our economic and business structure? Will this case be a watershed for business? A: It is the fundamental tension in America between runaway capitalism, the free market, and the conscience of socialism. That's what we are facing, and America is torn between these two. It likes to think of itself as a strictly capitalist country. But it can't, because it comes from a Judeo-Christian background, and conscience is valued. To me, this is a philosophic war, and one that is raging inside the heads of every American and every corporation. Bill Gates fits every single tenet of this capitalistic world. But issues of fairness and predatory behavior, issues that go to conscience and fairness, and socialism -- those are doctrines that are not in the capitalist world. I'm perfectly happy to roll with the courts on this, as long as the courts are informed. I am not sure that the people participating around this courtroom understand deeply the issues. Q: You're a dual citizen of the U.S. and the European Union, and have been active for a long time in European technology matters. What particular insights and assets do the Europeans bring to the information industries? A: The Europeans do everything better than we do, but they do it slower. It's because they have a feudal tradition, they have obedience to the king, especially the Central Europeans. So they know how to sit down and calculate everything and do technology right. But they don't have the rugged independence to jump and try things with an 80% probability of success that we do. And therein lies their lament: They would like to be like us, and I'm not sure we want to be like them. Q: What have been some of their important contributions? A: They took cellular phones, which we invented, and they made it into GSM, and it worked much better. They took NTSC television, which we invented, and they created PAL, which made it much better. Dare I go into aircraft? Airbus is becoming a threat to Boeing. We are shielded in software. There is no one out there who can beat us. Software is so much more complex than industrial products that good obedience and calculation can't determine everything that a piece of software will do. So the people who win are the 80-percenters, the Americans who go half-cocked, build a first version, try it, correct a thousand bugs a month. Then in the middle of this correction, the creators say, we were doing it wrong all along, and they rewrite the whole system. That's a more effective way of developing software than the meticulous, plan it all ahead of time. That's why the Japanese failed, and why the Europeans aren't as strong. I see America being not only a creator of technology in the new world of information but also retaining the dominance in the manufacture of the new steel, which is the software. Q: Do you see the problems in Asia having any long-term effect on their involvement as players in the information industries? A: I don't think so. I think within five years the effect of the slowdown there will be largely over. I see a tremendously exciting growing community of technologists, starting in Taiwan. They are no longer a developing nation. They have punched through the barrier. Move next door to mainland China, and you see impressive 5 percent to 6 percent rates of growth, and more important, the attitudes. I give China 30 years to become a formidable master of Asian technology. Japan is going to return to some period of strength. I don't see them becoming as strong as we are in software, though, because they, too, have a feudal background, and obedience reigns superior to rugged independence. But I do see them climbing. The part of the world that worries me is the Indian subcontinent and Africa. Q: Can technology be harnessed in some way so that gap between rich and poor doesn't grow wider? A: I have advocated for a long time that the gap between rich and poor, if left to its own devices, will grow. If you have computers and communications, you're more productive and you grow richer, while the poorer countries that lack those technologies stand still and get poorer. It's not rocket science. There are several things we can do. The low-earth-orbit satellites are interesting, because half of the time they are over the developing world. So if we leave them on, there is no other business they are doing at that time. With very little marginal cost, we can provide backbone communications to the developing world that are very exciting. The same argument can be made with the geostationary birds for the ghettos of the developed world. Who's going to subsidize these costs? The richer countries, not just for the benefit of compassion, which is good enough in itself, but for self-protection. If the differences increase dramatically, we are going to have blood, and it won't be the Bangladeshis attacking the Bostonians. It's going to be the L.A. ghetto revolting against the L.A. suburb -- not for reasons of race, but for reasons of money. Other things we can do: The World Bank which spends $15 billion a year in structural loans, should consider earmarking a quarter of that money for information infrastructure -- communications, computers, and training, and backing some of the information entrepreneurs in places like Nepal, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa. Q: Are there aspects of ourselves and our societies that cannot and will not be changed by technology? A: Yes. There are some innate powerful driving forces I believe behind human beings, and I call them the forces of the cave, because they have been with us since our days as cave people. And I'm referring to the fundamental fear, the inherent, innate fear. Not the simulated fear when you watch a Steven King movie, but the fundamental fear you felt in the cave when the animal was about to come in and eat you, or the predator came in to kill you. The innate feelings of nurturing, of parents and children, of friends, of food, of health, the fundamentals that drive human relations -- those fundamentals cannot pass. Even though you can transmit emotions through the wired media, and you can cry and you can laugh at TV, you know you can turn off the Internet, you can turn off your machine. There's no way I can squeeze your collarbone to extinction through a body suit because you'll turn me off. That is not a trivial thing. It separates the real physical world with the fear of death, the love, the nurturing. We do that hourly, when we talk with people that we trust, business associates, doctors and patients, parents and children. We do that hourly, and those fundamental things cannot pass. Q: What are the implications for the texture of technology? A: The implications are far easier to understand than it's being made out to be. To me, the human has been immutable for thousands of years. And in the human path have come certain technologies that help the human soul with his or her problems, the ancient problems of wanting nurturing, food, love. The first tools were the stone tools. Then the wheel came. Then we got the plow. Then we got electricity, and the motor, and chemicals. Then we got the computer, then we got the communication. What is the similarity? The similarity is that they are all things. It's about time we started going beyond things and focus on the most precious resource on our planet, by understanding ourselves. I believe we broke ourselves during the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment came and it split reason from faith. It also split men and nature. This split was essential: People could pursue science without being shot. Science led to technology, the industrial revolution. In 300 years we became wealthy because of the post-Renaissance Enlightenment split. I consider that a boon to our current situation and the biggest mistake that could have happened. And I want it corrected. Because by causing the split, we have split ourselves. It's not just religious faith. The faith-reason split today is manifested as the techie-humanist split. It's manifested as the rational vs. the more emotional split. As long as we are split, I don't think we can face tomorrow's world, which is inextricably complex. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
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