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Q. What was the role of openness in spreading this work?
A. The decision was made not to patent anything, and to publish all the blueprints and specifications—everything that nowadays would be most secret and proprietary was put in the open and published and freely circulated. That’s really why this particular design became the one that, if you take apart any microprocessor today, you’ll find it’s essentially an exact functional copy of this original institute machine. That decision was on the one hand was very altruistic. On the other hand it was extremely good for IBM. And the dark side of that is that von Neumann was actually being paid as a private consultant for IBM, so you could say there was really a conflict of interest.
What’s I think most frightening, and most the concern of your audience, is that universities are among the worst actors in the situation today. Universities are putting all these proprietary controls on their own work. In most universities now, if a professor wants to do research that has any conceivable practical results, they sign patent agreements, and the university pursues the patents and tries to license them. Maybe it’s to the good of the endowment of the university, but is it to the good of research and science? It’s not at all clear.
Q. In the end of the book, you seem a bit down on the future.
A. We have to be eternally vigilant. Our job, as it was with nuclear energy or drugs or any of these amazing technologies with power, is to make sure they are used for the good of humanity, not for evil. In the case of computers particularly, the jury just is still out. And the story I try to tell is how this computer very specifically originated from what can be very accurately described as a deal with the devil that von Neumann made. That if the mathematicians built this machine that could help build the hydrogen bomb which could destroy all life on earth, they would then get this machine that could just make amazing progress in science. We haven’t used the hydrogen bombs. It’s sort of like we escaped. And it seems that we got all these wonderful things from computers. We all have our iPads and our iPhones and things we never dreamed of. We have to be careful that computers likewise can be a tool for liberating people or for controlling people. That was seen at the beginning, by people like Norbert Wiener [American mathematician], as a real threat. That could still turn out to be true. Tomorrow a totalitarian government could take over the world and control everybody through computers. I’m not saying that’s going to happen, but we need to be aware of that.
Marc Parry
Marc Parry writes about scholars and the work they do. Follow him on Twitter @marcparry, or email him at marc.parry@chronicle.com.