The conference was my first networking experience. Mario and I were wearing clothing that could not really be considered suits. Mario had long hair, and I was wearing a black turtleneck sweater that didn’t really fit me. But that didn’t stop us from ignorantly attempting to converse with everyone there.

Billionaires walked by. Vinod Khosla entertained us all, and drove up the prices of every solar company’s stock in the room with his words. Mario dragged me from our table to where Bill Joy was finishing an interview with a national news syndicate. He was a nice guy, and made me feel at ease.

We went back to the Dow Jones in 2007 for another conference, where we met more interesting people. However, we didn’t decide to attend the 2008 conference, but attended a conference on Energy Policy and the Environment in Washington D.C. last winter. The different perspective the conferences presented to our brains was both useful and jarring.

However, Bill Joy spoke brilliantly, and we continue to be impressed with his intellect. It is because of our memory of him that the following video has been posted here.

Thanks to MitWorld for this lecture.

Video Length

September 29, 2005
Running Time: 51:35

About the Lecture

It’s a good thing that a decade ago, some engineers at Sun Microsystems became dissatisfied with the limitations of the desktop PC and with kludgy TV remote controls. Their frustrations, according to Bill Joy, led to technology breakthroughs we count on today—and will likely in years to come. Joy and his colleagues grasped early on the impact the Internet would have on both computing and entertainment. Back in the 90s, they decided to play out how technologies imbedded in daily life would evolve under the influence of the internet. They envisioned the “far” web, as defined by the typical TV viewer experience; the “near” web, or desktop computing; the “here” web, or mobile devices with personal information one carried all the time; the “weird” web, characterized by voice recognition systems; the “B2B” web of business computers dealing exclusively with each other; and the “D2D” web, of intelligent buildings and cities. (Sun’s programming language Java was a deliberate attempt at a platform for all six webs.)

Joy sees the six webs as a great organizing principle for understanding how the internet will continue to change. He believes the “here” web will figure most prominently in our lives, with its “nomadic idea that instead of being tethered to an office, we carry around things of most interest to us.” He notes the increasing “cleavage between entertainment authored for the ‘here’ and ‘far’ webs.” The latter is dominated by such corporate interests as game companies intent on copy protection and rights management, while the “more anarchic world” of the internet leads to more interesting content, such as personal publishing, housed best on the “here” web. Says Joy, “Doing things with people you know through a small screen makes enormous sense.”

About Bill Joy

As a Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Former Chief Scientist, Sun Microsystems Bill Joy led Sun’s technical strategy from the founding of the company in 1982 until September 2003. While at Sun, he was a key designer of Sun technologies including Solaris, SPARC, chip architectures and pipelines, and Java. In 1995 he installed the first city-wide WiFi network. Joy has more than 40 patents issued or in progress.

Before co-founding Sun, Joy designed and wrote Berkeley UNIX – the first open source operating system with built-in TCP/IP, making it the backbone of the Internet. Fortune magazine dubbed him the “Edison of the Internet.”

Joy has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Engineering, honoris causa, from the University of Michigan. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a trustee of the Aspen Institute.

Even with extremely simple rules, one can get extremely complicated behavior.
-Stephen Wolfram

Wouldn’t it be exciting, Stephen Wolfram wonders, to have a little computer program that could function as a precise, ultimate model of our universe? If you ran the program long enough, it would reproduce every single thing that happens. It’s not out of the question, according to Wolfram’s lecture which somehow encapsulates his 1,200-page opus, A New Kind of Science, in a single hour.

Thanks to the new release of MIT World (and ISITE Design, the Portland agency who created it), we can watch Steven Wolfram’s entire 1.5 hour lecture on the book. While I read the book when it first came out a few years ago, it is always great to be able to watch Steve speak about his ideas. As I read the book for the second time, his voice will help guide me through as I gain new intellectual perspectives.

Stephen Wolfram is a MacArthur Prize winner, and world-renowned for his work in scientific computing. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, and received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech at the age of 20. His breakthrough work involved studying the behavior of simple computer programs called “cellular automata”. After a career at Caltech, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and at the University of Illinois, he launched Wolfram Research, Inc., publisher of Mathematica, the world’s most widely used symbolic mathematics software.

Wolfram’s vast and penetrating research uses simple computations to generate complex computer models that resemble designs found in nature. He embraces the really big subjects, and the really small ones—from patterns on mollusk shells and the shapes of leaves and snowflakes, to free will, evolution, and extra-terrestrial life.

This new kind of thinking might provide alternatives to evolution in explaining how different forms of life emerged. Wolfram believes his work is already transforming the study of science, as well as making possible a host of new technologies.

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