Alan Alda Talks with Craig Mundie

robk — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:54:00 GMT

After Rashid's keynote, Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, engaged in a freewheeling technology discussion with Alan Alda, famed television and movie star and host of PBS' Scientific American Frontiers. The pair sat informally, and after a brief intro in which Mundie explained how the two first met in Beijing five years ago, they were off and running.

The discussion ranged far and wide. Alda, it turns out, is quite the technophile, and he held his own quite well with Mundie. Their discussion touched on, among other topics, WorldWide Telescope, search collaboration, user interfaces, cellular modeling, algorithms, the differences between serial and parallel computing, and quantum computing.

When it came to the latter, a most interesting exchange occurred toward the end of the hour-long chat:

Alda: You know what worries me about this? Because of my history in entertainment, I think about the first film was nitrate, and it disintegrated and sometimes went up in flames. But then, when they changed the technology, they copied a lot of the old films and brought them forward, and we have them today because they did that. And then, as we got digital, they did the same thing. But every time the technology changes, they have to make a decision. They cull; it's like culling a herd. And the ones that they transfer--that decision is made on the basis of the culture at the time: What seems important, what do we want to send into the future? They're constantly making these capsules for the future, every time the technology changes. And when we go from ones and zeros to a completely different way of computing, there's going to be a gigantic culling of all knowledge, not just of movies. What's going to happen?

Mundie: I don't actually think about it in that way, in part because I tend to think of the information which gets represented as something slightly different than the model of computation that we apply to the information.

Alda: Will this new way of computing be so smart that it can take everything that already exists and learn how to translate it?

Mundie: Yes. That I actually think we'll see. But there is another fascinating thing that is happening now that wasn't happening that many years ago, and it's another area where some of Tony Hey's projects at Microsoft Research are involved today, and it is with this question of digital libraries and the whole question of archiving the digital history. When people were making these decisions step-by-step as a business decision, they were guided by one thing. But of course, society has always depended on archivists whose mission wasn't to preserve everything but at least preserve a representative sample. One thing I think is really interesting today is that our ability to store things has grown in capacity to such a degree that we're really getting close to approaching a time where almost nothing needs to be forgotten.

Alda: And then you're story is how to search through it.

Mundie: And to some extent, we're also getting to the point where we can find anything we remember. At least at the scale of the Web, with billions and billions of pages of information, we not only remember all those things, but we can find every one.

TechFest Live! : Alan Alda

Alan Alda Talks with Craig Mundie