Because of the breadth and depth of Dr. Masood Mortazavi's knowledge and interests as evidenced on his popular sun.com blog, On the Margins, his Meet the Engineer interview appears in two parts, so stay tuned. Part 1 explores his thoughts on technology, virtual reality, the nature of open-source movements, the significance of bugs, and more. Part 2 will look at his work as a Java developer and manager of a team of senior database engineers.
I've also worked at Sun as a high-performance and high-availability expert and filed several SMI patents in these areas. I've been involved in carrier-grade J2EE investigations and high-performance computing (HPC) and high-availability (HA) studies with Sun technology partners in the telecommunications and financial services industries. Before joining Sun, I worked as a chief architect and an investigator on DARPA-funded projects with a focus on distributed intelligent computing. As a university student, I did a B.S. (U.C. San Diego) and M.S. (U.C. Davis) in applied and chemical engineering, and finished my Ph.D. in computational fluid dynamics with a dissertation titled Vortex-Vortex Interactions and PDF Methods (U.C. Davis, 1990). I next worked for China's National Petroleum Company in a very small town in China's Northeast Province of Heilongjiang, teaching computational techniques for plant design and spending the winter weeks in -25° to -30° cold. After China, I returned to academia and spent seven more years at U.C. Berkeley, where I finished both a master's in journalism in 1993 and an M.B.A. in 2004. While at Berkeley, my academic interests led me to pursue a second Ph.D. in the Graduate Group in Logic and Methodology of Science (math, philosophy, and computer science), with a focus on the foundations of mathematics, theories of computation, and philosophy, in general. In particular, I studied the philosophy of artificial intelligence with Hubert Dreyfus during those years. Dreyfus is the author of What Computers Still Can't Do. (I decided to stop my second Ph.D. work soon after joining Sun in 1999. There were enough thrilling things to do at work.) java.sun.com (JSC): Sun founder Bill Joy, one of the creators of UNIX and Java, wrote a famous article in 2000 called "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," in which he said, "Our most powerful 21st-century technologies -- robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech -- are threatening to make humans an endangered species." He argued that the field of artificial intelligence will lead to computers and robots that will far outstrip human intelligence, with potentially devastating consequences. Joy asks with great seriousness, "Will we survive our technologies?" You studied with the Berkeley philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, author of What Computers Still Can't Do (a revision of the earlier book, What Computers Can't Do). Dreyfus is famous, or infamous, for claiming that there are inherent limits to AI and that computers will never be able to "understand" the world and answer questions about it like adult human beings and therefore will never pose a threat to us. Where do you stand on this? Mortazavi: I respect Bill Joy tremendously, not least because of his Berkeley pedigree, his founding of Sun Microsystems, and his commitment to being an independent, profound thinker -- and I'm pretty sure I used one of his earliest editors in a programming course I took in the summer of 1980 at U.C. Berkeley. However, while I think Bill's warning signs about technology should be reviewed and taken seriously, I differ with him regarding the actual dangers and how they may unfold, and I question Bill's views regarding artificial intelligence and how technology may pose an existential risk to us, partly because of my studies with Hubert Dreyfus.
The idea that technology will have some kind of apocalyptic influence on our lives, whether positive or negative, is very American (and potentially, Western European). Technology historian Thomas Hughes has already analyzed this infatuation in great detail in his book Human-Built World: How to Think About Technology and Culture. I believe, following Hubert Dreyfus, that we're not essentially computational beings, although a lot of computation takes place in our brain's basic integration of sense perception and pattern matching of all kind. And yes, neural networks have something to teach us about the way certain functions of our brains operate, but we keep learning more subtlety as we explore more deeply. We are primarily coping beings. From an existentialist point of view, we are beings who uniquely face and own our own demise and death. This ownership cannot be artificially engineered by human beings into a machine (even if we imagine the contrary in cartoons such as Wall•E). I myself cannot imagine a machine that has to come to terms with its own eventual demise. If it did, it would no longer be a machine. As technologists, we have failed in the past and will fail in the future to create something that is computational and robotic and enough like ourselves to pose an existential threat to us. If there's an existential danger, it probably issues much more directly from ourselves than from the technology we have produced. The conduct of our personal, social, and political lives can pose a far more serious existential danger to us than can the technology we create. Intolerance and discrimination against the "others" often corrupts our basic human moral compass, and that kind of intolerance by itself is a much greater danger than technology. To battle intolerance, we should all remind ourselves of what Mencius, an ancient Chinese philosopher, used to say -- that, in our hearts, we are all essentially the same. Here's the direct quote: In good years the young men are mostly lazy, while in bad years they are mostly violent. Heaven has not sent down men whose endowment differs so greatly. The difference is due to what ensnares their hearts. Take the barley for example. Sow the seeds and cover them with soil. The place is the same and the time of sowing is also the same. The plants shoot up and by the summer solstice they all ripen. If there is any unevenness, it is because the soil varies in richness and there is no uniformity in the fall of rain and dew and the amount of human effort devoted to tending it. Now, things of the same kind are all alike. Why should we have doubts when it comes to man? The sage and I are of the same kind. Thus Lung Tzu said, "When someone makes a shoe for a foot he has not seen, I am sure he will not produce a basket." All shoes are alike because all feet are alike. All palates show the same preferences in taste... It is the same also with the ear... It is the same also with the eye... Should hearts prove to be an exception by possessing nothing in common? What is common to all hearts? Reason and rightness...
JSC: You wrote on your blog that "Every technical invention seems to take something from us in return for what it gives," and you made the point that electric lighting in cities has made it impossible to see the stars. What have computers and the Internet taken from us, and how can we get it back? Mortazavi: Computers and the Internet have given us the best copying machine ever constructed. They also produce some of the worst information overload problems imaginable. Computers and the Internet are in serious danger of destroying personal relationships. While they have great potential to make our physical experience richer -- by unburdening us from processing the mostly trivial information that we need to process to live in modern societies -- they also create time sinks that take us away from meaningful physical participation, interaction, living, and experience with others.
We sometimes use computers in dubious ways, for example, when we communicate with the office next door, or with our siblings in the room on the other side of the house, through chat and email. We used to write handwritten letters and send them to our loved ones and friends, who mattered to us. Now, we're able to email instantaneously across the universe to all kinds of recipients without much thought about who is getting what and whether this matters to them. With social networking, the personal and physical attributes of relationships fade away. Children are in serious danger of growing up with little appropriate physical and personal education. Many of the young who are hooked on the Internet are missing out on the traditional rituals of human contact, from a simple greeting to a simple good-bye handshake. These rituals seem trivial, but they form the very foundation of human culture. They are subtle and need to be learned early. We know how difficult it is for people with awkward social habits to repair them later in life. Of course, those who can afford it still send their children to various ritual schools. In today's world, you need to pay and set aside special time to learn social, physical grace. Finally, the Internet has made some people think they can know about anything by simply conducting a web search and judiciously reading what they find. But there's a lot of garbage on the web. Unless you are well-grounded in the physical world and have good experience and a powerful sense of discrimination, the web will put you on a train bound to nowhere.
JSC: Are we at risk of losing touch with our bodies as we live and interact increasingly in virtual worlds and we are deprived, for example, of the emotional connection that comes from being touched and exchanging smiles with real live people? Mortazavi: Yes, absolutely -- this is a real danger. Hubert Dreyfus ends his book On the Internet with a paragraph warning against the very serious danger of losing touch with our bodies and with our physical being in the world. Other philosophers have noted that the sense of touch gives us our earliest learning toolkit. We are exposed to and depend on our tactual senses to develop our sense of time, distance, and yes, vision -- not to mention personal attachment and love. Unless we have a rich social environment where we can appropriately develop our very special gifts, which are really our physical senses, we will become misfits to ourselves. We will not be able to comprehend our own place in the world. We will become estranged from our own. We may even say that our physicality is sacred, in the sense that it has mysteries and treasures that we can only unlock in our actions in the real physical world, particularly in our social interactions. This should be clear when we think of expressions such as love at first sight. JSC: You wrote on your blog: "According to my daughter's first-grade teacher, who has been teaching in the same elementary school for the last 30 years, children have progressively become less and less skilled in motor coordination. 'It just takes them much longer to learn jump rope,' she says." Mortazavi: I think that says it all. This teacher is no Luddite. She uses technology in her class. However, her observation regarding the deterioration of motor functions is based on her 30-year experience with children, something for which she deserves the highest accolades. Motor skills, along with various social rituals, and emotional intelligence -- all of which define us and defend us as human beings -- are learned early in life. Without proper environments to nurture them, we are in serious trouble. JSC: Consistent with your comments about the pitfalls of virtual reality, you have said that every software engineer needs to get out and see the world, take a bicycle ride, stroll in the park, and so on. Do software engineers need this more than other people? Mortazavi: Software engineers, by being purely mental workers, definitely need it more than most other workers. Software engineering, at its best, involves solving highly constrained problems, which can be enormously draining. Even if the person coding is unaware of feeling drained, it's still happening. We always need "to sharpen the saw," as my daughter often likes to remind me. For software engineers, sharpening the saw means getting out there, riding the bicycle, smelling the flowers, looking at the distant horizon, and in short, doing something else.
JSC: In another posting on your blog, you quote from Dreyfus's book On the Internet, where he said, in effect, that the Internet is in danger of encouraging us not to take what we write as seriously as we should. Because anyone can say anything so easily without consequence, the Internet encourages a kind of idle talk. Mortazavi: Absolutely. Dreyfus is a brilliant philosopher and thinker about technology. It's not unusual or even controversial anymore to run into vast masses of nonsense every time we do a search, regardless of how wonderful Google or some other search engine really is. In fact, in cases like this, it doesn't matter how powerful or how good the search engine is. Of course, Google and others seem to have made some headway with adaptive search. Frankly, I used to find a lot more interesting materials to read and research walking through the physical, shelved book system at the U.C. Berkeley Central Library than I have ever found on the Internet. Ready availability says nothing about the quality or usefulness of what is available on the Internet. Furthermore, there's a lot more to the physical book than we grant it. There is a funny but meaningful video about books as a user interface here. So the problem is not just about putting more books in digital form or into the Google library. (If I'm not mistaken, even Google offers its engineers a mobile library of physical books and video right at their Mountain View campus.) Even if we can search and find books in digital search libraries, it's hard to perceive relationships among the books. We don't have them all before us, in physical form, in categorical locations in a library. There are some notable exceptions and relative wonders such as Wikipedia, which is really a giant online book set. What Wikipedia adds to an encyclopedia is the enormous linkages. Here, Encyclopaedia Britannica really lost a historic opportunity. They should have dumped all editions, from all years, online. In fact, the full history of the EB is much more interesting than any particular edition. Compare and contrast the 1908 Encyclopaedia Britannica print edition with what we have today, and you'll know what I mean.
JSC: Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier has said that open-source software movements have not promoted radical creativity. "In fact," he writes, "they've been hindrances." Lanier insists that he is not anti-open source and adds: "A politically correct dogma holds that open source is automatically the best path to creativity and innovation, and that claim is not borne out by the facts." You have worked at creating Sun's commercial software, and you currently manage a team of senior database engineers who contribute to open-source communities. Your thoughts? Mortazavi: We're all prone to looking for panaceas, and life will always prove us wrong. I agree with Jaron that there's something quite disturbing about the cult of personality (or cult of personalities) that has developed in some open-source communities, which usually occurs because the processes of some particular community have been too weak to encourage self-organization and self-management. Good community self-management can be seen in the Apache Software Foundation, which offers some of the best examples of open-source communities and governance I know of, and does a lot of innovative work too. But unfortunately, some communities lean towards cults of personality because all organized work requires coordination, and some organized activities, because of their internal weaknesses, cannot arrive at a better coordinating principle than a cult of personality. We have something like this in economics. We either coordinate through prices or through entrepreneurial directions. In firms, we have entrepreneurial direction. In markets, we have prices that do the coordination work. The market is an organism, and the firm is an organization. It is more likely that cults of personalities arise in organizations and less likely that they will arise in organisms or real markets. This question of coordination has been explored, originally and beautifully, by Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Harry Coase in his very famous 1937 paper, "The Nature of the Firm." I think, with the open-source communities, when we have good channels of communication to conduct a real dialog, it is highly unlikely that cults of personalities will arise. Transparent communications, where information is readily available and dialog is possible, lead to open-source development environments that are like a bazaar. When these channels are weak and inoperative, information flow and dialog fail, and we have coordination by authorities that soon develop a cult around them -- what, using Eric Raymond's words, we may call the cathedral. One more point: The psychological makeup of some people involved in open-source communities leads them to believe they are on a very special mission that will determine the fate of the universe. This also gives rise to cults. But the majority of those involved in open source have no missionary interests -- they just use the software because it works. The main redeeming benefit of open-source development is the concept of communal or joint production. Many scholars have tried to understand what this joint production means. Some have compared it to gift economies. I think an analysis based on transaction-cost economics and institutional economics could take us further in understanding open-source communities. Briefly, here's how the transaction-cost economics analysis works: It is cheaper to develop software in open-source communities (with good dialog and communication capabilities, like a bazaar) than in close development led by directive. Linus Torvald has proven this. OpenSolaris is now proving it again. Ultimately, open-source communities are about giving and taking, that is, about exchange and transaction, where the extent of the freedom to give and the freedom to take depends on various characteristics of each of these communities -- in particular, about their ability to sustain transparent and open communication, dialog, and development. Some people try to distinguish these communities as loci of continuous creativity as opposed to programmed creativity. In fact, creativity is an activity that can hardly be programmed. The creativity that Jaron observes in iPhone is also socially produced, but only organized in a different way, within a firm that creates according to entrepreneurial directives. On the other hand, we have Java DB (Apache Derby), an absolutely wonderful database with great features, originally produced in a closed corporation but now part of an open-source project in Apache. Java DB has been very innovative and successful. Perhaps the best open-source projects have similar roots in closed-source pasts, but creativity does not stop once they go open source.
JSC: You have observed that bugs lead us to existential questions that reveal something important to us. What do they reveal? How can developers most benefit from their encounters with bugs? Mortazavi: We live our lives coping with the world in a very intelligent, seamless manner because we're designed to cope with it, and we only start thinking about things as things when they break down. I'm walking in the park, I sit on a bench to take in the view. I only think of the "benchness" of the bench if one of the legs of the bench breaks as I sit on it. If that happens, I may fall and then get up and look around and wonder about how the benchness of the bench has failed. Bugs are similar. Here's a scenario: A program works perfectly. All is well. I use it. It acts wonderfully. Oops, here's an expected behavior that's missing. Here's a bug. Let me see what the program is made up of and supposed to be doing. Let me think about the program now. Before, I was just using it as a tool for a purpose that drew all my attention. Now, I have to figure it out as a program that's broken. So working on bugs is the best way to learn about complex systems of code as well as simple ones. In fact, if we think of missing features as bugs in disguise, we can learn about programs as we fix them.
JSC: In a blog posting that was both funny and deep and picked up by the Washington Post, whose editors wondered if you were being sarcastic, you praised newspapers and concluded, "The efficiency and effectiveness of the paper edition of newspapers leaves me dumbfounded." What inspired you to write this? Mortazavi: I had just finished reading a book by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid called Social Life of Information, and I started thinking about paper as technology. Brown and Duguid explore the concepts of mobility versus durability of any content, given the media used to convey that content. Seely Brown and Duguid note that while various digital media have improved mobility, paper has proved quite durable as a medium and sufficient -- up to recent times -- for mobility of content. It's also obvious that paper offers a tremendous user interface in its simplicity and versatility. In the blog entry you mention, I note how the newspaper can be folded to almost any desirable size. Urban dwellers who read newspapers would know what I mean. In fact, traditional columns in papers were designed to allow such folding and readjustment of the "interface." JSC: Finally, what else would you like to say about technology and related matters? Mortazavi: People's relationship to technology needs to change. We need to view technology as one of many tools at our disposal to accomplish modest but meaningful goals. Fearing it or worshiping it will get us nowhere.
On the Margins: Masood Mortazavi's Sun.com Blog
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