John Gage, chief researcher and director of the science office for Sun Microsystems, has long manifested an intense desire to use technology for the good of all. He is responsible for Sun's relationships with world scientific and technical organizations, for international public policy and governmental relations in the areas of scientific and technical policy, and for alliances with the world's leading research institutions. In Part One of a two-part series, we met with him to discuss the ways Java technology can be used to improve the world.
Today, increasing computational power enables new kinds of science. And Java technology amplifies this trend. By allowing anyone to create programs that can run on any device connected to the network, Java technology helps scientists create new kinds of scientific instrumentation. Science and education are both forms of exploration. The same tools that are used for scientific exploration should be in the hands of students in schools, so that they can explore the world around them from the earliest age. We're seeing that today with four-year-olds playing on their Macs and interacting with visual and auditory environments. And that exploratory environment is a form of education, which is truly lifelong. Learning how to explore is a core component of education, far more long-lasting than simply learning a specific body of knowledge. And, we must be able to explore the world as it changes. Development and innovation come about through interplay between what we think we understand, and the changes happening in our environment. Today what is often called "industrial-age education" partitions pieces of information into 50-minute segments delivered at a specific time and place. As a more exploratory approach to education evolves, the network of knowledge will expand, creating a digital library of the world, available to all children. The Web symbolizes this. The Net Day project was just a tiny step towards putting the infrastructure in place to allow this kind of exploratory environment. Internet connectivity allowed new exploratory tools to be developed for students and teachers. And in a way, it was a step towards turning education from a classroom with a teacher at the front with the students seated and listening, into a world where the teacher and the student are helping each other to explore the world together.
Now, a student in a high school classroom linked on the Net can, through world-wide sensors, examine weather changes or alterations in pollution and salinity, all over the world. The unexplored data is enormous. Everyone can now be involved in the process of discovery. We're moving away from a world of rote, repeated experiments, into a world of exploratory environments that contribute to scientific dialogues.
The SETI program that searches for extraterrestrial intelligence is using the computational power of millions of computers across the network, in classrooms, in homes, in offices. So the PC linked on the network sitting in a fifth grade classroom could be the PC that discovers a sequence of symbols communicated from a remote portion of the radio galaxy. The idea is to unite us all in a web of exploration.
Many of those words, names, and jobs did not exist 10 or 20 years ago. So, our children are different from us, and the way they experience the world is different. Some people may not like the direction we're going in, but children today in rich countries with access to the global media have friends in other countries, listen to music that originated on another continent, and are exposed to so much more than their parents were. Just listen to today's music. It reverberates around the globe in a way that was impossible to implement and difficult to imagine 20 years ago. So, today, a child in a Detroit elementary school can put music on the global web and have listeners in China -- and a child in China can post thoughts and poetry that are read in Ethiopia and Atlanta. Information technology is a communication tool that has linked us together in an expanding, very tightly connected way. That's a fundamental change. A second area of major importance, but difficult to discern, is the evolution of symbol manipulation aided by computers. Human beings could not decode the human genome using index cards. But the symbol-analytic capabilities inherent in the processing elements of a computer (which is simply a symbol manipulation device), when joined with human intelligence, create something new. In the 1970s we called this the man/computer symbiosis, or the augmentation of human intellect. The founders of the ARPANET -- including J.C.R. Lickliter, in the 1960s, and Ivan Sutherland -- discussed how this combination of different forms of thinking, remembering, and symbol manipulation created a world of new insights and explorations. So the world is not static, and these new capabilities are altering how we think.
When you bring people who run the computer systems in a bank into a room to create a Java technology-based model of their part of the bank, and ask each of them, "What is a customer?" you get different answers. With object technology, you must specify -- for each object called a "customer"" -- the capabilities, aspects, dimensions, elements, and functions of that customer object. Well, you'll get a different answer from every component of your business. One group views the banking customer as a bank balance. Another views it as changes in bank balance. Another views it as the number of interactions over a certain period of time with that entity. Everyone views the customer from a different vantage point, just as every information system views the object from a different vantage point. So, by bringing your existing business systems into the new world of object-oriented organization and defining the interfaces among the objects, you get a much richer understanding of your business. There is no end to this, because there is no end to the shifting business conditions that shape whether or not a business is successful. So I view the introduction of Java technology, Java 2, Enterprise Edition, (J2EE) and all the methodologies for creating databases and objects that interact, as a way of creating the ongoing strategic self-awareness that every business must invest in heavily. Unless you continually reevaluate the objects that constitute your business system, you won't truly understand what has changed in the environment that affects your survival. Making Things Cheaper
It's within our grasp, but we don't do it. We're faced with the possibility of terrorist acts and earthquakes and natural disasters, so knowing how to integrate these transportation systems and react to changes in them could save lives. But we take the short-term view that it's functioning well enough, and we fail to see its costs. We need to make these costs more evident. Another design deficiency relates to the reliance upon foreign oil. With a slight change in energy efficiency standards, we would not be reliant upon foreign oil, and we could shift the political balance of the world. Standing at a distance, we see how that's possible, but always up close, given today's structures, we seem to think it's too difficult to change. But it's not too difficult to change. So, information technology can help give us perspectives on the haphazard ways we've organized things and enable us to take a more systematic view. The World Economic Forum
There is a shift, however, because as communication technologies become cheaper and cheaper, they allow people in the most remote parts of the world to take advantage of knowledge developed elsewhere. Today, people without the appropriate technology can't learn from someone more than a day's walk from where they live. The moment that radio, television, and the Internet begin to link them to others whose lives are similar, they can learn from each other and share their experiences. So, one power of game machines, PlayStations, and X-Boxes is to serve as communication devices, with graphics and audio that are clear to everyone. Used as network devices, they can link someone into the global digital library of knowledge -- and help them to make their water cleaner, or tell them how to keep their child with a 103 degree temperature alive -- things that every mother, every parent, every teacher, every nurse should know. The nice thing about these devices is they're becoming cheaper, so they will be far more widely used. When the level of Internet access reaches that of small radios, the ability of citizens in any country to participate in this flow of knowledge will have begun. We're not there yet, but the World Economic Forum consists of a group of business and governmental entities that can sponsor the programs that make these changes possible. All of us with technical knowledge and the ability to create information technology have a responsibility. We now need to take what we have learned and share it with the rest of the world. Since all Java programmers are empowered by their skills to create something new, they should become more responsible. In my opinion, some element of your time should be devoted to allowing those who come next to build upon your work. That means you should teach someone, write something, and allow others to use what you create. You must reach out to this expanding world, which is looking to you for leadership. That's all you could ask of the World Economic Forum, all you could ask of the world of Java programmers: Consciously devote some time to providing new tools and capabilities for the next wave, for the future. See Also
John Gage's Web Site
Biography of John Gage
The World Economic Forum
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You are the founder of NetDays '96, when thousands of volunteers wired 3,500 schools in California for Internet access. Since then, more than half a million volunteers have wired 50,000 schools in the U.S. You have articulated a vision of the American classroom, in which the orderly desks we see today are replaced by something resembling the trading floor of the stock exchange or a military command and control center. Just as fighter pilots learn to fly combat missions using simulation, students of the future will be exposed to a learning environment that challenges them through dynamic, realistic experiences. You have argued that technology can change our whole way of seeing, intuiting, and experiencing physics, history, biology, and virtually every traditional academic discipline. Can you give us a more detailed articulation of this vision?
When Galileo first saw the rings of Saturn through his telescope, and when Leeuwenhoek first saw microorganisms in a drop of water, these scientists grasped the power of combining scientific instrumentation and human observation to create new understanding. In the 1960s, Ivan Sutherland -- now a Sun Fellow and researcher -- published his Ph.D. thesis, Sketchpad, which founded the field of computer graphics and computer-aided design. He combined physics with design, by merging powerful, computer-based simulations of the physics of circuits with the tools designers used to create printed circuit boards; he forged a new synthesis of intuition, exploration, analysis, and design.
