Of all the fellows, Hillis has the most organic (and the strangest) connection to the company. When he was a graduate student at M.I.T., he worked on the problem of parallel computers-the means of generating enough capacity to teach a computer to begin thinking for itself. Few students had ever attracted as much attention, but if Hillis was to get his doctorate he had to carve out time enough to sit down and write a thesis. One morning, he stuffed a bag full of clothes, books, and legal pads and went out to Logan Airport intending to take the first flight out of Boston. The first flight was to Orlando. He took it. At Disney World, Hillis checked into the Contemporary Resort and bought a week's pass to the park. Every morning, he took the monorail from his hotel to the Magic Kingdom and, sitting on a bench, wrote a chapter per day.
Hillis soon built an international reputation, and a sizable fortune, through his expertise in parallel computing. Now, at Disney, he is spending many of his hours developing what he calls a Millennium Clock. The project itself, like so much else at Disney, may turn out to be too unwieldy to be called art, but the idea-the conception-is, amid all the Magic Mirrors and mega-puffers, a moment of ambition.
"For a long time, I've been struck by how our sense of a future is shrinking all the time," Hillis told me. 'When I was a little kid, the future meant the year 2000-all our expectations and dreams were built around that date. Now, thirty years later, somehow the future is still the year 2000. Part of it is the artificial barrier of the millennium, but it's also because technology is changing things so quickly. Now I think the year 2020 is almost impossible to imagine. Technology is self-creating. When I design a faster computer, it lets me create an even faster one. In science, this is called autocatalytic: every change increases the rate of change. So people are right to think they can't plan for the future the way they used to. In the Middle Ages, you could be in a cathedral and then figure that your grandchildren would finish it. Long-term projects made a kind of sense. These days, you can't imagine a three-generation project. No one believes that such a thing would remain relevant. I like the example of the oak beams in one of the dining halls at Oxford, which were put up in the sixteenth century. Several years ago, they had to replace the beams-twenty-foot oak beams, which are very hard to come by. They called the Oxford forester and asked if there were any such trees, and sure enough there were. In other words, someone thought far ahead enough to have planted the trees in the expectation of replacing the beams. You can't imagine that kind of thinking anymore. It just wouldn't occur to many people to make a centuries-long development. When you start thinking only in terms of a five-year leap-a five-year future a lot of problems become impossible. You can't worry about hunger or literacy. People give up on them. Companies plan in a way that they aren't even sure that their particular industry-their reason for being-will be around in five years. Ten years later, many Fortune 500 companies don't exist."
"The millennium stuff will pass. At first, there will be a big party, but when we're on the other side of the millennium we'll feel like there's a big blank sheet of paper in front of us, an open road, and we'll shift to more long-term thinking. The burst of technological progress will not go on forever. It feels very bad right now, because we haven't adjusted to it yet. We now have the technology that will allow for a different kind of society, but we don't have that different society yet.
"I felt what we need is a project that takes more than a century to complete. I want to build a clock: Imagine something very large-- cathedral-size, Stonehenge-size. A huge clock, whose very construction emphasizes that it will last only as long as people take care of it. It will be a clock that ticks once a year and bongs every millennium. If people keep winding it, it will last ten thousand years. One idea is to put it in the desert, and you'll have to go on a pilgrimage. I think of it as a way to keep mankind modest. No matter how hard we try, we literally cannot imagine the future."
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