Selected highlights from an Edge Roundtable talk; click through to the Edge site to check out the video for a richer experience and read the rest of the transcript to dig in deeper, including bits about Mirror Worlds, asynchronous communication, The New Tork Times, McLuhan and more.

John Markoff and Clay Shirky talk to David Gelernter, An Edge Roundtable: Lord of the Cloud:

On Cloud Computing

GELERNTER: But the [cloud computer] field during the 1980’s said … “This is a very pretty idea. This is a beautiful elegant idea. It’s stupid because it’s impossible. It will never work. It is grossly inefficient. There is no way that you can take information, just float it out there, and expect people to search this whole vast collection, or somehow or other find what they want. And, you know, how are you going to find out what computer to put it on? How am I going to know what computer to look for it on?”

We said from the very beginning that those questions are in a larger sense irrelevant because software develops the algorithms it needs to provide the service users want. In the final analysis, the question is not, what can software engineers build? It’s the question, What do users need? If we identify our user need, the software technology will come along — in combination with hardware, obviously, and interconnect technology.

SHIRKY: The other thing I think is so striking about it … is that you [Gelernter] were flying in the face of the dominant view of the computing industry. What you said, which is simple economics but radical to the industry is, computers will become abundant because people care about them. And when they become abundant enough, we’ll stop caring about them. … Because then we can take them for granted.

In ‘91, no one was ready to take computers for granted yet. They were the fetish object themselves. What I got … was the sense of, “oh right, this is going to fade into the background and the computer stops being the object you care about.” That movement from object to fabric was absolutely prescient.

On Lifestreams

GELERNTER: Well, Lifestreams was already my idea that instead of keeping my information in separate pieces of digital Tupperware with some of it in this app, and some of it in that app, and some of it in the file system, and some of it in my Web brower, and some of it on my laptop, and some in my palm, and some in my cell … — I didn’t want to do that. I wanted every information object I owned arranged in an electronic diary or journal or narrative. Or ‘Lifestream’ is what I call it.

So, in principle, the first thing would be your electronic birth certificate. Then every piece of electronic stuff you either generated or received, including all of your e-mail and every draft of every paper you wrote and every photograph and snapshot and thing you scanned in and your receipts when you travel and your tax returns … it would all be on this one stream. So any computer and device that I used, whether it was portable or large screen, or whatever, I would tune in this Lifestream.

… There was a thesis in the late 90’s and Eric Freeman [who had written this PhD thesis] had a really hard time. He almost got thrown out of there because people said, “Well, are you talking about saving everything? Indexing everything? You’ve got to throw things away and you can’t index everything. And you need a file hierarchy — you’ve got to put things in files. …” Nobody believed it then.

“Too early is wrong.”

GELERNTER: You know, in a sense, there is a window of opportunity and being too early is as bad as being too late.

SHIRKY: “Too early is wrong.”

GELERNTER: Exactly. I mean Babbage had brilliant ideas about computing in the nineteenth century. It didn’t do him a hell of a lot of good at the time. …

SHIRKY: We all make our living, in a way, on positive externalities [of] ideas that are 50 years old. And the funding climate now seems, both on the commercial and on the industrial and on the government side, all to be about three to five year paths. A seven-year timeframe for research — that’s long-term thinking right there. And I wonder, is the university the last place that’s got a long enough time horizon to hold what we used to get from a lot of different sources.

On the persistence of data and lifestreams

GELERNTER: This is not just a small software thing. This is going to be your life. I would love to be able to inherit a Lifestream from my grandparents and see what their lives were really like and there is no reason I shouldn’t leave my Lifestream to my children and my descendants. There’s no reason why these shouldn’t go for centuries or millennia. Or let you immerse yourself in the lives of your forbears, the lives of an earlier time. In such a radically a-historical world as ours, it’s important. But on the other hand, there are cases where I want to suppress the past and it’s important for me that I be able to do that. Certainly it is conceivable. It is doable.

MARKOFF: Except that there are multiplicities of Lifestreams and you may delete a portion, but your life intersected with those of others, which will not reflect that, given search. It gets very tricky.

GELERNTER: It gets very tricky very fast. …

SHIRKY: In the digital world, privacy is the right to insist on incomplete information.

GELERNTER: We live in an environment in which the industry — and certainly computer science or the research field — is always thinking that people care more about privacy than they do. I remember, it wasn’t all that long ago in the mid late 90’s, when people were saying, “Well, what will be the killer app on the Web? You know, mainly it’s going to be for pornography. Right? People are never going to send their credit cards over the Web.”

… They don’t care. The point is that the convenience obviously trumps a very marginal risk in their minds. And in the larger context of privacy, I think people have been aware subliminally, or at some level, for a long time.