Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI,” Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More (#782)

“It may be easier to actually make intelligence than to understand intelligence.”
— Danny Hillis

Danny Hillis is an inventor, scientist, author, and engineer. While completing his doctorate at MIT, he pioneered the parallel computers that are the basis for the processors used for AI and most high-performance computer chips. He has more than 400 issued patents, covering parallel computers; disk arrays; cancer diagnostics and treatment; various electronic, optical, and mechanical devices; and the pinch-to-zoom display interface. He is a co-founder of The Long Now Foundation and the designer of its 10,000-year mechanical clock.

Danny has founded multiple companies, but his only regular job was as the first Disney Fellow at Disney Imagineering. He has published scientific papers in Science, Nature, Modern Biology, and International Journal of Theoretical Physics and written extensively on technology for Newsweek, Wired, and Scientific American. He is the author of The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work and Connection Machine. He is now a founding partner with Applied Invention, working on new ideas in cybersecurity, medicine, and agriculture.

Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) is the founding executive editor of WIRED magazine, the former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Review, and a bestselling author of books on technology and culture, including Excellent Advice for Living; The Inevitable; What Technology Wants; and Vanishing Asia, his three-volume photo-book set that captures West, Central, and East Asia. Kevin is the author of the popular essay “1000 True Fans.” Subscribe to Kevin’s newsletter, Recomendo, at recomendo.com. Every edition features 6 brief personal recommendations of cool stuff.

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Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform. Watch the interview on YouTube.

The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

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Want to hear the last time Kevin Kelly was on this show? Listen to our conversation here, in which we discussed Kevin’s long bet against the human population, resurrecting extinct species, active optimism vs. passive optimism, Kevin’s $20 time machine, the “dumbsmarten” future of AI, tips for traveling with children, the joys of being a tourist in one’s own town, sabbaticals, and much more.

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

• Connect with Danny Hillis:

Applied Invention

• Connect with Kevin Kelly:

Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube

• A Multidisciplinary Innovation Company | Applied Invention
• Six Brief Personal Recommendations of Cool Stuff | Recomendo
• Interview of Kevin Kelly, Co-Founder of WIRED, Polymath, Most Interesting Man In The World? | The Tim Ferriss Show #25, #26, & #27
• Stewart Brand – The Polymath of Polymaths | The Tim Ferriss Show #281
• Sierra Diablo Mountain Range | 10,000-Year Clock
• Natra Mogen Clamp | eBay
• W. Daniel Hillis: Becoming a Disney Fellow | Web of Stories
• Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
• World Leader in Artificial Intelligence Computing | NVIDIA
• Moore’s Law | Intel
• Sun Microsystems | Wikipedia
• Five Facts You May Not Know About Disney and Dali’s Lost Project ‘Destino’ | Park West Gallery
• Disney Online | Disney Wiki
• How to Do a Tombstone Rubbing | ThoughtCo.
• The Steve Jobs Effect: Why We Need Visionary Founders and Professional Leaders (Who Are a Little of Both) | Inc.
• Thinking Machines Corporation | Wikipedia
• What Is Parallel Computing? | IBM
• Danny Hillis: The Biological Connection (Excerpt from Out of Their Minds) | NYU
• Intelligence as an Emergent Behavior or, The Songs of Eden | The Long Now
• Amdahl’s Law: Understanding the Basics | Splunk
• A New Identity-Aware Network Security Layer | ZPR
• Island by Aldous Huxley | Amazon
• Ocean’s Eleven (2001) | Prime Video
• Logo History | Logo Foundation
• W. Daniel Hillis: Programming Slot Machine | Web of Stories
• Tinkertoy Computer | Computer History Museum
• A Modern, Open-Source Smalltalk Programming System | Squeak
• How Feynman Diagrams Almost Saved Space | Quanta Magazine
• Quantum Electrodynamics | Fermilab
• Comprehensive Cancer Information | National Cancer Institute
• Danny Hillis: Understanding Cancer Through Proteomics | TED Talk
• David Agus: A New Strategy in the War on Cancer | TED Talk
• Talking with Walt Disney | The Disney Connection
• Life on the Pond | Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust
• Permaculture: You’ve Heard of It, But What the Heck Is It? | Modern Farmer
• TL;DR Shorts: Dr. Danny Hillis on the Automated Future of Research | Digital Science
• The Alliance for Learning Innovation | ALI
• The Big AI Research DARPA Is Funding This Year | Defense One
• Dr. William Hillis: Man on a Mission | Baylor College of Arts & Sciences
• W. Daniel Hillis: My Father Was a Doctor | Web of Stories
• The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron | Amazon
• The Pros and Cons of Homeschooling | Parents
• The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines | Inc.
• The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Entanglement | Journal of Design and Science
• The Coming Entanglement: Bill Joy and Danny Hillis | Science Talk
• Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World by Kevin Kelly | Amazon
• Fostering Long-Term Thinking | The Long Now Foundation
• The Big Picture | WIRED
• What is a Neural Network? | IBM
• The History of Artificial Intelligence: Complete AI Timeline | TechTarget
• W. Daniel Hillis: The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence | Web of Stories
• Here’s Why We Don’t Understand What Electricity Is | Ribbon Farm
• Plants of the Gods — Dr. Mark Plotkin on Ayahuasca, Shamanic Knowledge, the Curse and Blessing of Coca, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #508
• Mantis Shrimp | Great Barrier Reef Foundation
• Artificial Intelligence Concerns: Is Skynet or The Matrix Possible? | Ontario Society of Professional Engineers
• Duck And Cover (1951) | Nuclear Vault
• Smallpox and the Story of Vaccination | Science Museum
• 1950s: Explore a Decade in LGBTQ+ History | Pride & Progress
• Danny Hillis: Should We Create a Solar Shade to Cool the Earth? | TED Talk
• By 2060 the Total Population of Humans on Earth Will Be Less than It Is Today. | Long Bets
• Star Trek: The Original Series | Prime Video
• Smartphone History: A Complete Timeline | Textline
• Seven Ways the Internet Has Changed the World (for Better and for Worse) | Race Communications
• Babble: A Real “Cone of Silence” | Lifehacker
• The Jetsons | Prime Video
• Herman Miller Babble | The BE Collection
• Alzheimer’s Treatments: What’s on the Horizon? | Mayo Clinic
• Theranos: A Fallen Unicorn | Investopedia
• Danny Hillis: Breakthrough Tools for Neuroscience | BrainMind Summit
• W. Daniel Hillis: Seeing the Future Emerging from Dreams | Web of Stories
• W. Daniel Hillis: My ‘Pinch-to-Zoom’ Invention | Web of Stories
• Pinch-to-Zoom: Apple Versus Samsung | Canadian Intellectual Property Blog
• What Is a Patent in Simple Terms? | Investopedia
• On the 20th Anniversary, An Oral History of the Web’s First Banner Ads | Internet History Podcast
• Daniel Hillis Inventions, Patents, and Patent Applications | Justia Patents Search
• How Claude Shannon Invented the Future | Quanta Magazine
• W. Daniel Hillis: Why I Don’t Believe In Cause and Effect | Web of Stories
• Quantum Computing: Definition, How It’s Used, and Example | Investopedia
• The Pattern on the Stone by W. Daniel Hillis | Amazon
• W. Daniel Hillis: Francis Crick and Consciousness | Web of Stories
• Something That Goes Beyond Ourselves | Edge
• Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More | The Tim Ferriss Show #674
• The “Long Tail” of Research Impact Is Engendered by Innovative Dissemination Tools and Meaningful Community Engagement | LSE
• The Clock of the Long Now | The Long Now Foundation
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade | Prime Video

SHOW NOTES

• [07:56] How Danny and Kevin first met through Stewart Brand.
• [09:58] The funniest person who ever opened Danny’s interview box of unusual objects.
• [14:01] Danny’s transition to Disney as a Disney Fellow and Vice President of Imagineering.
• [19:12] The contrast between engineering and artistic approaches to problem-solving.
• [28:56] The development of parallel computing and founding Thinking Machines.
• [37:15] The three criteria by which projects are chosen at Applied Invention.
• [40:36] Zero-trust packet routing (ZPR) and the future of cybersecurity.
• [46:46] Learning by “hanging out” with experts like Seymour Papert, Marvin Minsky, and Richard Feynman.
• [59:20] Danny’s work in biotechnology and cancer research with David Agus.
• [01:07:44] Staying sustainable with systems-oriented thinking in agriculture — as nature intended.
• [01:16:10] Danny’s superpower.
• [01:17:48] Homeschooling, education on the move, and the influence of Mrs. Wilner.
• [01:22:00] The failure of Thinking Machines and other regrets/surprises.
• [01:26:00] The “Entanglement” that blurs natural and technological boundaries.
• [01:30:54] The current state of AI versus true intelligence.
• [01:34:34] How AI may help humanity better understand its place on the intelligence spectrum.
• [01:39:42] What the future looks like to a short-term pessimist/long-term optimist.
• [01:50:50] The cone of silence we never heard from again.
• [01:53:10] Debugging dementia and other diseases.
• [01:58:05] The MRI alternative Danny’s tackling.
• [02:00:51] Why don’t we have a freezer version of the consumer microwave oven?
• [02:01:23] Danny’s place in pinch-to-zoom iPhone innovation history.
• [02:04:51] The pros and cons of patents for inventors and society.
• [02:08:01] Inventors Danny finds inspiring.
• [02:10:04] Danny’s cause-and-effect heresy.
• [02:14:47] Quantum computing and its implications.
• [02:18:34] The scientific pursuit of understanding consciousness.
• [02:23:00] The question Danny asks himself before investing time in a project.
• [02:25:26] Danny’s 10,000-year billboard.
• [02:29:49] Parting thoughts.

MORE DANNY HILLIS QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“What the inventor does is actually a very small piece of it. What society does is it creates these preconditions for invention. And once those preconditions are in place, then it’s just a matter of putting together the puzzle pieces and making it work.”
— Danny Hillis

“I’ve also developed the ability to search out the people who really know the thing and hang out with them. … It’s not that I know things other people don’t, but maybe I know a different combination of things that other people do know, and I’m kind of willing to learn the things I don’t know and have a technique of doing it by just hanging out with people who are smarter than I am.”
— Danny Hillis

“Intelligence is a very complicated multifactored thing like life. It’s not just one thing. At the beginnings of AI, we thought the things that were hard for us to do were the intelligence. … As it turns out … the hard part was the stuff that we were so good at, we didn’t even notice—like recognizing a face, jumping to a conclusion, having an intuition about something.”
— Danny Hillis

“It’s much harder to imagine solutions to problems than it is to imagine problems.”
— Danny Hillis

“Maybe I’ve kept a superpower that kids have. … They’re not afraid to go in and see something new and strange and start playing with it.”
— Danny Hillis

“I try to ask the question, ‘Will this make a difference over how much time and how long will that difference matter?’ If it makes a lot of difference after I’m dead, I’d rather do that.”
— Danny Hillis

“I read enough papers that I have questions, because you’re wasting the time of a Marvin Minsky or a Richard Feynman if you don’t ask them something that makes them think. So I would say most of my learning was from the people, not the papers. But I always do homework beforehand to see where the interesting questions are.”
— Danny Hillis

“Great teachers … see where you are and they stretch you to someplace you can get to.”
— Danny Hillis

“A lot of people’s use of computers is now, they kind of know the magic incantations that cause this library to do that, but they don’t really know all the things that are going on underneath that that make it work. And so it’s becoming more like nature. Nature, we used to kind of know, ‘Well, here’s the magic incantations we use for making beer. We don’t know really why this makes good beer, this makes bad beer, or this makes champagne, but we know when we do this, it does that,’ and that’s kind of becoming our relationship with computers. So I think that what’s happening … the distinction between the natural and the artificial is becoming entangled. … It may just kind of go away because there almost is no pure nature and there almost is no pure technology that we fully understand.”
— Danny Hillis

“I have a granddaughter [who] can sit and talk to an electrician as if she knows what electricity is, just by using the right words and saying phrases that she’s heard before and so on. And she can kind of fake it pretty well, but she has no idea what she’s talking about. And that’s mostly where AI is right at this moment.”
— Danny Hillis

“It may be easier to actually make intelligence than to understand intelligence.”
— Danny Hillis

“I think humans, as we know them today, are kind of halfway between monkeys and what we’re going to become. … We’re in this transitional phase. We’ve still got a lot of monkey in us, and I’m really excited by that thing that we’re going to become.”
— Danny Hillis

“In general, I’m a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist.”
— Danny Hillis

“Much better to be a peasant today than to be a king a couple of centuries ago in terms of your health, food that you ate, how you spend your time … your comfort, everything.”
— Danny Hillis

“I don’t believe in cause and effect.”
— Danny Hillis

“An idea has a lot more sticking power than any physical thing you could build.”
— Danny Hillis

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