The new book Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing (Copernicus/Springer-Verlag), edited by the distinguished computer scientists Peter J. Denning and Robert M. Metcalfe, is a collection of 21 brilliant essays commissioned to celebrate a major milestone in technology: the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Association for Computing Machinery. In this interview with Educom Review, Denning talks about the making of this important and remarkable book, which The New York Times describes as having an "astonishing intellectual reach."
Educom Review: Is the book an attempt actually to predict the future of computing?
Denning: Oh, no. We wanted to stay as far away from prediction as we could. We are keenly aware that the landscape is littered with the broken remains of failed predictions. What we were really interested in - if you don't mind the analogy - was to map the clearing, the space of human agreements, beliefs, values, practices, technologies and history that constrains where we move. Like the clearing in the forest, the world of 2047 is connected to the clearing of 1997 by a few pathways that pass around dense underbrush and between thick trees. We asked our authors to tell us what they think that clearing will look like and how we are likely to get there. We asked them to extrapolate trends and work with historical probabilities. I think they accomplished that remarkably well.
ER: How did the book come to be?
Denning: The ACM had decided to celebrate the 50th anniversary of electronic computing (its own anniversary as well) with a conference, a book, a Web page (acm.org/acm97), and an expo. To engage the theme of the next 50 years of computing, we invited over 150 leading lights and experts to contribute new essays. We sent a large number of invitations because we knew that many people would not be able to participate on account of the extremely tight time schedule or because they were not used to this style of essay writing. We received about two dozen positive responses.
ER: What were the responses like?
Denning: They fell into three basic categories. The first was pure high tech. These authors extrapolated trends like Moore's Law (which says that the speed of computers doubles every 18 months) and speculated what would happen with chips and fibers a billion times faster than today's. The second category addressed who we are becoming as human beings. Who will we be when we rely on computers to remember and do things for us? When the primary way people come to know us is through our communications? When our kids, who take computer simulations for granted, grow up thinking there is some form of non-life intelligence in computers? The third category addressed the future of business, leadership, work, innovation and education. In all categories, the authors repeatedly warned that the worlds they foresee may not come to pass.
ER: Let's go through the book from beginning to end. The Gordon Bell-James Gray paper is called "The Revolution Yet To Happen." What is this revolution that's yet to happen?
Denning: Although we all like to think that a lot's happened in 50 years, the capabilities of software, hardware and communication bandwidth in the next 50 years are going to jump so far ahead of where we are now, that we really have no idea at all what the consequences are going to be. Bell and Gray say, "No matter what you think you've seen, you ain't seen nothing yet." For example, they speculate that every signal that comes to a human being will be recorded by on-body computers and sensors. They give fairly detailed technology forecasts.
ER: Do they expect progress in the various technologies - software, hardware, networking and so forth - to continue at the same rate over the next 50 years?
Denning: Using Moore's Law, they are able to extrapolate processor speeds, memory capacities, and network bandwidths over the next 50 years, at least until we reach the physical limits of the materials from which we make these parts. These aspects are predictable in the near term. But it is a more interesting question as to what will be considered "progress." From the perspective of a person beset by information - getting ever more confused and overloaded - these changes might not look like "progress." Ultimately, progress has to be defined in human terms. What will happen when every sound, every photon, every electromagnetic wave, every gravitational change impinging on a person can be measured and recorded by on-body computers? Everyone will appear to have a photographic memory. But what happens if one of your computers breaks down? Are you human any more? If your photographic memory breaks, will you look stupid? Will your affliction be considered a disease?
ER: Does the next chapter in the book, Vint Cerf's essay, "When They Are Everywhere," proceed along the same lines?
Denning: Yes, but with more emphasis on the ways computers will be integrated into everyday life. Suppose that we have thousands of very fast, small, powerful computers attending each of us - what will we do with them? What will life be like? What will our children or grandchildren take for granted that we think is impossible today?
ER: Cerf, Bell and Gray are all optimistic. What about the others?
Denning: Yes. Nearly every author is optimistic that it's all going to work out for the best. One notable exception appears later in the book. In "Virtual Feudalism," Abbe Mowshowitz paints a picture of a darker world that many of us might not want to have come about. He asks us to think what we might do to keep that world from happening.
ER: Is he the only exception?
Denning: A couple of speakers at the conference brought this up, too. It was certainly on emcee James Burke's mind. He kept asking speakers to comment on the consequences of what they were talking about. One of the most articulate speakers on this point was Bran Ferren, VP at Disney, who said that for him many of the other speakers did not answer the question, "So what?" So what if we can wear computers? Why should I care about it? What are the consequences for me and my children of living in a world where everyone wears computers?
ER: What would your own answer to the so-what question be?
Denning: I resonate with Ferren. We should really ask ourselves those questions: so what? who cares? For me, if I can't find anybody who cares, I won't continue. The lack of clarity about who cares hasn't always been a barrier. For much of the first 50 years of electronic computing it was sufficient just to make the computer. The main customers were other technologists and visionaries. The computer was so novel that these people would find ways to use it. It didn't matter whether it was easy to use or reliable, it just mattered that it was a computer. Now that's changing. Now computers are so much a part of everyday life that most of the current users are pragmatists who care about getting things done rather than exploiting a novel technology. For them, the motivating force is the value the computer makes for them. They won't bother unless they think it is going to improve their life in some way. This has enormous consequences for everything from software design to marketing.
ER: Would you say that, during the last 10 years or so, people were generally optimistic, not just the computer inventors?
Denning: I spend my time with technologists. I am a technologist. We've been brought up to be optimistic. We're paid to be optimistic. Why would we invent stuff we couldn't conceive of anybody using? What I see happening now is that skeptics are coming to know computers. They want to know, is this good for us? Will we like the consequences? At the conference - not in the book - some of the most optimistic speakers were the ones who were working in the labs with the new technologies. The skeptics criticized them for being like kids playing in a sandbox without any idea that their sand castles were not real. Do you want to entrust your future to a bunch of computer-encrusted kids walking into walls, they asked? Doesn't it bother you that you are not thinking about the possible consequences of what you are doing? It is coming as a surprise to some of these technologists that there are non-technologists out there who question the value of what they do.
ER: Does the next essay, "Beyond Limits," by Bob Frankston, take the same tack?
Denning: Not completely. The Bell-Gray essay is an exhilarating technological joyride, looking at what might happen with increasingly powerful computing. Cerf softens the message by showing how the technology will affect people's lives. Frankston takes a different tack. He says that the trend lines used to make these technology predictions can't go on forever - we will run into physical limits. At some point Moore's Law will become useless for further predictions. Does this mean we are stuck? Frankston says no, that's not how it works. He says that a mentality of scarcity inclines us to think that we can't go on doubling something forever without running out of a resource. In reality, he says, all empirical evidence tells us that inventors come up with new technologies to overcome the limits of current ones. Yesterday's limit is tomorrow's opportunity. We are notoriously bad at predicting where human ingenuity will take us next. The reality is, we've never run out of anything. As we approached the limit, the price rose, demand dropped, and people looked elsewhere to satisfy their need. That is what technology is about. Frankston does not accept the mentality of scarcity.
ER: What does Edsger W. Dijkstra have to say in "The Tide Not The Waves"?
Denning: He looks with a gimlet eye. He says that we've spent a lot of our time inventing systems that turn out to be very complicated. We then invent stories about how systems design is the taming of complexity. In his experience, complexity arises because we don't take the time to ask good questions or look for universal principles. We cannot see the tide if we look only for the waves. Often the waves look complex in their number and variations, when all that really matters is whether the tide is going in or out.
ER: So what represents a wave?
Denning: Dijkstra has always been interested in how to program in a way that will assure you that your programs will work. The first large programs that were written were the early operating systems of the late 1950s and 1960s. The designers were mystified over the problem of asynchronous interrupts: if two signals arrived at nearly the same time, the hardware circuits could hang up and crash the machine. They seemed unable to come up with a good solution to this problem, which occurred often enough to make the early machines unreliable. But Dijkstra said that the mystery arose from the way designers were thinking: they wanted the machines to act deterministically but could find no way to guarantee it. He proposed instead that programmers accept nondeterministic action and learn programs that will work correctly in spite of it. He became famous for showing how to do this. It was simple and elegant. The tide was the question of deterministic action; the waves were the individual systems that failed when they were interrupted. Beware of complexity: it's a human invention.
ER: Is Richard W. Hamming, in "How To Think About Trends," equally "gimlet-eyed"?
Denning: Yes, he's been ever the skeptic. He has always been interested in what makes creative people creative, and how they solve problems. Therefore, when he thinks about trends, he always looks to see what human tendencies are at work. Here he says that inertia and resistance to change are powerful human forces that can defeat many of the optimistic predictions about where technology will take us. People will use technology to satisfy their concerns. We cannot make good forecasts without looking at what people are or will be concerned about.
ER: In the last essay of the "high tech" group in the book, Mark Weiser and John Sealy Brown use the phrase "calm technology."
Denning: What they say is very important. When a technology gets integrated into our lives so completely that we are not even aware of it, it has become "calm." This word contrasts with the earlier stages in which the introduction of the technology may be turbulent and unsettling. Weiser and Brown believe that good designers understand what the calm phase looks like and can design the technology to be unobtrusive and usable without conscious thought. It helps you, but you don't notice it. The telephone is a current example of calm technology. Of course, we become decidedly un-calm when the telephone doesn't work; we notice them only when they break.
Weiser is fond of pointing out the irony of modern design, a belief that a user interface can be worthy of admiration. Weiser believes that if you are aware of the user interface sufficiently to admire it, it has intruded on your consciousness and has defeated the goal of calm design. Whatever our grandchildren marvel at is not likely to be computers. One of the points Weiser and Brown emphasize is the capability of technology to promote interactions and communities. Since people are calm when in good relationships, the technology will be calm when it enables people to carry out their relationships easily. When the technology interferes with their relationships, people become anxious and upset - contrast the outrage that occurs when the network is down with the annoyance of a disk crash.
ER: In the first essay of Part II of the book, Sherry Turkle writes on "Growing Up in the Culture of Simulation." What is she talking about?
Denning: Turkle uses the word "culture" to remind us that we learn a lot through our involvements with other people, without anyone explicitly teaching us anything. We learn care and trust by being involved with others who are caring and trustworthy. Today's simulations (sometimes called virtual reality) give a way to involve kids in semi-real worlds in which they learn, acquire practices, and adopt attitudes. From the kid's point of view, a computer is not an object of study, it is just part of life. Kids are very accepting of things that adults still want to debate, such as whether a computer program can think. Turkle says the kids believe that computers contain sentient entities that are not alive. What is obvious to an adult is not obvious to a kid who has grown up participating in computer simulations.
ER: But wait, she doesn't use a phrase such as "culture of computation." She says "culture of simulation."
Denning: That's right. We adults tend to think of virtual reality as a simulated world that does not exist. Kids, on the other hand, seem to take simulation for granted and are inclined to see a virtual reality as another world that is not the same as the regular world, but a world nonetheless. Think of the game of Doom, for example. Kids take that for granted. They just play the game and sometimes find it amusing. Parents often find it amazing that the programmers of Doom could have gotten such powerful graphics working on a personal computer. To a parent, Doom is a simulation. To a kid, it's a world. Turkle is telling us that our children are growing up with a perception of computers that is very different from ours. There's nothing wrong with that. The world they inherit is not going to be the same as we thought.
ER: In the next essay, Donald Norman tells us why it's good that computers don't work like the brain.
Denning: Right. For years, Norman has been celebrating the obvious fact that computers are not good at the same things people are. He says that machines are dumb, rigid, insensitive and unimaginative. People are creative, flexible, attentive and resourceful. Words that describe human traits, especially the virtues, don't fit machines. Norman rejects the suggestion that machines will eventually replace human beings. Computers and networks define spaces for human action, but do not determine the outcome.
ER: So then, why does Gelernter, in "The Logic of Dreams," take a rather different tack?
Denning: You may have noticed that, in the last few years, most of the membership of artificial intelligence [AI] community have retreated from their old hope that they might learn to design computers that think, that pass the Turing test, or that replace people. Many of their leadership have labeled the period of public disillusionment with the unmet promises of AI as "AI Winter." They have regrouped and have formulated visions of computers augmenting human intelligence rather than replacing it. That is what expert systems, speech systems, robotic systems, vision systems, planning systems, and the like do. Gelernter is not so quick to give up trying to simulate human traits, especially the trait of creativity. Even without being emotional or understanding, he believes that a computer might still be creative. He offers evidence that your greatest moments of creativity occur as you are falling asleep, when you are on the edge of dreaming and your mind is no longer locked on a fixed pattern. He's looking at the dream state for inspirations on creativity, which he hopes to use to build creative computers.
ER: Is that the same kind of thing Franz Alt is talking about in the next essay in the book, "End-Running Human Intelligence"?
Denning: Yes and no. Consider the invention of human flight. The earliest inventors believed that we would need wings that could flap like a bird's. In this century, we achieved success with air foils tilted into the breeze, propelled forward by engines. Although we set out to simulate nature, we did not achieve flight until we exploited a different phenomenon. Alt is saying this happens a lot. We often set out to solve a problem by imitating how people do it, and we achieve success by finding another, simpler solution based on a different principle. Alt calls that an end-run. A lot of engineering is like that. And it's human creativity at its best.
ER: And what's the message of Paul Abraham's "A World Without Work"?
Denning: He is interested in whether we will eventually automate everything that we now do and have nothing but a life of forced leisure. How satisfying would that world be? If there are few jobs, would there be a lot of poverty? Who would keep things working? Abrahams does not believe this is likely because technology seems always to create new ways people can make offers that others are willing to pay for. Take a look at the Internet for numerous examples. New professions such as Webmaster and Web identity designer have sprung up and are becoming profitable. He believes we are creating new opportunities for jobs faster than we are automating old jobs out of existence.
ER: The last essay in the second section is Terry Winograd's essay on "The Design of Interaction." What does he mean by that?
Denning: The traditional engineering view of design is oriented around specifications - "Give me your specifications and I will build you a system that I can prove by testing meets them." Sounds easy, right? Winograd does not believe that this view of design is going to survive the next half century. Most of what people do on the Internet is interact - they form relationships, maintain communities, make and fulfill promises, guide projects, and the like. Computers are used more and more to support interaction. Software must be designed to support interaction unobtrusively; otherwise it will not be "calm," to borrow the word of Weiser and Brown.
This shift of what design means is consistent with the major trends we have witnessed in the practices of computing - from number-crunching to communication, from machines to environments, and from aliens to friendly agents. Along the way, Winograd makes a rather interesting claim. He is not sure that the field of computer science is going to accept this change in the meaning of design. Computer scientists may opt to emphasize technical depth and leave to someone else the software issues of design. Interaction design may become a new discipline of its own. It would be a shame for computer science to miss this rich opportunity.
ER: Does he suggest what fields the interaction designers would come from?
Denning: From software engineering, graphics design, communications, architecture, anthropology, arts, literature.
ER: In the first essay of the "Business and Innovation" segment of the book, Bob Evans reviews a turbulent part of IBM's history.
Denning: Evans was a VP during those turbulent times and was thus able to give an insider's view. IBM did not recognize the importance of the PC until late, and then it moved aggressively into the field, making the IBM PC the standard to be imitated. But they stumbled because they continued to think about the new machines in the old way: they thought the PC was about hardware and the IBM standard. IBM did not insist on a proprietary license with Intel for the chips or Microsoft for the operating system. It did not occur to them that the chip would be more valuable than the box and that operating systems might become box-independent commodities. This eventually enabled IBM's competitors to clobber them. It has taken them a while to recover.
ER: How does Fernando Flores, in "The Leaders of the Future," add to Evans's insight?
Denning: Evans vividly described a skill that IBM had not mastered - reading the market. Flores tells us what managers and leaders must do to develop this skill. He himself is a business executive, entrepreneur and scholar. He says that business is entering an Age of Convenience, an age in which people want products and services customized for them and delivered at their convenience. Companies are learning to use computers to remember many details about individual customers and to achieve exquisite, just-in-time coordination. One of the consequences will be increased personal freedom accompanied by hyperflexibility, information overload, complexity and gross uncertainty.
How then will executives run companies? Today's management philosophies won't work because they are oriented on planning and understanding the "big picture." Tomorrow's leaders will cope with the complexity and rapid shifts of the marketplace by recognizing "recurrences" - the fundamental patterns human beings use to build their worlds and coordinate their actions. He says that the recurrences are observable in the way people use language and he outlines his theory of management and leadership as forms of communication.
ER: But is he basically optimistic?
Denning: Yes. The fundamental recurrences are part of human nature. We are simply going to understand human nature better in the years ahead. ER: But human nature also has a dark side, which leads us into Larry Druffel's paper on "Information Warfare."
Denning: Druffel was director of the Software Engineering Institute for many years. The SEI gets its funds from the Defense Department. Druffel thus stood at the intersection between commercial and military interests in secure and reliable software. DoD has long worried about attacks on our physical infrastructures such as water and electricity. Such attacks are hard to launch because the terrorist needs to visit the location of the attack in person. But an attack on the information infrastructure is much easier to orchestrate because it can be launched from anywhere on the Internet and can be virtually untraceable. A lot of business people are concerned about this because they don't want to be put out of business by frauds, thefts of funds, or disclosure of databases. Druffel transported the term "information warfare" from the defense world to the business world because the threats to economic security are basically the same as those to national security. We need to mount a major defensive effort before we get seriously hurt.
ER: You mentioned Abbe Mowshowitz before as one of the people who were worried about the dark side too. What's his worry in "Virtual Feudalism"?
Denning: Our world is founded on several critical assumptions that use territories and locations to define jurisdictions, nations and states. Taxes are paid on transactions performed in certain places. Move the transaction to a different place and it becomes subject to the local tax laws. In the world ahead, governments are going to be unable to control information. People will send information to whom they wish even if the government does not want them to. They can move the information to new jurisdictions before a search warrant can be executed. Taxes may become voluntary. Intellectual property laws become impossible to enforce.
Mowshowitz worries that these trends will not only strengthen individuals, they will weaken governments to the point of being unable to protect citizens. In this world, people may seek protection of their assets and physical well-being by allying themselves with powerful multinational corporations. This arrangement may resemble the ancient contracts between lords and vassals. He's not optimistic things will turn out much better than this. The human dark side - a few people wanting to exploit or harm others - will be facilitated by information technologies and will drive people to a new feudalism for protection.
ER: Well, going from Mowshowitz to Chamberlain, we go from feudalism to globalism; he talks about globalizing culture and calls his essay "Sharing Our Planet." What's his point?
Denning: He's more optimistic that things are going to work out well. He views software as a new kind of life, symbiotic with human beings, that can coexist with us and make our lives better. We will have a new kind of children.
ER: William J. Mitchell and Oliver Strempel, in "There and Not There," talk about the economy of presence. What do they mean by that?
Denning: I found this to be a most interesting essay. Mitchell is an architect and Strimpel an historian. They tell us that some of the distinctions we find novel in information technology are quite old in architecture - most notably synchronous versus asynchronous, and local versus remote. Libraries and theaters give excellent examples of services that fall into each of the four quadrants defined by these two distinctions. For example, live stage performances are synchronous and local, television performances are synchronous and remote, and video games are asynchronous and remote.
Telepresence usually means synchronous and remote, but the WWW is demonstrating Web sites that are asynchronous. Telepresence is likely to become more common because it improves the ways in which people can interact. But it is not likely to make other forms of presence obsolete. People will still want to attend live performances or meet person-to-person; and they cannot share a dinner by Internet. Mitchell and Strimpel raise the question of whether some of our technology predictions about telepresence might be naive.
ER: What does Dennis Tsichritzis talk about in his essay, "The Dynamics of Innovation"?
Denning: Tsichritzis is the chairman of the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD). When he took over as chairman about five years ago, GMD had a political problem. It was a mainstream, traditional research center. Subsidized heavily by the German government and by industry, it was out of favor because they didn't see it as relevant to German national needs, or producing value for German industry. His job was to turn that around. He needed an intellectual framework for the changes. He soon realized that the point of doing research is not to pursue questions of possible interest, but to produce innovations. An innovation is a shift in human practice. If people say they are able to do things faster or better with the results of the research, they will be satisfied with the innovation and grateful for the research.
Tsichritzis says there are three ways of creating innovation. First is the generation of new ideas, which is the common understanding of research. We pose questions and seek answers. If we come up with a good idea, others will act on it and incorporate it into daily practice - which means that an innovation has taken place. The second way of innovating is to teach people the practice marking the innovation. This is a more direct path than the first. It's basically an education function and cannot be successful without scholarly work to locate best practices and ideas and integrate them into teaching the competence sought. The third way of innovating is creating new products. The new products are tools, artifacts, that permit people using them to engage in the new practice. The better the tool, the faster this happens.
Tsichritzis says that neither GMD, nor any university, nor any other research lab need be constrained to the first model. He does not say we should eliminate the curiosity-driven research so characteristic of the first model, but be prepared to let the people who are best at it do it, and to encourage other researchers to try the other models. By expanding the portfolio of GMD, he was able to help companies find new ways to teach their employees competent practice and to produce products of great economic value, and thereby he was able to win back the political support for GMD. He was able to protect the truly talented researchers who are particularly good at the first kind of research. Currently, we follow the research model pioneered by another German, Wilhelm von Humboldt, in the early 1800s. Ironically, another German two centuries later may have given us the key to restoring U.S. research universities to their former luster. The new models would help us cope with the frozen or falling federal research budgets and generate new sponsorship from collaborations with industry.
ER: And we come now to the final essay, "How We Will Learn," by Peter J. Denning. Tell us about that.
Denning: I continue my exploration of the same themes as I did last November in Educom Review - how might the university design itself successfully as a business that satisfies all its customers. This must take place in what Flores called the "Age of Convenience." People want education to come to them; they don't want to have to go to it. They want it to be relevant to their concerns now, not at some undetermined future time. They want to be part of a learning community that does not have to meet face-to-face frequently to sustain itself.
A lot of people are trying to address these issues now, under the rubrics of "distance learning" and "asynchronous learning." These market forces are strong enough to move even the most tradition-bound universities. But these buzz words, which are mostly about technology, miss the deeper phenomenon. We are being forced to rethink what we mean by knowledge. We are asking where competence fits in, how education confers competence, and whether education for competence is really "training." What does all this mean for teaching and learning practice in the Internet? The Internet is basically an information transfer medium. Knowledge is much more than information, it is the capacity for effective action. People do not consider that you know something unless you demonstrate it by doing it. You need more than the facts, you need the capability to act. As long as the Internet is seen as an information transfer medium, it will be incapable of helping to confer knowledge.
Lewis Perelman discusses this a lot. He talks of the difference between the menu and the dinner. People go to the restaurant for dinner, not to read the menu. Web pages are nothing more than menus. I am going further than this. I say that the kind of knowledge that people are seeking is embodied knowlege, knowledge that has become part of their biological structure and is ready for action. It's knowledge that shows up when you need it, even though you are not consciously aware you have it. Continuing with Perelman's analogy, it's the incorporation of the nutrients from dinner into your body through digestion.
ER: For example?
Denning: The examples are found in our seemingly little, routine, daily practices - without which we would not get much done. A good example is typing, essential today for skillful use of computers. A lot of people know how to type. But they have long since forgotten how they learned it. They have no awareness of what makes their hands move when they type. They just think the words and their hands type. One hallmark of embodied knowledge is that we learn it during involvement with other people, which can include involvement in their stories and narratives. We learned typing in a group guided by a typing teacher and were tested by real people counting words per minute and errors per page.
We also learn many intangible but important things from our groups and communities, including virtuous behavior, oratory skills, leadership, management and much more. Embodied knowledge goes much deeper than what we learn individually. Groups and organizations have it. It is observable in their cultures, practices, routines and traditions. It sometimes is called "organizational core competence." Some organizations get very good at certain things that others cannot seem to master at all. A big challenge for education is going to be to help organizations embody the core knowledge they need in the marketplace.
ER: And how would you apply this to the role of the college or university?
Denning: As a start, we are going to have to stop thinking of the Internet as an information transfer medium and instead as a way to sustain learning communities. If I want to be a member of a community of physicians, say, I have to be accepted by them - how will I do that? In a world of virtual campuses, how will I develop my competence and a professional identity as a competent physician? In other words, how do I appropriate some of the community's embodied knowledge? I don't know the answer to this yet, but I am certain the current set of information technologies is not up to the task. Distance asynchronous learning technologies are no more than baby steps along the path. But I am confident that we will eventually learn this and master it.
It may well be that the historians of 2047 will write a story like this: "The folks of 1997 had a quaint idea they called information, which we know today to be a myth. They thought that information was the carrier of knowledge. They were like the physicists a century before them, who sought vainly for the ether as the medium through which electromagnetic waves traveled. As long as they looked to information as their ether, they could never come to grips with education as the embodiment of knowledge in individuals and in communities. It was only when we saw that knowledge comes from involvement with other people that the mystery was solved. Ironically, this theory of people relativity gave us the working theory we needed, just as Einstein's relativity gave physicists what they needed."
The times ahead will be rich and challenging for educators.