 Hi everyone, I'm Grady Butch. I'm sorry, you go first. Yes, hello Grady, hello everybody. Let me just notify here the folks in the world that they can tune in to the video, to the parcel media. It's audio, it's on now, I hope you can hear us. Hello everyone, welcome to the 11.30 planning session of the Open Simulator Community Conference 2013. As a reminder to our in-world and web audiences, you can view the full conference schedule on our website at conference.opensimulator.org and you can post your questions in local chat on new stream chat or tweet your comments using the hashtag OSCC13. Although it's not guaranteed that Grady will pay any attention to what you are all chatting over here. So it is my pleasure to introduce Grady Butch. Grady is a chief scientist in software engineering in IBM Research. He is best known for developing the unified modeling language, UML, with Ivor Jacobson and James Rambo. He is recognized internationally for his innovative work in software architecture, software engineering and collaborative development environments. He was, and I believe he still is, a champion for these kinds of environments within IBM and beyond. Grady earned his bachelor's degree from the United States Air Force Academy and a master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of California in Santa Barbara. He served as chief scientist of Rational Software Corporation since its founding in 1981 and through its acquisition by IBM in 2003 where he kept working until now. In 1995 he was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He is an IBM Fellow and was recognized as an IEEE Fellow in 2010. So thank you Grady for coming here, talk to us and take it away. Thanks very much for having me. We are an unusual bunch here as we sit in this virtual space because we are of those group who really grok what it means to live a life, a virtual life. And what I'd like to do in the next hour or less than we have here today is to tell you about my journey into this virtual life. And it would be interesting to get in dialogue with some of you as well to understand your journey through this life. I have done, gosh, I don't know, probably 30 or 40 lectures and presentations, mostly in second life, a few in OpenSim. But this is a very natural thing for me as you'll see here in a bit. Doing these kinds of things in world is almost as natural as doing it in the flesh for the reasons that we'll talk about in a moment. I am deeply influenced by the ideas of Joseph Campbell, the late and great mythologist. Dr. Campbell spent his lifetime trying to understand the stories that we told ourselves and the stories that transcended cultures. His classic book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, was actually the basis for a lot of great other storytelling. George Lucas was heavily influenced by his ideas. And the hero's journey that Campbell speaks about is one that we see repeated over and over again, not just in the literature and in movies and TVs, but it's interesting to parallel one's life in that way. One of the things that Campbell said that really resonates with me is this notion that we live a world in which we put on masks. Now he's not a psychotherapist, he's a mythologist, so he's looking at this from the lens of how over time culture has expressed itself. And his observation is that with these masks, we still tend to have some common stories below the surface, and those masks are simply views into those worlds that we have. There's another way to look at it as well, and this is the work from Carl Jung and his ideas of the archetypes. Jung's notion is that there are indeed some common elements in each of the journeys that we have. And at one time or another, we all play different roles. There are roles of the explorer, there are roles of the gesture, the ruler, the sage, the magician. But collectively, you can see that each of us is in a way a composite, a delicious mixture of these kinds of different masks that we play on, that we put on. And we put these masks on at different times and in different places according to different circumstances. There's a delightful article that just came out this morning by Bruce Shiner, the delightful gentleman who speaks a lot about security and privacy issues. And he observed that the present generation, not me, but the generation or two after me, has come into the world in a very different way with regard to the expression of the masks they put on in the world. With Facebook, with Snapchat, with Instagram, etc. There is a different kind of sharing that goes on in that generation, the digital generation, the generation that was born not knowing the internet never existed. Very different kind of putting of those masks on. And if anything, we've seen this increasing dropping of our masks as we move into the social arena. It used to be the case, especially if you look at British society, incredibly formal approaches to how we put on our masks. But if you contrast that with the average tween who's sharing or oversharing on the internet, very, very different world indeed. So let's talk about my masks as we begin this particular journey. I'll go to parties sometimes, and especially parties where people have no clue who I am, and the usual cocktail banter is. So what do you do? That's always a difficult question to answer. The first question, depending upon who I'm talking to, will be, oh, I'm into computers. The problem with that answer is if you talk to somebody who is utterly clueless about the computing world. They will say, oh, my son, nephew, uncle, whatever is into computers. They have a PC, and their job is to build websites for local businesses. And oh, by the way, just like they would ask a doctor, my PC has been running slow. Can you come over sometime and help me fix it? So the problem is that we find, when I say something like that, you get people's reactions who are like, all computing is the same. So somebody who puts up a simple website via GoDaddy is the same kind of computer person who helps design software for a satellite, or helps build something for some weapon system, or helps build some financial system. From one perspective, they view the stories to be all the same, and it's not quite exactly that. So sometimes I'll advance it by then saying, well, I do software to distinguish the software and hardware bits, but then that discussion will immediately go to say, oh, let's talk about this app and so. Do you build apps? Well, yeah, but not exactly. If I wanted to be a little bit less humble, I'll say, oh, I'm an IBM Fellow. Problem is, people have no clue what that is, so that doesn't go very far. If I want to, you know, really start the conversation going, I'll say, oh, I'm an author. And unfortunately, the discussions will sometime go to, gosh, have you read 50 Shades of Grey or something like that? Well, I'm not exactly that kind of an author. If I really want to confuse people, I will put on the mask that I'm a free radical, because that, indeed, that's one of the titles on my business card, because then that helps explain to them that I'm a little bit of an out-of-the-box kind of guy. Problem with these roles is that all of these things are true. It is the case that I am into computers and software and a fellow and an author and a free radical, but none of them are really sufficient. So, another way, oh, somebody asked, what is an IBM Fellow? Well, I'll be happy to tell you. IBM is one of the first companies that's produced the Fellow's program of the, gosh, let me think. It started in 65 by Watson himself, and it was attempted to provide a path for the most senior technical executives within the company. Basically, there are two paths that you find in all organizations like that. You're a technical geek, you keep doing technical stuff, and all of a sudden, you get to a certain time and age and experience, and they want to promote you. So, what do they promote you to? A manager, which is absolutely the wrong thing for a good technical person to do. So, there is a separate path, and therefore the Fellow is basically the equivalent of the CEO where the most technical senior technical people in the company. There are, I think, only about 150, 160 Fellows that have ever been appointed inside IBM through its history. Currently, there are under 50 of us who are still alive and active. The easiest way to become a Fellow is win a Nobel Prize. There's no Nobel Prize of software, so I just did it through my geeky stuff, and the CEO appointed me a Fellow in 2003. The great thing about being a Fellow is that pretty much I'm given the license to go do the things that I think are important for the company. And so, this gives me degrees of freedom to go do the technical things for the future. Basically, my job role is twofold as a Fellow, and this was told to me by the CEO, Grady, go off and invent the future. That's a pretty cool job. And the second is destroy bureaucracy, which is pretty fun, too, because IBM is a target-rich environment. So, if I go to the next level, you know, what do I do? Well, I can talk about the roles that I play. I'm chief scientist, which means I cover a whole bunch of different fields, and I kind of bring people together. I'm a software architect. I'm also a cognitive scientist. You'll hear more about this if you follow my Twitter stream, but basically I'm doing a lot of work in what happens beyond Watson. I also still code. I mostly work in Java and PHP and little bits of C++, but I do that as well. And I'm a researcher, which means I'm continually worrying about the future. So, that's kind of the things I do, some of the masks I do. But still, that's not enough. It's kind of the roles that I play. What are the things that I do that define me? Well, I mentor people. I'm a theorist. I'm a software archeologist. I'm on the board of the Computer History Museum, and my interest there is the preservation of classic software. I'm a mediator. I'm an historian. I'm a visionary. I'm all these kinds of things. But, you know, if you think about defining a life, that's still not exactly what I am. So, how about the jobs that I have done? Well, done a bunch of things. And, ooh, this slide's not coming up. I love it. Let's try to go back again. Well, I'm looking at a blank slide. Oh, there it is. I had a little latency. Sorry, I should have been faithful here. So, I could take a look at one of the jobs I've done. My very first job was to mow lawns. In fact, I did this, gosh, I don't know, starting 11, 12, and used all my money to buy the components so I could build my own computer. That was my first real job. I was a scooper of ice cream. My first job, for which I had to pay taxes, was at Baskin Robbins. I'm a singer by act of Congress. I am an officer and a gentleman. I graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1977. I'm a godfather and a husband. So, I'm all these kinds of things. But still, that's not quite it. Another way to look at my journey is, what's my, what are the ways that I go through life? Well, I'm a child at heart. I'm a warrior. I'm a leader. I'm a lover. I'm a believer, a philosopher. And the way I often describe myself is, I am an awestruck seeker, meaning that what really defines my life is trying to step back and just staggering awe of the amazing nature of life, and then also the nature of just the fact that we have the opportunity in this journey to do some amazing things. So, here's my conclusion on this. This is really a life of ends. None of us goes through our journey in life as living just one of these roles. Nor do we live these roles sequentially. But rather, we live a life that's defined by the role we play at the moment, but the collective result of living all of those things fully in the moment. And so, at any particular moment, you see the world through the lens of those particular masks we play, and we present ourselves to the world according to the masks we wear at that very moment. The interesting question for me, therefore, is what does this virtual role that I put on do to the lens in which I see the world, and what does this virtual world do to the lens in which others see me? So, let's talk a little bit about that virtual life and the journey that I ran through that. I'm unusual, like I think many of you, but if we compare ourselves to the rest of the world, we're a very unique bunch, those of us sitting in this room right now. For me, and I would imagine for many of you, my virtual life is not a mask, but rather it's one of a trinity of places where I wear my masks. Now, I'm going to expand upon this in a notion, but let me mention one thing in particular right now. There are some of you who I know spend a lot of time in second life, and many of you who are not here, but also spend time in second life, for which your second life is quite distinct from your real life, and so that's okay. We intentionally have different kinds of masks like that. So, I would observe that there are people, like you and I now, we can begin to divide the world in a couple of ways, and how does the joke go? There are one-zero kind of people in the world, those who get binary and those who don't. A little different kind of thing. There are some people who are comfortable in only one world. There are people who are at home in multiple worlds, meaning that I've seen people come into second life in other virtual worlds, and they just don't get it. They look at it as if it's this incredibly foreign kind of thing. IBM did an experiment some years ago in which we did a major conference entirely in second life, and it was a fascinating experience. This was a time where, for whatever reason, upper management said, oh, my God, we can't afford to do this conference anymore. And so, someone came up with the notion of being able to do this conference fully in world. This was the Academy of Technology Conference. So, as a fellow, I sort of see across all of IBM, but there's another tier of folks where we have an academy that people are nominated to, voted into. It's kind of like the Academy of Sciences, but it exists to allow us to cut across all divisional boundaries of the company and put people together in one room to have serendipitous connections. Well, for better or worse, one year, they decided we don't have the money to bring this together. I mean, it was a multimillion-dollar conference for IBM to do this thing internally. So, we had the idea to do this thing fully inside second life, and we spent a considerable amount of resources doing so. We had people who built enormous numbers of sims we probably at one time had, I think, three to five thousand people in second life for this particular conference. And as a long-time second lifer, it was interesting seeing the people struggle who were brand new to it and had never really thought about being projecting themselves into a virtual world. I think one of the reasons that contributed to IBM's pulling out of second life is that was an experiment that just did not go well. That I don't think we did a good enough job of setting the expectations of users, of telling them, really, educating them how to do it, but we kind of threw a bunch of people into it, and the reaction was negative. So, we didn't get them, didn't get their minds in the right place. And you could really see this bifurcation. There were some people at home in the physical world. There were some people who were really at home in the virtual world. And, you know, I would say it's probably a 60-40 split. There are 60% of the people in IBM who just didn't get it. There's another further division. For those who get virtual worlds, I find a further division in that there are some who use the virtual world as a canvas. It's a delightful place to be. It's another place to express themselves. They can build some wonderful things, but there's another group. And those are the people who really project themselves into the virtual world, and they become part of the canvas. I don't know how many of you fit into that category, because I've not interacted with some of you, but you know who you are. You are the folks who dream in second life. You go into the second... You go into a world. Your screen's full now, and it is as if you are there. You feel things from the things you see in here. It is as if you are physically present within that room. It's a total projection. And there are some who get that. I am one of those. That I have visual reactions from being in second life, just as if it were real life. And even though I cannot touch or be touched, or taste or smell, all the other senses are active, and it's like I'm there. The day I get my oculus rift connected to some haptic interfaces, then by God I'm out of it for the real world, I think for a long time. There's this great series of books by an author named Grant Naylor. And it's actually not a guy, but it's two guys, Grant and Naylor. The first in the series, it's a British one. The first in the series is Better Than Life. And of course it comes from Redor. The second one is... I forgot the second one in the series. But the idea is, and if you learn the premise, is that there are some folks that are caught in a virtual world, and it is so real for them. In fact, it is better than life that they wish to not leave. Another lecture unto itself, but you know I think that we are on a path to that kind of world for reasons that we'll see here in a moment. So let's talk about some interesting parallels. I'm going to talk about a brief history of me grading the physical world. I'm going to give you a brief history of grading in the virtual world and we're going to see some interesting parallels. So this is me as a little baby. That's my mom holding me. I think it was a few months old at the time. And interesting culture. My mom was fully German. She was born raised in Germany during World War II. Married my dad after the war. That's me in my Cub Scout uniform. The lower picture in the lower right was me I think in high school. I actually have an interesting IBM experience I told you earlier about mowing lawns. In fact, the first computer I built was at age 12. That would have been 1967. So I was a geek who was truly a geek that was a stranger in a strange land because nobody was doing that back then. But I also then wanted to move from just hardware to software. So I remember knocking on the door of the local IBM sales office. I grew up in Amarillo, Texas. Nobody was going to hire a 12 year old. So I was going around trying to find somebody that would hire me. And I finally ended up at IBM and I said hey I've done some cool stuff but I want to learn how to program. And a sales guy took it upon himself to give me a Fortran manual and say go away kid. Go read this and come back when you figure it out. Well I came back two days later and had written some programs and kind of the rest is history. So IBM know what or not influenced my career. So as I moved forward in my career and this is again way before virtual world kind of stuff. I graduated from the Air Force Academy. That's me on the left. And as you can see I looked very different before my long hair. My wife ruined me of course. This is when I began to understand the notion of virtual stuff. Some of you may have heard of a system called Playto. Playto was just radically cool. It blew me away. Because here we were. This is in the early 70s early to mid 70s way before the internet became big and real. And Playto was a system built at I think the University of Illinois that was one of the first other kind of real time interactive systems. There was an awesome game in it. It was an aircraft game where you could pilot an aircraft and sort of go around the world and interact with people. And it was amazing because I remember conversations I had real time chats with people all over the world and Europe and across the US and it blew me away. It was an incredible experience because now here I had an experience that allowed me to interact with people in real ways and I began to project myself. I graduated from the academy and started a software business with a couple of my classmates from the academy and grew a beard because I didn't think I looked old enough and here we were selling this million dollar machine and I was this fresh face 20 year old right out of college and nobody believed me. So I started to look a little older and here I am still today. As my history progressed we built a machine, the R1000 I wrote a bunch of books and invented the UML, Yada Yada and here I am and virtual worlds are a part of what I do. I continue to to live and breathe in virtual worlds even though IBM is not there a great deal I do spend a bit of time there so let's talk about my virtual history and I'll tell you why I got here in a moment but let's talk about what that virtual life was. I managed to keep some pictures of me through my virtual life and oops I went too far I think. This is the right one. Here's why I got into my virtual world. I remember I'm going to talk about it now. During much of the middle 2000s I got pretty busy not dying. In second life you want to know who I am? I'm Aleem Theus A-L-E-M-T-H-E-A-S I have an avatar that's Grady and Grady Butch but I mostly spend my time as Aleem. So in 2004 by that time my dad had died of an aneurysm my uncle had died of an aneurysm and that summer my nephew died of an aneurysm he was just a delightful young man brilliant spiritual energetic and spent some time with him. The picture there is the two of us that you see when we took some time in the Colorado mountains but in the summer of 2004 Thomas died suddenly he was with his father we had been working out 30 minutes later he went down to go to sleep took a nap because he wasn't feeling well he did not wake up devastating for my sister and my brother-in-law but it turned out to be an aneurysm as well well my wife immediately took me to the doctor and I had a CT scan and sure enough I had an aneurysm as well the problem about aneurysms is that the major symptom of an aneurysm is death which is not extremely predictive you sort of die and it's like wow you had an aneurysm so we went on a journey to try to figure that out spent some time with the Mayo Clinic and they said yes indeed you have an aneurysm and basically you have a ticking time bomb inside you but there's something we can do at that time they didn't know it was really genetic it's clear that it is now so if you have somebody with an aneurysm in your life you ought to get yourself tested because it's a good chance that you're going to have some of those same genes as well but that was transformative for me in 2006 I underwent elective open heart surgery if you can think of such a thing with the intent of killing the aneurysm before it killed me and it was successful it took me about nine months of a physical recovery and probably about two or three years of a spiritual and emotional recovery this is the time I moved into second life IBM was just starting to get into it I had recovered had the surgery in the summer of 2006 I was mostly physically recovered by the end of that year and I wasn't traveling at all so I was trying to find some way that I could continue to interact with the world and still leverage the ability to to do so as I had done before and second life was the opportunity to do that so that's when I began my journey of my second life and this is a picture of my first avatar oh my gosh, was it clumsy looking this was in the earlier days of second life and they didn't have meshes they didn't have you know primes that were really fluid kinds of things and so this is as good as I could do very much a 2007 avatar pretty much the normal body but I built a beard and hair as best as I could and that's about as good as I could get well I eventually then got a few more you know a little bit more ability under my belt to be able to to model my own have a bit better I commissioned somebody to do my hair which is the hair I still have in second life and it moves and it's kind of cool the face wasn't quite right but good enough and this is the avatar that I use for the longest time we had to walk to school in the snow with no shoes well I remember the days when my god we only had ones and zeros and life was so hard that some days we didn't even have ones my god wasn't hard you young whippersnappers if you move to where I began doing my lecturing um this was one of the first builds that rational did rational did a conference it was I think one of the best conferences we did in which we actually did filming in second life it was this wonderful backstory about these superheroes that came together and we had sets for it and different characters it was awesomely cool I think this was a session in which I was was giving a lecture about this whole thing and preparation to it um so and this is me in that same avatar you saw there this is actually from a photo shoot we did in world for a series that went under the New York Times and a funny story I should tell you I presented these pictures to to folks and to put in the article and IBM's PR people said oh my god you can't do that because look at that woman in the front row she's showing too much skin and it's like oh my god it's an avatar for god's sake there's it's just bits get over at IBM well eventually they had me do some other stuff and I had to you know we had a different one but it was it was good enough and we got second life on the New York Times that was kind of cool um it was from that that meeting that I first began to to really develop some long term relationships with folks in in second life there IBMers that that I had I have never met to this day and I only know them through second life and we have you know long term a long term connection that's that's still very cool um this was sort of in the time of my more mature second life as I started spending time there I actually for a time had had regular office hours um this is part of the bill that I have a little seaside kind of thing and I would bring people to this to give mentoring I would do regular lectures I would have office hours so that because I was a remote worker people could always come there at a particular time and come meet with me and I would have people randomly come by and that was cool because it allowed me as a remote developer to to have office hours where I could have serendipitous connections my building skills got better eventually built built this classic kind of room and it really was the place that was home for me I mean frankly it was a place I would go away to it's like oh I'm living in this place where there's great I miss the rain or I miss the snow so I'd go put myself in the virtual world I'd leave it on a screen and I turn on the rain or the snow and I'd still work on my office so it would be as if I was there but so a pretty rich environment and you can see that there was quite the progression in my virtual life from just I'm playing with it to no it's really really part of my life however let me observe that this is not just the only aspect of my virtual life if we take a very broad view of what virtual is I realize that we create our own virtual spaces my first email address was in 1979 it was at the Air Force Academy it was still the ARPANET hadn't been pushed out before and I had an email address I think this is what it was because obviously I don't have it anymore didn't even have the dot to it I think at that time I remember this at that time we had a little book it was a mimeographed yes we had mimeographed back then a little book maybe 20-30 pages that listed everybody's email address in the entire world the internet was that small so I knew everybody's email address that was pretty cool and that was the beginning of that virtual life today I have six primary email addresses and God knows how many others I have accounts to 200 distinct sites I broadcast through a whole bunch of social media if you want to follow me go follow me on Twitter as Grady underscore butch that's where I primarily tweet I have one blog I do a regular column for I've tripled and I have seven known public profiles including one in Wikipedia so these are the lenses through which I project myself to the world but there are some other ways as well I also have a tremendous amount of virtual presence through video I use Skype regularly using it today and I also use Polycom quite a bit here's a screenshot from a conference that I was involved with just a few days ago and it was a conference involving people from I think we were in five different cities and you can see me in the upper right if you zoom into my avatar you will be amazed to see that my avatar looks very much like what I look in the real life I both here in open sim as well as second life I did a took some photos of me went through a service that did the skinning of it and so my avatar in world looks as close as I can to to what I look like in the real world so these kind of video conferences are very common to me it's what I do all the time I also do a lot of telepresence stuff we have at various IBM laboratories some beam robots and so from time to time if I can't fly out there but they really want me to be present then I'll show up in a beam robot and that's not quite as good as being there physically it's a little bit better than a video conference because I can turn and look at the person I'm talking to and this is yet another part of that visual experience because it gives me a way to interact and now people look at that robot as a proxy for me why do I do all this well I forgot to mention that I live in Maui and so I'm actually doing this conference right now from my office that overlooks the beach I'm sitting here in a swimsuit for goodness sakes and this is the view that I have so my virtual life is a classic example of how I can live in a world that is surrounded by physical presence this is my view this is how I live I don't have a commute because I walk from my bedroom to my office and so it is understandable why I leverage these virtual techniques because they allow me to project myself in ways that I never could have before and that's pretty amazing now that's my journey it's a unique one and it's one for which the virtual world is as natural to me as putting on my clothes here because it allows me to project in ways that I could not have done so before so I make the premise that we are moving to a state of the world where you and I as pioneers in this space are going to be moving into a world that is increasingly like the world I just described now this is a lecture unto itself I want to make sure there's some time to talk about this but I did a study some years ago not some years about four or five years ago in which I tried to project out what the state of the world might be looking at a variety of sources pinging my colleagues inside IBM I asked myself the question what's the world going to look like in 2031 and I'm going to touch upon a few of those because they directly impact our virtual world if you extrapolate from current population trends a number of folks suggest that we are going to hit a peak population global population maybe just somewhere under 9 billion people why do we think we are not going to peak much more than that why do we think we are not going to hit 10 billion well you will find that the third world countries the birth rate still is decreasing it's dampening a little bit in industrialized countries birth rate is actually declining and as countries move from third world, second world, first world there seems to be this natural break upon population and extrapolation leads us to there actually there is a global decline in fertility rates and there is a beginning to global population decline in developing nations this is especially interesting with regards to what is happening in Japan you point out the issues of water as well too that is absolutely a limiting factor and the issues of food the phenomena that is happening in Japan is particularly interesting because here you have a society that is actually declining in size of native Japanese the skewing of the population of the elderly is absolutely enormous and so there are more people who are elderly and fewer people to be able to take care of them you add to this an interesting cultural aspect of Shintoism where Shintoism projects onto the culture that inanimate objects may indeed have a spirit to them and so as a spirit it is not unusual it is highly accepted in Japanese culture to have robots that are viewed as real kinds of things you add this to the population factors and you are finding the growth of experimentation in robotics because these kinds of things are being viewed as aids to the elderly and I think we are going to see that more and more as we find a population that has been born digital projecting itself into this we are moving into worlds where we are living in these thousand mile cities the increase of the urban centers the decline of the rural centers and that is putting us more in concentration with one another and in some degrees because of energy costs less and less travel we are becoming in some ways a less mobile society so it was alluded to earlier about the issues of resources a significant portion of the world is chronically short of fresh water the hubert peak that some believe to be true and one of them suggests that we have now passed global oil production some fisheries have collapsed some have been saved and air pollution plagues a number of cities so we are in in considerable stress from an individual perspective we are also seeing changes in that there is this shift from mass marketing to micro marketing the advent of 3D printers the advent of immersive things like this the advent of facebook and twitter and the like are leading to this fragmentation of marketplaces but it is also leading to the rise of pervasive personal assistance this is indeed a lot of the work I'm doing with inside IBM these days you've all probably heard of Watson the system we built that played jeopardy and beat every human Watson was pretty cool but we see a path that can do even more and frankly I'll declare it now we believe we have a path of systems that could pass the Turing test and what would that mean to build an automated system that could be indeed a companion an avatar and a health mate and clearly with the increased loss of privacy we all find desires to find those places we can call our own that for me is a push toward more of these virtual spaces now a little bit of a plug here these ideas are coming together for me in some very real ways and as a fellow as I mentioned I have the degrees of freedom to go off and do some cool things I wanted to express to you where the next part of my story is many of you probably saw Carl Sagan's Cosmos and of course there's a new version of that coming out Seth McFarland bankrolled a new generation of Cosmos it should be out in the fall of 2014 appears to have the same kind of structure as the Sagan one but I think it's great because here we have a whole new generation and I think will be inspired by this it occurred to me that in the computing world we have just as equally interesting a story a story that is as wonderful as the story of the awe of the universe as the way I put it the story of computing is the story of humanity and it's a story that's full of ambition and invention creativity drama you know all these kinds of things that's the story of computing as well so a few years ago as I was recovering again from my aneurysm and my open heart surgery my wife and I decided to go on another journey I had been in conversation with the CEO of the computer history museum he knew of my virtual work he knew of the stuff I was doing in IBM and I said to him John you just landed about a 10 million dollar deal with Bill Gates to help fund parts of the museum what are you going to do next and he said well John why don't you do because knowing he had been at PBS he said John why don't you do a series about computing that's just like Sagan's cosmos and he stopped and said you know Grady that's a great idea why don't you be our Sagan gave me pause I'm no Carl Sagan but it intrigued me and led me to say you know this is a great idea so starting in 2000 gosh would have been five six years ago whatever that relates to be my wife and I decided to do just that so we began a journey to build a transmedia documentary which we call computing the human experience and you can go to our website computingthehumanexperience.com and follow what we're doing but basically we have pitched to PBS a multi part series about computing and the human experience and the confluence between those two how do those two relate to one another and what's the difference between the two of them we call it transmedia because we're presenting this story through traditional broadcast indeed in the in April of this year we developed a teaser along with KQED the PBS station in the bay area they commissioned the development of a teaser which we took out to corporate PBS in April and we pitched the series to them and their reaction was this is exactly the series to which we aspire so now we're on the journey to find the producer and the director to actually develop the full five or six episodes we have in mind. At the same time we have a book series with O'Reilly if you're interested if you have something in mind there on the confluence of computing the human experience reach out to us we're developing some ebooks and some apps we have a YouTube channel we're developing a curriculum as well too so be patient this is still a few years out I don't have a bank I don't have a patron like Seth McFarland so we're in the process of raising about five million to do so but we will do this we have a lot of folks behind us to make this happen but that's our journey a piece of the story I want to say now is the piece of the virtual world we have an episode in which we will be dealing with this virtual world and what it means if you talk to the vast public this is stuff of science fiction but for you and I who are here this is real and it's going to be the future if you go to computingthehumanexperience.com you will see a set of things that include our lectures and those lectures there are two of them on there right now one is about war and computing the woven on the loom of sorrow there's another one that deals with I think therefore I am and let me actually skip on to another one it talks about both virtual worlds and robotics and frankly it relates to some of the things that Turing said I'm deeply influenced by Alan Turing Sly hasn't read from me but it's the one that says in which Alan Turing observed that he believes a computer would deserve to be called intelligent if we could deceive a human into believing it was human so that's the notion of the Turing test you know I think we should we should try something that's not quite that expansive you know let's try something that's a very you know simple intelligent not that smart at all you know someone like I don't know Sarah Palin let's set our bar really low so that's my recommendation to start there which tells you of course my political view of the world so let's let me offer you some parting thoughts and we'll have a little time to Q&A here I alluded to this notion of a trinity and I really only talked to you about two of them one was my virtual world and second life and an open sim the other is my physical world the third world is this increasing view of me as a robot I'm actually increasingly using this telepresence robot so now I have three ways in which I present myself to the world in the flesh as a robotic avatar as an avatar in second life for those of you who recognize it yeah this is kind of the present the premise of of Caprica and Battlestar Galactica in which there was this sort of three this trinity of living and I'm I'm kind of living that and it really works for me it's pretty amazing this is not the singularity I respect Dr. Kurzweil I think he's got some interesting ideas I think the whole idea of the singularity as a particular point in time is absolutely batshit crazy because as Rodney Brooks said we're not going to know there's a singularity because we're going to be so much of a part of it the eye can't see itself in a way we are moving this direction but it's not going to be a singularity I think as Ray described it's going to be something that I think is even more more amazing than what what Ray can imagine so I'm going to leave you with two parting questions the first is what masks do you wear here in this virtual world and that's one of the masks you know so what other masks might you have and then the last question I want to leave you and this is the question I leave whenever I give these kind of lectures to the general public you know look the path we're on is inevitable it is irreversible and the consequences of it are going to be utterly astonishing just we can't calculate what those changes will be and so the question we have to ask ourselves is simply what kind of life do you want to live and what does it mean to be a human how do we live as a human we have a choice we have a greater choice than we ever could have imagined and indeed with virtual worlds especially and as you saw in my particular life I have a reach to across the globe and I never have to get out of my swimsuit and that's pretty freaking cool so well thank you for giving me the opportunity to chat with you guys I probably have 10-ish minutes or so how do we do this you want to type me some questions you want to throw things at me what do you want to do yes thank you very much thank you very much Grady that was just absolutely inspiring I think everybody is super happy that I gave this talk so we have time for some questions feel free to pick them up as they're being beamed at you I just want to remind everyone that there is going to be the next session is full of sessions there will be 6 parallel sessions going on in about 10 minutes or so so feel free to throw questions at Grady and he will be kind enough to answer them it's fun to be here thank you all applause applause I tell Google what Google tells me to do yes what worries me about our future that's a great one let me ponder that my first reaction to that question and that genre of questions is that I have great faith in the human spirit I see naysayers naysayers who speak gloom and doom and they raise their hands and wring their hands we've made it through some amazing times we look at the worries about us we look at the changes about us go look at what happened in the year 2000 when frankly the apocalyptic talk was even greater look at the time of being a peasant in the middle ages life pretty much sucked so I have great confidence in the ability of the human spirit to adapt and change and grow in ways that we can never anticipate and furthermore to focus upon the negative will never allow me to appreciate the moment and contribute to making changes so very little keeps me awake at night because I have great hope for the future let's look at some other questions here um yeah you can find me, follow me on twitter grady underscore a butch um IBM as a singing computer, yes IBM does if you go to the computer history museum there's a reconstruction of the IBM 1401 and it the way that people used to system admins used to do it is they put an am radio right by the computer because you could tell when it actually doing different kind of things it was pretty cool my bouncers and handlers are telling me we probably need to leave the room in just a few minutes because I guess someone else is coming here so maybe a couple more questions and then I'll have to dash I'm trying to find the picture of my uh of my uh a view here it's a glorious day here in Maui it's 920 in Maui and once we leave here I'm going to have I read jaren's book absolutely I've read his book I've never met the man I think he's an interesting fellow um I think he has a little bit more negative take upon the future than I do um so you know find a forum where he and I can be in a panel together and I'd love to I'd love to uh to chat with him further about that that would be fun to do we'll try to do it next year that would be cool get me in a room with uh with rey as well too that would be fun oh right yes rey is a great idea for future conferences just keep me away from sharp objects with him though I respect rey he and I have vastly different senses of opinion though okay maybe one more question anybody else last chance I do visit our website you'll find that I'm exquisitely approachable I pretty much write answer everybody's email so yeah get Sarah Palin now I I'd prefer we get somebody intelligent on the panel uh do I think that virtual disconnects us from the real well I have to have to attend to your questions premise which is the virtual is not real and for me virtual is just as real as atoms are so it disconnects me from a life of atoms but that is not necessarily disconnect me from the human experience almost there someone on Twitter was offended at the stab at Tara Sarah well sorry about that yeah that that happens I respect and appreciate what miss Palin has done for the great state of of Alaska but I won't go any further oh yeah Sarah Sarah complain all right so do you want to close this up here thank you I will thank you very much greaty you don't need to rush because all the other six parallel sessions are actually in different so I can stay I can stay here and chat oh cool you can stay here and chat and the audience if you want to hang out and chat with greaty feel free to do so we are going to officially close it because the streaming team needs to take care of other things but thank you very much greaty great thank you so I'll drop off of Skype but I'll stay here in world and I can type with folks excellent great thank you thanks for having me