I want to build a place that’s accessible from the network, and let the hackers homestead there. Let’s see what they create. I want to do this as a real-estate deal and get somebody to fund it on the grounds that they’ll just own a lot of the real estate there. And these hackers will make it valuable in exchange for getting some plots of land. I’m a believer that this ought to be done commercially. For a while you support the economy by hiring them to do useful things in the universe, like, touring people around, building the library, or some of the basic community facilities for accessing data and seeing what’s going on. But then you allow them to set up their own businesses of creating tools or creating personas, and so on.
Predictor: Hillis, W. Daniel
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly and Steven Levy quote Danny Hillis, the co-founder and chief scientist of Thinking Machines, a supercomputer company designed, in part, to create the sort of machine that Hillis was thinking about when he said, “I want to design a computer that will be proud of me.” Hillis says: ”The time has come for us to go into the real-estate business in cyberspace. I want to build a place that’s accessible from the network, and let the hackers homestead there. Let’s see what they create. I want to do this as a real-estate deal and get somebody to fund it on the grounds that they’ll just own a lot of the real estate there. And these hackers will make it valuable in exchange for getting some plots of land. I’m a believer that this ought to be done commercially. For a while you support the economy by hiring them to do useful things in the universe, like, touring people around, building the library, or some of the basic community facilities for accessing data and seeing what’s going on. But then you allow them to set up their own businesses of creating tools or creating personas, and so on. At first you’d probably have to have a few draws, like some entertainment … If you give enough people some stake in it, then I bet every dollar of effort that you pay for, you would get $100 worth of effort from people who are just doing it for a stake in the result. Basically what you’re doing is you’re building a frontier. If we’re right that this is the next great thing, then you can attract the right 20 people. It would be fun to try to build this frontier. One important point – and I’ve been worrying about how to convince the sponsors of it – is that you can’t make a frontier without outlaws, unfortunately. It’s a necessary part of the ecological structure.”
Biography:W. Daniel Hillis, vice president of research and development at the Walt Disney Company, an inventor of massively parallel computing, was also founder and chief scientist of Thinking Machines Corporation. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Community/Culture
Subtopic: Cyberpunks/Hackers
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Kay + Hillis: Wired Brings Together Two Legendary Minds: Alan Kay and Danny Hillis
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.01/kay.hillis_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney