[walnutclosefarm]

When I was in junior high, I was given the opportunity to program on a GE Time Share BASIC system, through KSR 33 teletype, and a 100 baud dialup modem. Between January and May, I got maybe 25 minutes a day on the machine. The most impressive thing I could get it to do was play checkers at a level that a four year old could consistently beat. I orchestrated maybe, a couple thousand moving bits of logic to do that. It was all trivial. My reaction might well have been, "you can't do anything valuable with this computer programming thing." After all, I couldn't get it to do anything. My actual reaction was "WOW! Think what we can do with this."

Fifty years later I was directing construction of systems of systems that could remove a tumour from a little girl's brain by taking 2D X-Ray images, reconstructing them as 3D density maps, identifying the organs in those maps, identifying the tumour in those maps, computing the best way to align proton beams in order to irradiate just the tumours, and then position the patient and beams, operate the accelerator to generate the protons and zap the tumour. It involved, literally, billions of logic statements - every one of which was trivial in its own context. Spacetime is also flat, everywhere, at the right scale. But we could orchestrate those billions of mathematical and logical trivialities into something very nontrivial because of huge productivity gains in producing them and stringing them together during my lifetime. A 30X productivity gain in producing even trivial (and the example give was not trivial) elements, is part of the path to radical innovation.