The Inventor with a Delight in Making Things Work

"It is better to take a driving problem that is 

someone else's problem, because it keeps you honest."
- Frederick Brooks

With great abilities and interest in engineering and science, Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., born in Durham, NC in 1931, started his career at Duke University with a double major in physics and mathematics. He graduated in 1953 and realized that he was much more drawn to "a younger field" than physics, so he decided to pursue computer science. He did so at Harvard University under the leadership of Howard Aiken, a pioneer in computing and one of the original designers of the Harvard Mark I computer used during wartime to calculate "the trajectories of battleship artillery shells based on" various criteria (162). He graduated in 1956 and joined IBM to work on what was then considered an "extremely ambitious" project called the Stretch computer, the world's fastest (at the time) supercomputer that utilized many of the same concepts that are used to implement modern computer architecture (163). Eventually, Brooks became the project manager of the development of the IBM System/360 line of computers. As a part of that project, he and his team received the opportunity to research and improve the OS/360 software package which was used on the system. A direct descendant of the OS/360 now runs on the majority of the big IBM mainframes. In 1964, Brooks returned to his home state upon receiving a job opportunity at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill where he founded the Department of Computer Science, which at the time was the second one in the entire nation, that same year. The department focuses its research efforts on three-dimensional, real-time computer graphics, computer vision, and virtual reality. In other words, it is what Brooks calls "intelligence amplification," and he explains:

"The artificial intelligence approach is to replace the mind. Our approach is always to have the mind at the very center of the system. Now the artificial intelligence community has come around to this idea after twenty-five years. But that wasn't where they started out. They used to say, 'We're going to be able to solve these problems. You don't need a mind.' In fact, you do need a mind."

His approach may not be a conventional, but it is certainly a good one, and Brooks is right - people will probably always be better than computers in terms of intelligence. The research to make them smarter continues, but we must never forget that computers are only tools for people to use and there are always much more important things to consider.