David Gelernter

David Gelernter

Writer, Artist, & Computer Scientist

David Gelernter is professor of computer science at Yale, chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies, contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, and member of the National Council of the Arts. He is the author of several books and many technical articles, as well as essays, art criticism, and fiction. The "tuple spaces" introduced in Carriero and Gelernter's Linda system (1983) are the basis of many computer-communication and distributed programming systems worldwide. According to Reuters, his book "Mirror Worlds" (Oxford University Press, 1991) "foresaw" the World Wide Web and was "one of the inspirations for Java"; the "lifestreams" system (first implemented by Eric Freeman at Yale) is the basis for Mirror Worlds Technologies' software. Gelernter is also the author of "The Muse in the Machine" (Free Press, 1994), the novel "1939" (Harper Perennial, 1995), "Machine Beauty" (Basic Books, 1998), and most recently, "Judaism: A Way of Being" (Yale University Press, 2010).

It’s obvious to anybody that the mind does much more than solve problems.
The extent to which human beings are willing to be duped by computers is already very large.  
David Gelernter: We’re seeing wisdom and moral seriousness come under attack and often from the same people who want to do the genetic engineering.  
People are rightly hesitant to put all their private data in the hands of big corporations, but Gelernter argues that this is in fact the safest place for it.
3mins
The Yale computer guru decries the dangerous trend of know-it-all scientists (Richard Dawkins?) telling people that “religion is trash.”
8mins
The major question of the 21st century “is whether human beings can summon the integrity … to resist the many ways in which computers will encroach on human dignity.”
2mins
What excites the legendary computer scientist about the future? In a word: graphics.