By MIKE MAGEE
This has been a challenging week for me, but not for the reasons you might think. My compartmental skills allowed me to push the 2024 Presidential election to the back burner while I worked to complete my āAI and Medicineā course at Presidents College at the University of Hartford. The complexity of AI, its potential risks and benefits, is staggering. So it’s fun for me to remember how far data and information has come in my life. The commemoration comes in light of the loss of one of the field’s great pioneers.
The last AI lecture week began with the announcement of the death of 94-year-old Thomas E. Kurtz. You may not have heard of him, but you may remember his seminal invention, the first computer programming language for the massesāBASIC (All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code for Beginners). As Bill Gates himself described this week, “The ability to approach BASIC and time sharing from what the PC and the internet took to a new level.”
Bill will understand. His high school had a teletype connection to the original time-sharing mainframe computer at Dartmouth. But Gates is not alone or first in line. As Kurtz remembers, “I once thought that before Bill Gates took action, five million people in the world knew how to write programs in BASIC. There are like 80 time-sharing systems in the US that offer BASIC as one of the languages. And they are all over the world. I even got a letter from someone in Siberia.
It wasn’t until 1978 that Gates teamed up with Microsoft founder Paul Allen and got permission to install BASIC on the first customizable personal microcomputer, the MITS Altair 8800.
Kurtz was the son of German immigrants, and showed a high talent for mathematics early in life. He graduated from a local college in Illinois in 1950, and by 1956 had earned a PhD in statistics at Princeton. He was recruited to Dartmouth that same year by the chair of Mathematics, John Kemeny, who had previously been a research assistant at Princeton himself under Albert Einstein. Kurtz launched a new field at Dartmouth that year – computer science.
He started at ground level – or more accurately, below ground level since the lone computer the university owned was in the basement of Hall Hall where it filled an entire room. Training students in computer science requires hands-on involvement. As Kurtz explained a few years later, “A lecture on computing is worthless, any more than a lecture on how to drive a car.”
In a later interview, Kurtz explained that the idea did not meet with applause at first. He admits, “The target (in computing) is research, but here at Dartmouth we have this crazy idea that undergraduates who are not going to work technically later should learn to use computers. That’s not the right idea.”
Two obstacles at the time were computer language and computer time. The mainframe on campus runs on complex FORTRAN and COBOL that only a few experts have mastered. And if you want access, you have to wait in line.
But eight years after he arrived on campus, on May 1, 1964, at 4 a.m., he tried a new language, BASIC, with the command he typed “RUN” and it worked. He simply noted that “The point of all this is to make computing easy for Dartmouth students, Dartmouth faculty, Dartmouth staff, and even Dartmouth janitors.”
One of Kurtz’s famous quotes is “always choose simplicity over efficiency.” Only one hour seminar to learn the system. At the same time, he solves a second problem – time. Developing what he calls an “intelligent workaround,” his new system allows multiple users at remote terminals to access the computer simultaneously.
As with C.Everett Koop, who also died at the age of 96, he chose to live out the last few years of his life near the view of Dartmouth green. And the world they left behind, which was advancing at a rapid pace, offered unlimited computing access, and no time or delay between thought and action. Mistakes therefore run the risk of self-aggrandizement and may be beyond human control.
Mark Minevich, respected AI Master Strategist focuses on “human-centric digital transformation” according to the risks and benefits as well as anyone. He recently created a pillar for AI government management. These include risk assessment, enhanced security, pragmatic governance, and public/private partnerships. Channeling Kurtz, he said, “There are no shortcuts to developing a system that earns lasting trust … transparency, accountability, and fairness (must) govern exploration … as we create tools to serve everyone.”
The Dartmouth flag was lowered in Kurtz’s honor on Wednesday, November 20, and Thursday, November 21.
Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB and author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex (Grove/2020)
