Alec Nevala-Lee at Asterisk:
In the words of Danny Hillis, the man who conceived the clock in 1989, long before Bezos became involved: “You have to get away from the idea of direct progress and surrender that kind of control in order to find your way.”
According to Hillis — who originally planned to build the clock himself — some of his friends saw the project as a symptom of “a midlife crisis.” Born in 1956, he had written his thesis at MIT on parallel computing, an innovative architecture based on simultaneous calculations by thousands of ordinary microprocessors, and co-founded a supercomputer startup called Thinking Machines. Its most famous product was the Connection Machine, a black cube with blinking red lights that was so photogenic that Steven Spielberg featured it in Jurassic Park.
In 1994, the company went bankrupt. While the Connection Machine worked well for certain applications, like weather modeling, it was hard to program and had trouble attracting commercial clients. For the breakthroughs that Hillis had in mind, he conceded, parallel processing had to improve “by a factor of a thousand, maybe a million.” Hillis had been on the right track, but a decade too early, so perhaps it was unsurprising that he would quit the race to build faster computers, hoping instead to regain his sense of deep time.
He had been dreaming about the clock for years, but he first set it down in detail in an essay — later published in Wired — dated February 15, 1995. Noting that society had trouble picturing the far future, he proposed a symbolic object to encourage long-term thinking: “I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium.” It would keep accurate time for ten millennia, or roughly as long as human civilization had already existed. The musician Brian Eno, who later developed the chimes, named it the Clock of the Long Now.
More here.
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