May you live in boring times

Louis Fein’s utopian vision of academic computer science

I can’t get enough of the computer-centric idealistic futurism from the 50s and 60s. The dreams and fears are exactly the same as those of today's technooptimists. Don't get me wrong, we've made tons of progress since 1960. But I’m endlessly fascinated by how we tell the same stories: Promises of superintelligent machines and self-driving cars within the decade. Solemn discussions of the inevitable job loss from labor automation.

Having found a new obsession with this Louis Fein character, I was compelled to read his 1961 paper “The Computer-Related Sciences (Synnoetics) at A University in The Year 1975.” In sharp contrast to his big-dreaming contemporaries, Fein’s lofty speculative vision imagines new academic bureaucracy. It’s delightfully boring!

Published in The American Scientist, this article is Fein’s ACM pitch written to inform a broader audience of the tremendous potential of computer science departments. With such outreach in mind, Fein asks us to imagine that his paper is the address to distinguished alumni, 15 years in the future. The speaker is the University President, an accomplished historian with impeccable bona fides. In his address, the president will be waxing poetic about his wise decision to establish a new department of Synnoetics.

I feel for the poor imaginary people who signed up to suffer through that talk. They come to campus to see old friends and watch the football game, and have to suffer through a soporific lecture on finances. The development office should have gently informed the president that this wouldn’t help meet the year’s fundraising targets.

Despite its boringness, two themes that weren’t in Fein’s ACM report are worth discussing. First is his notion of synnoetics. Second is a bizarre fictional tale of a battle with the head of the campus computing center.

Synnoetics is Fein’s attempt to make a more coherent definition of the field of computer sciences. He now calls his original vision—the long laundry list of topics from the ACM article— “computing-related fields.” Starting a department by just putting a bunch of people in a room together because it makes sense financially is a hard sell on campus. You need to articulate a real academic vision.

“The reason that we were not satisfied with the former name Computer Related Sciences, was that the appearance of the word "computer" was misleading; although we were acutely aware of the public relations value of this word. People ignored the qualifying word "related" and associated the name exclusively with the computer-sciences—i.e., with the design, programming, and applications of computers, which is now only a small part of the number and variety of subjects we include in Synnoetics. The other names variously used, "Cybernetics," "Information Sciences," "Communication Sciences," etc., had similarly restricted connotations.”

Fein equates Cybernetics with “theory and practice of control and communication,” which suggests he read the title of Wiener’s book, but probably not much beyond that. His description of synnoetics sounds an awful lot like cybernetics to me. For Fein, synnoetics concerns any problem of collective decision making. Such decisions can be made solely by machines, by machines and people, by people cooperating together, or even by people and other organisms. Synnoetics studies all collective enhancement of mental power. It is the study of how to solve diverse problems to attain diverse goals—an augmented, collective, instrumental rationality.

“Syn is a latinized form of a Greek prefix meaning "together"; noetics is derived from the Greek, meaning "pertaining to the mind or intellect."

To illustrate the power of synnoetics, Fein’s narrator tells the tale of “the famous strike of 1970,” which was settled by one of the faculty in the synnoetics department. The professor used a computer as an automated mediator. Instead of negotiating over a piecemeal settlement of concessions and demands, both sides argued for what constraints would make them happy. This was posed as a large-scale mathematical optimization problem rapidly solved by the computer. While MIT professors were promising machines that would think and talk, Fein was imagining faster solutions of market design problems.

Though Fein’s department had relatively modest ambitions compared to his fellow 1960s futurists, Fein’s synnoetics department is an academic utopia. It is staffed by the best researchers from academia, industry, and government, with degrees in “engineering, mathematics, linguistics, political science, psychology, physics, biology, neurophysiology, and economics,” and one of the most distinguished members is “also a poet and philosopher.” The department has broken free from the publish or perish culture that plagues other fields.

“Some of our best teachers just teach and do not write. We are pleased to have them with us, as we are pleased to have those who do research and write and do not teach. Most of the faculty is engaged in some research and some teaching. I must admit that, in the past, we insisted that our faculty publish—or else! But that was in the past. As I indicated, promotions are based on the excellence of a man as a teacher or scholar.”

In an unfortunate speculative history, Fein’s narrator describes how things weren’t always so perfect. Establishing the department met heavy resistance from foolish academic conservatives. Fein describes the resistance to founding the department by the director of the campus computing center.

The costs of maintaining the bulky mainframe made the director, an excellent researcher, into a poor salesman. The computing center paid for itself by charging campus researchers for machine time. You know, the AWS model. Though the director was always looking out for the bottom line of his center, he found himself with an enjoyable multidisciplinary academic role. Those who paid for computer time had interesting problems, and he saw common themes in the diverse applications. People in the center started to pursue standard solutions as basic academic research. They published papers related to the tooling itself. Despite vocal campus resistance to the notion that computing could be a field, they demanded classes for training so their students could maximally leverage the center for research.

Thus, the center started to generate papers and teach students ad hoc. The director thought this ad hoc assembly of research and training was fine. It kept the computer humming and avoided the heated academic fights for a department. However, since he focused on maintaining the center, he had a myopia where he only wanted to research computer-oriented topics. Otherwise, how could they generate more revenue for his center?

Fortunately, others on campus took matters into their own hands and wrested control of computing away from the director. They established the department with a grand vision, and the rest was a glorious history. But what happened to the director? Fein concludes,

“Before closing, I would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance given me in the preparation of this talk by our former Computing Center Director. He is now a Professor in the Engineering Department where he spends most of his time doing research on electronic components for Synnoetic Systems.”

This dig at the end of the article is too real. This director was clearly based on a real person. In a 1979 interview, Fein names names. In describing those most vocally opposed to a computer science department, he states:

“I didn't have any contact with people outside; the people outside weren't the resisters, it was the people inside who were the resisters. George Forsythe and [John] Herriot and Ed Feigenbaum. These people were the resisters.”

The same George Forsythe! Indeed, for those who might know, here’s the first paragraph from the history of the Stanford computer science department:

“Mathematics Professor George Forsythe, Provost Fred Terman, and Associate Provost Albert Bowker conceived of a scientific “escalation” of computing at Stanford from the Computer Center function to an academic teaching and research function. George, together with mathematics professor Jack Herriot (deceased 2003), founded the Division of Computer Science within the Mathematics Department in 1961.”

The resisters became the heroes, and Fein was mostly forgotten. It’s one of the many ways Fein’s speculative future did not become our history.