Human Nature Spring 2002

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Is there anything David Gelernter can't do? Listen as he plays a piano composition, which he wrote last week. See his painting of his wife and sons. Watch him teach a class at Yale University, where he is a professor of computer science. Marvel with thousands of Übertechnoexperts as he emerges from clouds of dry ice smoke to deliver a much-anticipated keynote address at the PC Expo in New York. Read his wickedly pointed social and political commentary; or his art criticism; or his short stories; or his "history with novelistic interludes"; or his theories of human intelligence. Use the computer interface, for which he is "chief technology architect," that follows his theories for proper interface design.

It would make me green with envy if I hadn't already passed out with the exhaustion of it all. And you can't be really envious of someone who is so good at what he does-you can only marvel. At a time when, as Jacques Barzun has observed, a heart specialist who sails and reads the occasional novel is called a Renaissance man, Gelernter seems to be the genuine article. David Gelernter is, professionally, a professor of computer science at Yale University. Like a lot of professors of computer science (and unlike, curiously enough, 99.8 percent of professors of history) he has hopped onto one of his ideas and ridden it into the business world. He is the chief technology architect of Mirror Worlds, Inc., a company named after one of his books and the ideas within it. As CTA he doesn't have to fire anyone, or do double entry book-keeping, but one imagines that he does have to think up a lot of things to sell to a grateful public.

Thinking does not seem to be a problem for Gelernter. Strange, though, that he should be doing his thinking ...

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