It’s an era when, thanks to technology, the English language, as well as the acronyms that render most computer publications unreadable to the novice, is expanding at a record rate.
So it’s somewhat surprising that a July 4, 2000 software patent, issued to Malibuite Francis Jeffrey, perhaps the first awarded by the U.S. Patent Office on an entirely new software technology, is described in familiar words.
But see if you can figure out what Jeffrey patented from the description under his entry in “Who’s Who in America:” “… a system providing for programming and communication of programs as an integral part of cultural transmission and human communication, based on teleportable packages of relationship … that are swatches of virtual brain tissue transplantable between neuronal environments …” Uh, huh.
Last week, seated with his huge, snow-white Pyrenees Mastiff, named K-2, after the Himalayan peak, in his beachfront home, Jeffrey attempted to explain this and a later, Internet-related patent.
Difficult to understand or not, we’d better listen. If technology evolves as Jeffrey, and his friend, science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, believe, in the next decade his patented software will impact everyone using a computer. It will do so by making today’s technology seem as primitive as the famous pre-human-era opening scenario of Stanley Kubrick’s film, “2001,” originally based on Clarke’s “The Sentinel.” Indeed, Jeffrey’s software breakthrough has the potential, he estimates, to drive a trillion-dollar business.
The core words in the patent description seem to be ” … swatches of virtual brain tissue …” It is a software technology based less on the present binary system, than on, admittedly primitive, model of how our brain operates.
“The software replicates a patch of brain linkage in highly modularized form,” he explains. “It’s a simplification and an abstraction, based on what we have learned about how the brain and nervous system tissue operates.”
“Today’s computer is based on a 1950’s design by John von Neumann,” Jeffrey continues. “He also abstracted a very small aspect of brain structure he got from a friend, the neurophysiologist Warren S. McCulloch, who showed you could construct a simplistic model of a neuron, an abstraction of a real nerve cell, that could do things we know the human mind does like logic and counting.”
Jeffrey adds: “von Neumann then built the same little units out of electrical components, which first used vacuum tubes and, later, transistors as logic gates.”
“My patent is directed at the construction of software with a much broader, updated spectrum,” says Jeffery. “[It] uses parts of McCulloch’s design, advanced 50 years, to incorporate what we know today about how brain and nerve tissue function. But it is still an abstraction so it can be simple enough to use it for a purpose. My software, basically, upgrades a conventional computer system to this new vision.”
Basically, this software that Jeffrey describes, will make computers behave more like a brain; computer programming and operation will be much easier — a Piper Cub vs. a modern jet plane, as an example.
Are thinking robots next? Not quite, but close.
Says Jeffrey: “It embodies an elementary set of requirements to build something you might start thinking of as intelligence.
“In theory,” he adds, “you could construct the same thing out of traditional computer programming. But it would be incredibly tedious.”
Jeffrey, 50, has been in front of a computer, thinking, most of his life. A 1972 graduate from U.C. Berkeley, with one of the first degrees in Computational Neurophysiology (a study of the brain and the computer and what each can tell one about the other), the software developer and “forecaster” — an obviously essential talent for someone working so far ahead of contemporary technology — founded the technology corporation, Elfnet, in 1987.
The name is a hybrid of “network” and “elephant,” whose survival is a passion of his; appropriately, his software is dubbed “Elfi” and “Elphin” (elephant/dolphin). Committed to saving the whales and dolphins, Jeffrey is also the chairman and co-founder of the Great Whales Foundation.
He is also co-founder of Arthur C. Clarke Communicators, founded last summer during a visit with the writer in Sri Lanka, where he lives. The company was founded to develop a new generation of personal computers under Clarke’s name and using Jeffrey’s software.
However proud he is of the patents, and optimistic about the future for his software, Jeffrey is also aware of the problems exploiting his inventions.
“I think I’m in a dangerous category,” he laughs, “where there are only about a dozen people in the world who understand what I am doing, and most of them are competitors.”
Consider how computers have changed … from the tube-driven behemoths of the early years, to today’s palm-sized powerhouses. Progress won’t stop, and Jeffrey sees that to his advantage.
“If the transition [to more comprehensible software] isn’t done in the next five years, there is going to be a severe impact on the economy from the inherent problems with the old software,” he says. “For every year that goes by, the demands on the old software paradigm are accelerating exponentially. It must change for survival reasons.”