Thomas E. Kurtz and “A Few Good Men”

Posted on | November 21, 2024 | Comments Off on Thomas E. Kurtz and “A Few Good Men”

Mike Magee

This has been a challenging week for me, but not for the reasons you might think. Compartmentalization skills have allowed me to push the 2024 Presidential election into the back reaches of my mind as I worked to complete teaching a course on “AI and Medicine” at the Presidents College at the University of Hartford.

Along with my students, we confronted a future filled with competing visions. Promise and dread lurked side by side at every turn. In one of the final slides of the final lecture I included an image from the 1992 Alan Sorkin legal drama, “A Few Good Men.” The face of an enraged Jack Nicholson (relentlessly baited by Tom Cruise) filled the screen under the headline “You can’t handle the truth!”

This device was employed to spotlight the fact that genAI, trained on de-identified population health data, will soon reveal numerous uncomfortable “truths” about our health care system – like its’ inefficiency, inequity, and spotty outcomes; or its wastefulness, fraud, and permissive attitude toward DTC marketing designed to drive demand.

AI’s capacity to uncover the strengths and faults of our system has already been highlighted in a January 24, 2024 JAMA article titled “Scalable Privilege” – How AI Could Turn Data From the Best Medical Systems Into Better Care For All.”

If we want to emphasize the positive, we do well to stop for a moment and acknowledge with gratitude the passing this week of 94 year old Thomas E. Kurtz. You may not have heard of him, but you likely recall his seminal invention, the first computer programming language for the masses – BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). As Bill Gates himself reflected this week, “The approachability of BASIC and time-sharing began what the PC and the internet took to a whole new level.”

Bill would know. His high school had a teletype connection to the original time-sharing main frame computer at Dartmouth. But Gates was not alone or first in line. As Kurtz remembered, “I once estimated that even before Bill Gates got into the action at all, five million people in the world knew how to write programs in BASIC. There was something like 80 time-sharing systems in the U.S. that offered BASIC as one of their languages. And it was all over the world. I even got a letter from somebody in Siberia.”

It wasn’t until1978 that Gates teamed up with Microsoft founder, Paul Allen, and received permission to install BASIC in the first customizable personal microcomputer, the MITS Altair 8800.

Kurtz was the son of German immigrants, and displayed high aptitude in 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 chairman of Mathematics, John Kemeny, who had previously been a research assistant at Princeton himself under none other than Albert Einstein. Kurtz launched a new field at Dartmouth that year – computer science.

He was starting at ground level – or more accurately, below ground level since the solitary computer the university possessed was housed in the basement of College Hall where it filled an entire room. Training students in computer science required hands on engagement. As Kurtz explained some years later, “Lecturing about computing doesn’t make any sense, any more than lecturing on how to drive a car makes sense.”

In later interviews, Kurtz make it clear that his idea didn’t meet with applause at the outset. He admitted, “The target (in computing) was research, whereas here at Dartmouth we had the crazy idea that our undergraduate students who are not going to be technically employed later on should learn how to use the computer. Completely nutty idea.”

Two barriers at the time were computer language and computer time. The main frame on campus ran on complex FORTRAN and COBOL which only a few experts had mastered. And if you wanted access, you had to wait in line.

But eight years after he had arrived on campus, on May 1, 1964, at 4 a.m., he put his new language, BASIC, to the test with the typed command “RUN” and it worked. He modestly remembered that “The whole point of this was to make computing easy for Dartmouth students, Dartmouth faculty, Dartmouth staff, and even Dartmouth janitors.”

One of Kurtz’s famous quotes was “always choose simplicity over efficiency.” It took only a one hour seminar to learn the system. At around the same time, he addressed the second problem – time. Developing what has been called “a clever workaround,” his new system permitted multiple users at remote terminals to access the computer simultaneously.

As with C.Everett Koop, who also died at age 96, he chose to live out the last few years of his life in near view of the Dartmouth green. And the world he left behind, one hurtling forward at breakneck speed, offers near unlimited computing access, and little time or delay between thought and action. Mistakes therefore run the risk of self-amplifying and potentially hurtling out of human control.

Mark Minevich, a well-respected AI Master Strategist focused on “human-centric digital transformation” understands the risks and benefits as well as anyone. He recently laid out pillars for governmental management of AI. They include risk assessment, enhanced safeguards, pragmatic governance, and public/private partnerships. Channeling Kurtz, he said, “There are no shortcuts to developing systems that earn enduring trust…transparency, accountability, and justice (must) govern exploration…as we forge tools to serve all people.”

The Dartmouth flags were lowered in Kurtz’s honor on Wednesday, Nov. 20, and Thursday, Nov. 21.