There are lots of clever computer scientists; David Gelernter is one of the few who is wise. He understands the need to interact with people rather than computers. He understands the limitations of computer science. He speaks to the problems of technologists, namely, how come there are so few women online. He addresses serious questions - why there is so little useful stuff on the Net. He realizes that there is much more to context and content than merely bits of information here and hypertext jumps over there. He is a historian, social commentator, and sage with a snicker. In Mirror Worlds, Gelernter predicted the power of computer models. His book on the 1939 World's Fair is a joy, showing how we've gained the future but lost our way. Despite, or because, of his deep experience in computing, he questions the maniacal adoption of computers and hypertext in schools and society.

THE SKEPTIC (Cliff Stoll)

The Conservative

"A community is not a community of disembodied spoken statements, in part because the most important aspect of the communication that people have is emotional, and one often communicates emotion not in terms of the text but as a subtext. The physical body is not irrelevant to a human community. The emotional subtext of human communication is crucial to human thought. It isn't a footnote. Too many computer scientists don't understand this."

David Gelernter, a leading figure in the third generation of artificial intelligence (AI) scientists, is highly regarded for his parallel programming language Linda, which allows you to distribute a computer program across a multitude of processors and thus break down problems into a multitude of parts in order to solve them more quickly.

DAVID GELERNTER, a Yale University computer scientist, is the author of Mirror Worlds (1991), The Muse in the Machine (1994), and 1939: The Lost World of the Fair (1995).