Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,928

This is the grave of Claude Shannon.

Born in 1916 in Petoskey, Michigan, Shannon grew up in the nearby town of Gaylord. This was a solidly middle class family. His father was a businessman and probate judge and his mother was principle of a high school. He graduated from high school a little early, in 1932. He was already interested in tinkering, communication technologies, and putting stuff together. He was a big Thomas Edison fan and wanted to be like him. So he went to the University of Michigan for college and double majored in electrical engineering and math, graduating in 1936. He was very good at it and went to MIT for graduate school.

Now, for me to explain things around computing and electrical engineering….well, that’s a bit hard for me. So be patient here and make corrections in comments. What I can say that he was good at this and finished a master’s degree in 1938. His thesis, “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits” actually has its own Wikipedia page (I wonder how many MA theses have one) because it is so important in developing computing. It used something called Boolean algebra (whatever that means) to demonstrate that one could simplify the relays for automated telephone systems, which then laid the groundwork for creating the ideas behind digital circuits in computing. Naturally, he went on to work on his PhD, which he finished in 1940.

A guy like this was obviously of value to the military during World War II. Shannon worked on cryptography during the war and wrote a paper that is considered foundational to that field. He was quite successful at breaking Axis codes. His work during these years is considered key to something called symmetric key cryptography, which I completely don’t understand at all, but hey, some of you might.

After the war, Shannon continued his pioneering work in fields that I do not comprehend. His 1948 paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” which he expanded into a book in 1949, basically created the field of information theory. Since I don’t know what this is or even what we are talking about here, I’m just going to shortcut and link to Wikipedia, which describes the main points as such:

An information source that produces a message

A transmitter that operates on the message to create a signal which can be sent through a channel

A channel, which is the medium over which the signal, carrying the information that composes the message, is sent

A receiver, which transforms the signal back into the message intended for delivery

A destination, which can be a person or a machine, for whom or which the message is intended

Uh…OK, sure, I totally understand that now! Evidently, this is an exceptionally important paper that influenced generations of scientists. Among those were scientists working for the CIA, where Shannon was brought in during the early 50s to be part of its Special Cryptologic Advisory Group. He also worked for Bell Labs. where he helped create something called pulse-code modulation, which is the digital interpretation of analog signals. That helped transform the recording of music, making the compact disc possible.

What I will never forgive Shannon for, not ever, is his role in creating artificial intelligence, the greatest evil of all time. I’m serious about this too–the rise of AI is the most anti-human thing I have ever encountered and I consider it an existential threat to the future of humanity. Along with climate change, we are in bad straits my friends and at best, Trump is the 3rd worst threat this nation and world faces, well behind AI. So when we look at the history of this humanity destroying horror, assuming we even have something like history when all the jobs are taken away and people respond with a lot more fascism than we see now (and let’s be honest, every time I hear someone talking about AI freeing humanity, I think of James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, where all these people just talk about the magic of recreating humanity through various schemes that are usually disastrous and quite deadly) , we will need to know who was responsible for this monstrosity. Shanon is one of them. In 1950, with his wife Mary as his assistant (I assume she was also competent and brilliant and like so many women of this era, was forced into being her husband’s assistant), created a machine called Theseus. It was basically an early AI machine that could find its way through a maze. Very basic, but established the frameworks for AI and AI hucksters have promoted him ever since as being a father of their ideas. He started publishing on AI as well, including a 1950 paper on a machine playing chess. In 1956, he and John McCarthy co-edited a book called Automata Studies that was an early compendium of the issue. At Dartmouth, he also co-led the foundational conference for the study of AI. Great…….

That same year, 1956, Shannon went to MIT. Endowed chair, all that stuff. He worked there for the next 22 years, continuing along the same paths of research. He was also something of a polymath (you may have already figured this out). He was a quite skilled juggler and unicyclist. His interest in AI chess came out of his own excellent game. He also invented a flame-throwing trumpet. Huh.

Through his life, Shannon received a lot of recognition for his work. This was not a guy working in some obscure lab. Fortune named him one of America’s 20 most important scientists on a 1954 list. In 1985, Shannon won the Kyoto Prize, Japan’s highest award for the arts and sciences. This was a recognition of his enormous importance in computing, which of course defined the Japanese economy by that time. Of course, there’s some cryptocurrency named for him. Not LoomCoin though. The LLM used to destroy learning as a human endeavor through AI called Claude is also named for him.

Later in life, Shannon developed Alzheimer’s and was in a nursing home for the last few years of his life. That ended in 2001, at the age of 84.

In conclusion, I’ve had two computing based graves in the last two weeks and that’s plenty for awhile! I don’t understand most of this stuff, so I will leave it to you all in comments to fill in the gaps and of course defend AI as something good since people love their technology fetish.

Claude Shannon is buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit some of the many people Shannon worked with over his long career, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. I am sure I will butcher their work too! John McCarthy is in Palo Alto, California and Henrik Bode is in Princeton, New Jersey. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.