Remembering Thomas E. Kurtz

By 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. The complexity of AI, its risks and potential benefits, are staggering. So it was comforting for me to remember how far we have come with data and information in my own lifetime. That reminder came wrapped in the loss of one of the great pioneers in the field.

The week of my final AI lecture began with the announcement of the death 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 until 1978 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.

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB and the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex (Grove/2020)