AIM INTERVIEWS

Who are you?

I am Alvy Ray Smith. I was born before computers and have seen the whole wild thing unwind and continue to thrill in the revolution. I heard the first A-bomb go off in New Mexico when I was a kid in Las Cruces. I grew up with missiles shooting up over the Organ Mountains which separate Las Cruces from White Sands Missile Range.

You created your first computer graphic in 1965 and later invented the HSV color model while at Xerox PARC. What made you interested in pursuing art and computing? Was there any inspiration?

My uncle George, also in Las Cruces, was an artist who taught me how to oil paint when I was kid. The glory of my life has been to combine my love of art and of technology into what I believe to have been a good contribution to the world, namely Pixar.

One thing people don't usually know about me is that I went to Stanford in 1965 to learn this new subject I had discovered called Artificial Intelligence. There was a new department there called Computer Science.

So far as technical achievements are concerned, perhaps the most profound contribution I made was, with Ed Catmull, the alpha channel. My proudest achievement was/is Pixar.

You and Ed Catmull co-founded Pixar in 1986 after spinning out of Lucasfilm, with Steve Jobs as the primary investor. What was the original vision for Pixar? What was it like trying to sell the Pixar Image Computer in the early days just as computers were becoming fast enough for feature film?

The group now known as Pixar began on the fabulous North Shore of Long Island in about 1975. After Xerox fired me (they made a corporate decision not to do color!) I found my way to the next color pixels at NYIT (New York Institute of Technology) where I met Ed Catmull who had just joined to introduce computers into an old-fashioned cel animation studio. The group that assembled there decided that we would be the first to make a completely digital movie, not understanding that that would take 20 years. Lucasfilm was the next home of that group, then Pixar was the final home.

The vision was very easily stated: The Movie. Toy Story was that movie, 1995. The Pixar Image Computer was how we kept the group alive for five years while we waited for Moore's Law to make computers fast enough to compute a movie cost effectively.

Since leaving Pixar, you started Altamira and later wrote A Biography of the Pixel which recounts stories from Pixar history. If you had unlimited resources (time, money, etc.), how would you spend your time?

I spent 10 years putting A Biography of the Pixel (MIT Press) together. It is about much more than Pixar. It's about the moment in time when everything became bits. I call it The Great Digital Convergence. It happened about the Millennium, but nobody seemed to notice, so I wrote the book. The year 2000 was about when the first digital movie became possible (all old media types got replaced by bits). The same thing has made modern AI possible (all human text is now bits or soon will be). You should approach my book like you would War and Peace: You can read all the Napoleon parts and skip all the Natasha parts, or vice versa. The book is full of surprises. They surprised me, for starters, and why it took me so long to complete it. (For example, the guy who invented the pixel was a Russian who was "knighted" in the Kremlin by Putin. Yes, and he told us about Sputnik before it went up.)

In eight decades, I've done many things. What I do in my late stage is scholarly genealogy. I have 12,000 pages of scholarly (proved) genealogy online, two print published books and a dozen or so print published journal articles. I'm one of 50 Fellows of the American Society of Genealogists. It's great fun (it's sleuthing), keeps me completely busy, and is a contribution to fine-grain history. (For example, my about-to-publish journal article in New York City is about the Walloon settlers of NY and NJ in the 1600s, not the Dutch.)

Are there any people or projects you particularly admire today?

This will seem too uxorious, but it's true: I'm fascinated by my wife Alison Gopnik's study of the mental development of children. And how that might relate to AI. And to my lifelong unsatisfied question: What is consciousness? It's so mundane but nobody can tell me what it is.

What's a message you have for the world?

That's too large a question. I'll just say that Turing proved in 1936 that we could not predict what this thing he called computation (which he had just invented) would do. And since there is no physical limit to the size of a bit, computers are getting smaller and smaller and faster and faster and there is no limit in sight. You just have to ride the wave to see where it's all going. I've been riding (and exploiting) that exponential wave for 60 years and am constantly bedazzled. It's nowhere near over.