In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Weird sCienCe and dark horizons 7Kim Taipale wanted to stop terrorists. If there is a prototype for the cyber-Renaissance leader of the twenty-first century, K. A. “Kim” Taipale might be it.1 In the twentieth century, Taipale would have been a lawyer. Yet even for a would-be attorney his education was far more diverse than the average barrister. Taipale got a degree in psychology from New York University and a JD from the New York University School of Law. But he didn’t stop there. Taipale later polished off an MA and an EdM in communications from Columbia University and an LLM from the Columbia Law School. But Taipale was not a professional student. He had real jobs—ones that paid money. He landed a position with Davis Polk & Wardwell, a top-ranked law firm. One of the first big deals he worked on was an underwriting by Morgan Stanley to take the computer company Apple public. For Taipale, the technology was more interesting than the law. “Looking back,” he remembered, “I think what I was always really interested in was the future of the relationship between man and machine. I remember getting into arguments with my dad— asserting, ‘If we could just model this or that we could get better solutions.’” Even though he had majored in psychology, Taipale had taken computer science and math courses as an undergraduate. “In all my work,” he recalled, “I tried to orient on the things that interested me—media, computers, information technology, and how science and technologies helped shape society.” This passion for the partnership of human and machine followed him through a career as an investment banker at Lazard Freres & Company. “It was 1983 and Lazard was still old school,” Taipale explained, “except for a few early Apples that the analysts had, we had no personal computers 228 Weird science and dark horizons 229 at the firm.” Taipale and an associate got tired of cranking out spreadsheets by hand with a calculator. So they went across the street and bought SuperCalc, an early spreadsheet program, on a floppy disk. “Since we didn’t have computers, we ran the software on the secretaries’ Wang word processors ,” he added. “The partners got so tired of us tying up the word processors and they couldn’t get anything typed—they finally went out and bought us computers.” In the late 1980s, Taipale saw the coming convergence of information technology, media, and telecommunications. He began expanding his business and research interests in that direction, working with start-up companies . Taipale also started feeling his way into the academic world. In 1991 he hooked up with Robert “Robbie” McClintock, a professor at Columbia University who was interested in adopting information technology as a tool for improving education. That started a long association with the university, both teaching graduate courses in communications and helping develop the university’s new media technology strategy, as well as through a Department of Commerce–funded pilot project to bring the public K–12 schools in Harlem online (using the then-new combination of hardware and software called a web server). As the Internet began to crawl and then sprawl across business and government , Taipale started doing more and more consulting, trying to explain how all the pieces of science, emergent technologies, public policies, and business practices fit together. In the mid-1990s, he regularly consulted with major media and publishing companies trying to understand what the web would do to their industry. “Stop trying to tell us what this Internet thing is,” they would complain, “and just tell us how to stop it.” In April 2001, Taipale had a catastrophic ski accident—leaving him with double vision, months in bed, and needing a walker to get around. He figured it was time for a change. Taipale had always had an interest in national security and thought it would be worthwhile to spend some time pondering what the future of security empowered by new information technologies might look like. He became the founder and executive director of the Stilwell Center for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology Policy. Taipale thought then that the most important emergent security issues would involve energy and the environment—so that would be the focus of the center’s research efforts. Then came 9/11. Like many Americans, Taipale wanted to do something. He lived six blocks from the World Trade Center and had seen both planes hit the towers. In the aftermath, he...

Share