The Hat

I’ve always identified as a technology creator. That’s not necessarily the norm in academic computer science, which can be filled with people who study computer science but don’t always do computer science. Unfortunately, in many of our degree programs, I think that lack of emphasis on creating and using technology comes through: we have people teaching about something that they don’t do.

I felt this way my whole academic career. When I got to Illinois in 2017, it started to bother me a little more than it had in the past. As a way of addressing that, and I’m not sure where I came up with the idea, I had hats made with the word τέχνη on them.

Techne, unfortunately, is not the root of technology, although I would like it to be. It refers to one of the many kinds of knowledge that the Greeks identified. They had many different words for knowledge, with different connotations, and techne has the connotation of dirt under your fingernails. It’s a grubby, applied, practical, crafty kind of knowledge. The best English translation is craft, which I like. It’s frequently put in opposition to episteme. The Greeks considered episteme, knowing about things, a higher form of knowledge, and techne, knowing how to do things, a lower one. So the hat was my identification with that “lower” form of knowledge, but a form of knowledge that I think we increasingly need our students to understand and to value.

When coding agents appeared, I decided it was time for a new hat, because it felt like a new skill was emerging. No longer the determined effort to write code by hand, but working at the level of ideas: more thinking, more consideration. And, in what I think was an appropriate choice, I decided to have a conversation with AI about it. I started:

Previously, I had trucker hats printed with techne on them in Greek to signal my identification with craft. What’s the modern AI equivalent of that? I need new hats.

Its first pick was μῆτις, which is on my new hat:

Metis was the Greek concept of cunning, adaptive intelligence: the practical wisdom of knowing how to navigate complex, shifting situations. Odysseus was the exemplar. It’s distinct from both episteme (theoretical knowledge) and techne (craft skill). In the AI era, the capability isn’t just making things skillfully; it’s knowing how to think fluidly with intelligent systems, to prompt and steer and adapt. Metis captures that beautifully.

The conversation went on and it proposed other ideas, but I really liked this one. Around the same time, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey was coming out, which was bringing people’s attention back to that story. One of the other examples we came up with later: I’m not sure Odysseus took a shop class, but if he did, they probably didn’t teach him how to build a Trojan horse. Metis is applying the skills you have to new situations.

I’m going to stretch the metaphor a little here, toward the journey that computing as a field is on right now. Odysseus’s journey starts at the Trojan War. To me that feels like our decades-long effort to communicate with machines in machine language. And happily, through a new invention, we have finally won that war. We no longer have to communicate with machines in machine language.

And yet the journey home, back to the vision of the earliest computer scientists that we can and should communicate with computers in human language, that we should teach them to speak our language, is not proving to be an easy one for many people in computing right now. It’s disorienting. It’s treacherous. There are new skills to learn.

I think we will get there as a field. We will embrace the vision of Grace Hopper and others that we have been living with for decades and decades. We will put aside all the difficult work we did figuring out how to communicate with machines in machine language, and embrace a future where we no longer have to, and where we can provide access to computing to people who have never had it before. We will arrive home, in a place we wanted to be, a place that feels natural and right for us, where we communicate with machines in human language. But the journey to get there is going to be long and difficult and treacherous.

So that’s where the μῆτις hat came from. I hope I’ll wear it for the decades I have left working in this field, watching this vision that we all had come true at last.