PERSON
Danny Hillis
Computer scientist (b. 1956), inventor of the Connection Machine parallel computer, co-founder of the Long Now Foundation and the 10,000-year clock that anchors its long-term thinking project. A thinker whose career has uniquely combined short-timescale engineering with civilizational-timescale design.
W. Daniel Hillis is an American computer scientist best known for co-founding Thinking Machines Corporation in 1983 and designing the Connection Machine — the first massively parallel computer, which used 65,536 simple processors operating in parallel to solve problems that traditional von Neumann architectures could not. The Connection Machine influenced the architecture of every subsequent parallel-computing effort including modern GPU design. In 1995, reflecting on a perceived collapse of long-term thinking in American culture, Hillis proposed a 10,000-year clock. The clock project became the anchor of the Long Now Foundation (1996), which Hillis co-founded with Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Hillis's Connection Machine was a structural precursor to contemporary AI hardware. The architecture — many simple processors working in parallel on a connected graph of data — is the conceptual ancestor of GPU-based deep-learning infrastructure. Hillis was working on this in the 1980s, when the dominant computational paradigm was