Few minutes of work that united billions of people around the world forever

The creator of the smiley emoji donated part of the incomes from his genius idea

Looking like a professor, knowledgeable, and probably already retired. And he already is. He never brags about anything, doesn’t interfere in conversations, and speaks slowly, more scientifically but quite understandably. He always smiles, and you can understand that this person is significant without even knowing that he has done something subconsciously but brilliantly.

For over 20 years, Scott Fahlman has had a close relationship with deep research in artificial intelligence. With that, he is closely connected to the world of communications. Moreover, right now artificial intelligence is changing the communications field 

unrecognizably and forever.

We drink tea and sweets together in the legendary Congress Center in Davos, as Scott will shortly speak on the stage about what the whole world has been talking about for years. I will moderate the session, but unexpectedly, the conversation turns into interesting memories.

I remember the date and time with mathematical precision because I have a copy of that message. It was 11:44 on September 19, 1982. In the very beginning of the first computers, which had no memory inside, and very few people besides us, the mathematicians, could understand what someone wanted to say. You probably remember — 

the screens were gray, and the characters were greenish. 

I was working then, as I am now, at Carnegie Mellon University. After a long debate about what each one wanted to say in a message and how we could understand if he was being serious or joking, I emailed my team with a simple suggestion. And it was — let’s mark messages with an element of humor with the symbol -:) just to be clear. And when we’re not happy about something, we’ll put the bracket the other way around…

I had no idea that years later, over 40 now, this symbol would become

unifying for the world,

everyone would call it a smiley, and quite often, they would use it in their messages even without a single word. Of course, over the years, the smiley has gone through thousands of variations, and there is no country where someone hasn’t come up with their local version and hasn’t transformed it into all possible moods as most popular after the smiley became the raised finger for agreement.

Unexpectedly for him, in 2021, a significant American event-organizing company offered to sell the original message in the form of an NFT, and

its price reached over $100,000

after the taxes and the fees, Scott and his wife immediately donated part of them to various organizations.

“ The price wasn’t bad at all for just a few minutes of work, but for me, more important was that ultimately, this emoticon (even then, in 1982, this word didn’t exist yet) really changed the world. Now, billions of people can say much more with just one sign than — for example — a thousand words.”

He likes Eastern Europe and the people there because he considers them

fresh and unburdened by intense competition

in developed countries and finds our nature unique.

 “I would like to come more often to this part of the world, even just to see the people, how they’ve been using my idea for over 40 years.”

We talk in-depth about everything modern and how communications are taking over the world, and we naturally “land” on his favorite topic — artificial intelligence. He doesn’t hide his concerns; 

on the one hand, ethics in communications are at stake and deeply doubtful; on the other hand, a great number of false information can be presented as accurate in seconds just because it’s generated by different software that has no way of knowing its origin.

When I called him at the beginning of 2024 to congratulate him and ask him what was new with him, somehow, logically, he shared his next project.

“Max, you know, after all, that I’m far from the PR business, but I can easily guess what will happen — millions of fakes will flood the world

and we, the people, will be powerless to control a superpower that can take our planet wherever it wants.”

According to Scott, one of the ways to avoid this is to create an almost invisible marker on photos that guarantees their originality, something like a watermark, so that we can be sure that artificial intelligence hasn’t worked on the image.

I ask him if he would work on such a project, and he smiles mysteriously and tells me,

“Maybe I’m already working on it…”

I have no doubt that he will present me the finished solution at our next meeting.

Hopefully soon. Both the solution and the meeting.

In the photo: Maxim Behar and Scott Fahlman, Davos 2019