Life and Ideas of Ted Coombs

Ted Coombs began his pursuit of innovation on wheels, not in a lab. In 1979, he roller-skated across the United States to protest the energy crisis that had stalled the country’s sense of progress. The act was a statement of endurance and purpose, but also of imagination, a refusal to accept stillness. Years later, when Coombs turned to computing and artificial intelligence, that same restlessness shaped his work. He viewed technology as a system of movement and translation, a way to extend the body’s capacity for thought. The road, the computer, and the neural network were, for him, parts of the same human endeavor to understand how effort becomes intelligence. Coombs first became known through his writing during the personal computer revolution of the 1990s. He was one of the early contributors to the For Dummies series. A project that democratized access to programming knowledge. His books on dBASE, PowerBuilder, and internet setup were not technical manifestos. They were acts of cultural mediation. He treated programming languages as forms of expression rather than rigid systems of command. His writing was direct and confident, but beneath the surface, it exposed a conviction that technology’s meaning depended on the user’s capacity to grasp its grammar. Coombs believed that literacy in computing was not optional. It was a new condition of freedom.

At the time, most technical documentation reflected a narrow vision of expertise. Users were expected to adapt to machines. Coombs reversed that order. He replaced mystique with method, and through that process, he defined an ethic of accessibility that would later echo through user-centered design.

Coombs’ later career in artificial intelligence extended this ethic into the architecture of cognition itself. As a programmer at CognitiveAI, he participated in the effort to build systems capable of independent reasoning. His TedAgents project aimed to create agents that could analyze, infer, and adjust their own behavior based on internal logic. TedAgents embodied an attempt to simulate the ambiguity of reasoning, the ability to hesitate, to test possibilities before acting. Coombs treated cognition as an environment rather than a sequence of commands. By doing so, he anticipated a shift that would later dominate AI discourse: the movement from deterministic computation to adaptive intelligence. His work reflected a belief that a machine capable of genuine reasoning had to possess a model of uncertainty. It had to know, in some functional way, that it might be wrong. This pursuit cannot be separated from his background as an artist. Coombs was also a portrait painter, trained in the precision of observation and the tension between representation and interpretation. That same sensibility guided his approach to AI. He treated code as an extension of perception, an effort to encode reflection rather than reflex. His understanding of both art and science created an uncommon synthesis of intuition and analysis.

For Coombs, the line between creativity and computation was porous. He saw in programming the same act of construction that defines the arts, the transformation of abstraction into form. This dual perspective led him to reject the idea of AI as imitation. He regarded AI as a complementary system of reasoning that could illuminate human thought through contrast. Machines, in his view, should help us understand what thinking is. His career also reveals an intellectual independence that distances him from the typical narratives of Silicon Valley innovation. Coombs pursued understanding. His influence lies in the way he reshaped the relationship between humans and their tools. By insisting that technology remain interpretable, he helped define the moral and aesthetic boundaries of digital design. His early insistence on clarity in computer education foreshadowed the ethical demands now facing AI development: transparency, accountability, and accessibility.

Coombs’ trajectory reflects a rare coherence across disciplines. His roller-skating journey across the United States, his popular programming books, and his work in AI all share a single philosophical thread. Movement, whether physical or intellectual, reveals structure. The act of skating across a continent is absurd in scale, yet it mirrors the mind’s own traversal through systems of knowledge. To him, innovation was conversation. The machine was a mirror for human curiosity.

Today, when artificial intelligence has become an industry of prediction and efficiency, Coombs’ work reads as an argument for reflection. He envisioned intelligent systems that could reason rather than react, learn rather than accumulate. His contribution reminds us that the core of AI is the same quality that allowed him to turn complex code into accessible language and abstract algorithms into tools for learning.

Ted Coombs’ legacy resists summary. He moved across domains with the confidence of someone unconcerned with boundaries. His life reveals that intelligence emerges from persistence, structure, and the willingness to reinterpret failure as motion. His work urges us to see technology as a language we continue to translate. In that translation, the boundary between art and science, human and artificial, remains open, a space still defined by movement, clarity, and thought.

References

Mooney, J. (2004). In Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Encyclopedia of the bizarre: Amazing, strange, inexplicable, weird and all true! Black Dog Publishing.

Ted Coombs. (2009, September 16). Curriculum Vitae [PDF]. Ted Coombs Official Website. (Archived from the original on March 3, 2016.)

YouTube. (2006, October 13). @TedCoombs [Channel]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/@TedCoombs