At first glance it might come off as hubris, but it's actually just a way of separating what we now know as technology (consumer technology) which is mostly just incremental from the other kind of technology which is innovative and profoundly transformative.
When he talks about the research that went on at the Parc back in the 70s it's not to show his accomplishments but to show the difference between commercial products addressed to the masses and touted as technological breakthroughs and real breakthroughs that happen way before the mass production and slowly make their way into society and bring about enormous changes and wealth.
Those are kind of strange, but struck a chord because I have been myself trying to discover these fundamentals which make us human and which most of technology is 'amplifying' (by Kay's terms). For example, music is not on that list which I personally think is one of the most important fundamental and which a lot of technology is built upon. Nor is communication, which is another fundamental and also a driver of a lot of technology. Maybe I'm thinking in a bit different terms, though.
I think Alan Kay put communication in his list. I don't think music is quite universal, certainly not uniformly and not the way we experience it now. He mentioned harmony theory as a notable non-universal, while almost any music you hear today makes extensive use of harmony.
Thank you for posting this, the best quote so far has been this: "Prior to the 18th century virtually everyone on the planet died in the same world they were born into". This is a realization I never had, we take progress for granted but it's a precious thing actually.
Which is why I think the idea of change itself was an invention. Up until roughly that point in history people didn't apply themselves to change because they didn't even have the concept as it came to be understood.
Things progressed so glacially for so long simply because, from experience, nothing other than stasis could be imagined, not because we were any dumber. Change was the key innovation for change. Occasionally I wonder if it wasn't an inherently fatal discovery.
One wonders how many other such "basic" concepts there might be that remain hidden from view.
One of the problems I've been struggling with lately is how to arrange for this sort of work, while still allowing the researchers to make a living. Governments and large corporations seem to have by and large lost interest in funding it, and a small company doesn't have the resources to make it sustainable. How do we solve this?
Neoliberalism since the 70's is a well-known culprit, but he also discusses the corporatization of universities — stifling managerialist bureaucracies.
> Governments and large corporations seem to have by and large lost interest in funding it, and a small company doesn't have the resources to make it sustainable. How do we solve this?
Educating people as to where their tax dollars are going is always a good start. The average joe has some very, very odd ideas about the federal budget and how money is allocated.
Personal favorites: the way many people complain about how much we spend on foreign aid. Ask such a person how much we ought spend as a percentage of the budget and the figure will very often represent a massive increase over what we spend now, since we don't spend much at all.
Or the way many people literally cannot wrap their heads around how much war costs. A couple of years ago an expert came out and pointed out that we spent more than $20 billion on air conditioning for our military every year in Afghanistan when you include road maintenance and fuel trucks and so on. He was a former general who had been involved in logistics but many people needed to just assume he was full of it, since that's more than we spend every year on fucking NASA.
The trouble I see is that if you were a politician and you went around with the charts and visual aids a businessman would use to give a briefing and convey that info... you'd look like Ross Perot. So I guess he just ruined it for everybody.
The UK is just launching something to address this: https://twitter.com/MattChorley/status/451773213497118720/ I expect it would be more difficult to do something similar for the US given the wedding-cake of federal, state and local taxes.
Perhaps he's a tad obnoxious, but he says some interesting things.
- think of the future, than reason backwards
- use Moore's law in reverse
- an introvert character can be helpful in coming up with real inventions
- be interested in new ideas for the sake of them being new, not because they are useful now, or accepted, or understandable
- it seems good to sell stuff that can be instantly used, people however, like many other things. they might for example like to learning or get skilled. the bike example is one. but also the piano. or the skateboard.
At least, this is what I tried to grasp from it. :-)
A lot of his talk was wasted on irrelevant complaining about lack of capex in R&D. That's only partly correct. Any one of us can afford to rent a crazy amount of computing power and storage on demand. Pfft.
In short, skip the first 20 minutes. He's being a grumpy old man. In the second part, he's a pissed-off genius and revolutionary.
His argument that 5 year timespans are minimal for invention is on target, but that's opex, even when you are cash flow negative. Where he is wrong is that you need large equipment capex for invention. Unless you are building a novel special purpose computing device, like an giant FPGA cryptocurrency miner, you really don't need more than $5k capex per coder for anything anymore, and renting Web-scale power is cheap.
Computing power and storage makes the computer of the future?
If you think like that, "new" things can only come from storing more data and processing it in new ways. That seems rather limiting...
Off the top of my head, I'd expect the "computer" of the future to know a lot more about my immediate surroundings. That means sensors, not big data, computing power and storage are useless. Can I get sensors that are 20 years ahead of the stuff that's mass-produced today? Maybe, but it's certainly not something I can rent for cheap.
The core idea of non-incremental progress: Xerox PARC accomplished what it did in large part by forcing technology 15 years into the future. The Alto, of which PARC built around 2000, mostly for its own staff, cost about $85,000 in present dollars. What it provided exceeded the general market personal computing capabilities of the late 1980s. This enabled the "twelve and a half" inventions from PARC which Kay claims have created over $30 trillion in generated wealth, at a cost of around $10-12 million/year.
Kay also distinguishes "invention" (what PARC did) -- as fundamental research, from "innovation" (what Apple did) -- as product development.
Other topics:
• Learning curves (people, especially marketers, hate them)
• "New" vs. "News". News tells familiar stories in an established context. "New" is invisible, learning, and change.
• The majority acts based on group acceptance, not on the merits of an idea. Extroversion vs. introversion.
• There are "human universals" -- themes people accept automatically, without marketing, as opposed to non-universals, which have to be taught.
• Knowledge dominates IQ. Henry Ford accomplished more than Leonardo da Vinci not because he was smarter, but because humanity's cumulative knowledge had given him tools and inventions Leonardo could only dream of.
> • Knowledge dominates IQ. Henry Ford accomplished more than Leonardo da Vinci not because he was smarter, but because humanity's cumulative knowledge had given him tools and inventions Leonardo could only dream of.
This really struck a chord for me. What I got from it was that many people try to build some form of success on pure IQ and get frustrated when they are outmuscled by knowledge in the market.
I think that cuts back to Xerox PARC as well - by focussing everything on IQ, they created the knowledge that allowed Apple to be so dominant.
Where the talk falls a little bit on the obnoxious side is when Mr. Kay makes dismissive statements on how they created what others sold, just 10 or 20 years earlier. I think that ignores the enormous amount of work you have to put into connecting this knowledge that they worked out to the current state of mind that people are in.
Xerox PARC may have invented the future, but the failure of their parent company to bring that future to market shows that even with that knowledge at hand, you have quite a bit of way ahead of you.
> Xerox PARC may have invented the future, but the failure of their parent company to bring that future to market shows that even with that knowledge at hand, you have quite a bit of way ahead of you.
There are quite a few talks scattered around the web from former employees about how everything went downhill due to mismanagement.
Back in the late 90's, when I started using Oberon and digging into what was Wirth's inspiration at Xerox PARC, I discovered a new world much more interesting that what Bell Labs could offer.
However they had better luck bringing their research into the market at large, given how it all played with the universities.
>Xerox PARC may have invented the future, but the failure of their parent company to bring that future to market shows that even with that knowledge at hand, you have quite a bit of way ahead of you.
does it really matter that Xerox PARC "invented the future"? If not they, then somebody else couple years later. 10-20 years down the road it just wouldn't change a bit.
I know that it is helpful at times to realize that invention and innovation could happen in a myriad of ways, but I don't think that is a fair way of looking at things in this case, or in many cases.
Without the invention of the mouse, we might all still be using trackballs. A mouse to me is not an "A ha!" invention. I remember when I first used one that it seemed silly to move a trackball around upside-down like that.
And without laser printing, we might all still be using ribbon cartridges at work, because of time/cost concerns with inkjet.
Everything that happens can have profound effects on the future. Think of the Challenger and Columbia disasters. While it's true that the American public had somewhat lost interest in the shuttle program prior to the Challenger disaster, they didn't think of it as risky or dangerous. Think of the lives that would have been saved and how much farther along we might be in space exploration had greater precaution been taken.
>Without the invention of the mouse, we might all still be using trackballs. A mouse to me is not an "A ha!" invention.
A ha! was to me when i first time used trackball instead of mouse. It was so great, such fast and precise movements (don't remember the game though :) And if i remember correctly people with carpal tunnel get trackball instead of mouse.
>Everything that happens can have profound effects on the future. Think of the Challenger and Columbia disasters. While it's true that the American public had somewhat lost interest in the shuttle program prior to the Challenger disaster, they didn't think of it as risky or dangerous. Think of the lives that would have been saved and how much farther along we might be in space exploration had greater precaution been taken.
i come from different school of thought. Whatever number of butterflies somebody squash today, it may (and will) affect only small details of the future while the whole system's trajectory will still be in the same volume of phase space as it determined by the macro conditions (like energy constraints, etc...).
>farther along we might be in space exploration had greater precaution been taken
the technological civilizations follow typical path. A bit faster, a bit slower doesn't matter. What matters is whether given technological civilization hits a bifurcation point like all-out nuclear war or uncontrollable climate change or uncontrollable run-away genetic development or implosion into ant-colony state as result of members being "always connected" ...
You could apply this to everything in life and conclude that nothing matters. What is important is that Xerox PARC did invent many of the technologies we take for granted today. This should be celebrated along with all the other contributions that led us to the present.
>You could apply this to everything in life and conclude that nothing matters.
it matters "locally" - to individuals who invent and innovate and to ones who gets direct financial profit from it. The rest of civilization will get it anyway, at the time when civilization is ready to consume it, so details don't matter at that scale. Ancient Greeks could in theory build a steam engine [granted very low efficient] - they wouldn't have been able to put it use anyway, it would be just a curiosity like Aeolipile was.
It's probably hard to tell in most specific cases, but it can be argued that some inventions were just ready to happen (e.g. the telephone and it's race to the patent office) while others may have taken decades longer if the right genius hadn't been in the right place at the right time (Einstein's relativity perhaps?)
It matters more than locally: those invention seeded the minds of the next generations, showed them what could be possible. It's not as if Gates and Jobs didn't hear about the work done at PARC. They most likely did and it "seeded" their minds or at least primed them for their ideas. Even if they didn't do even this, they at least confirmed them that their intuitions were on the right path, and without these confirmations they maybe wouldn't have even had the courage to start their businesses.
And if the ancient Greeks would have actually built that steam engine into a useful device (even something like a powered fishing lines drawer of anything of even the slightest usefulness), I'm sure this would've completely changed the course of human history, even if they may not have found too much practical use for it. You see, once you physically build something that works and is useful (or actually implement something that can be used, in the case of software), no matter how inefficient and barely-useful it is, you actually seed and idea into the minds of all the people that see that device working or hear about it working. And that idea takes roots and very soon they will think about improving it and finding uses for it. If you just write about it in a book, even if you add building instructions and careful calculations showing that it's possible, you get at most 1% of that mind-seeding power. Most peoples minds get primed to work on improving something only after seeing something that (at least kind of) works. It's the "if we'd only tweak that and that it might just actually really work" thinking that most people can only have after seeing something physical that at least "barely kind of works". Very few people have the intelligence and imagination to get a theoretical idea and turn it into something that works, but there always some Gates or Jobs or Wozniaks that once you give them a piece of practical vision they can carry it on to something that really works.
I think that if the ancient Greeks would have build a steam engine with even the most remote practical use and would've displayed that "craftmanship" to the people instead of keeping it locked in library, the whole middle ages with all their horrors might not even have existed. Humanity might have even jumped from antiquity to industrial age directly. Maybe with a slow languish at first, before something equivalent to the printing press would have been invented to help the dissemination of knowledge, but then faster and faster.
Alan Kay posits that yes it does matter that PARC "invented the future" because there were and are very few researchers working with the opportunity mix necessary. They had five years of freedom from business concerns, tons of ambition, the right context, intelligence and inspiration. Kay claims that the extremely unique situation and persons at PARC and previously at ARPA are what gave rise to the inventions. I think he would agree with you that other people would have made similar discoveries and inventions, if only they too had the opportunity and necessary materials. From what I have heard Alan say in his speeches his perspective is that the opportunity simply does not exist today, at least not in the necessary configuration to do what PARC did.
Check out this video for a more detailed history recounted by Kay about PARC and what led up to it:
http://vimeo.com/84523828
>there were and are very few researchers working with the opportunity mix necessary. They had five years of freedom from business concerns, tons of ambition, the right context, intelligence and inspiration.
A lot of Universities and research centers have the same. As most of them are, arguably, not a PARC may be these conditions aren't important? On the other side, we do have a lot of R&D coming out of Universities and research centers, so may be PARC isn't important?
i may sound like trolling, but i did listen live to Alan Kay once and honestly got more confused and got more questions as a result :)
Right at the start, Kay pointed out that the innovation to get from Alto to Macintosh took more work than inventing the Alto. I don't think he was ignoring that. His point might be that someone was bound to do the innovation, but it took very deliberate choices for PARC to situate themselves where the invention was possible.
Good point. I would still say that the route "from Alto to Macintosh" is thinking more in IQ terms and that the full path, Alto to Macintosh to market, is frequently underestimated. I had a feeling that while Kay may have appreciated the first half, the second half was rather absent in his talk and he kept presenting it as though the software they built was sold ten years later by somebody else. For example saying that Microsoft took Bravo and sold Word.
"Knowledge dominates IQ" - along this lines, recently I have come to accept the idea "Speed dominates IQ":
To explain it briefly, some one who can build fast and deploy can learn more as they come into contact with unknown-unknowns sooner and more often.
Contrast this with someone with a huge IQ who thinks about things a ton, and builds really clever first solutions which breaks on first contact with reality/market.
Running forward blindly does not help in research. During the talk, Alan even talks about this in the context of learning about the past to be able to come up with new ideas in the future.
On the other hand, there's a tendency with some people who "knows too much" to dismiss ideas that have existed for a while, even though it hasn't been widely disseminated.
Sometimes running forwards blindly, while ignoring all the reasons not to do something is what finally gets innovations out to people.
It get this at the moment. We have something new that the old hands say can't be done. We've proven it in the lab to our satisfaction and those that "know" just shake their heads. They do want more detail though.
It is fun to take methods that are 80 years old and update them with new technology and have them outperform the state of the art.
Yup, in computing, there often is the situation where in 60ies or so they already figured out the proper way to solve some particular problem, but noted that is impractical due to the unimaginably huge resources required (such as gigabytes of storage or CPU comparable to a modern smartphone); while the 'state of art' of that problem is based on directions that were known to be strictly limited, but could be practically implemented given the hardware limitations of the time.
That reminds me of the idea that "The world is its own best model", credited to Rodney Brooks. Basically rather than having an intelligent agent rely upon a complex predictive model of its environment to explore the actions it can take a better/faster/simpler approach might be to actually interact with the environment and see what works - "intelligence without representation".
> The majority acts based on group acceptance, not on the merits of an idea. Extroversion vs. introversion.
This is extremely important to realize. Eventually your [art|research] will take you beyond what people are comfortable with, and it doesn't mean you're wrong. It is hard, though.
I'm exploring some areas at the moment generally outside the "general acceptance field", and it's uncomfortable. I find that when I run across others, especially others I know, who are expressing similar concerns, or better, are reaching conclusions similar to mine, that I'm strongly reassured.
I think you missed one of his crucial points. That is that we live in a waking dream. That our day-to-day understanding of what is real and normal is a fiction.
When Tetsuya Mizuguchi left Sega to form Q Entertainment, he and his team started work on the famous puzzle game Lumines. Their stated goal was to create a game that was merely half a step forward, as opposed to their previous game, Rez, which was two steps forward -- and didn't do well at market.
Smalltalk was at least two steps forward, probably much more than that. The critical thing that put it well into the future was the fact that it made the boundary between users and programmers even more porous. I'm sure many of you have heard the stories of teenagers sitting down to an Alto and writing their own circuit design software in Smalltalk. That kind of power -- turning ordinary people into masters of these powerful machines easily and efficiently -- is just the sort of revolution originally desired and promised us by the first microcomputer marketers.
But of course it didn't do well at market at first, so we had to settle for the thing that was merely half a step forward -- the Macintosh.
Though a bit obnoxious i really liked the talk.
Alan talked about 2007. If we look back it was the time when first iphone was announced. We all knew that in a timespan of seven years the processor will be much faster( Now it is almost 20 times faster)., connectivity will be faster, it will have better display and better sensors.
But still none of the application that exists today (except games and animations maybe) take all this improvement into consideration. We are still stuck in old ideas of messaging app, photo sharing app, maps and news aggregators. I believe all those apps could have been conceived back in 2007. No one thought about any new use cases which can take use of the improved hardware. In fact some of the noble concepts like shazm or word lens were conceived 4-5 years back. Now we are stuck at a time where giants of internet are just struggling to squeeze few more bytes of information from user in sake of making more money from adds. It is difficult to believe after 7 years of first smartphone the most talked about event this year was a messaging app being acquired for 19 billion!!
I think hardware engineers push the limits by going to any extent to make moore's law true. But we software guys fails to appreciate what is going to come in future
I'm not sure computing is going to have a major revolution, unless we see a massive AI breakthrough. The reason is that the amount of computing power available for a few watts and tens of dollars today now vastly exceeds any idea of what to do with it. With all the data in the cloud stuff the limitations are storage related (i.e. just the time to read data off disk), and the use of the CPUs is really fairly low compared to how long they sit around waiting.
Post iPhone is the best example, because all that's really happened is a (much needed) improvement in the underlying networks and a shake up of the business side of the ecosystem, but very little of this stuff that is actually used wasn't available before. There was a gold rush, but I think history is going to judge that era quite harshly in terms of lack of real progress.
Uber surely is a great app. But if we think in terms of harnessing computing power i really don't think it falls into the same category as early GUI or OOPs. They definitely have to work real hard for managing the non computing side. But if you concentrate just on the computing side it is just a scalable web service allowing user to book cabs. And it was nothing that couldn't have been conceived in 2007. Far more complex air line booking system existed before that
Only real example that comes to my mind is PA kind of applications of the type of Google Now/Siri. But still they don't work to the level we desire them to
Consider that in 2007, the iPhone was already effectively the result of years of waiting. In '99/2000, there was already touch screen PDAs with apps and various limited networking functionality, and phone functionality at least as early as 2002 (possibly earlier, I don't remember), and a few tablets had started making their appearance (both laptops + touch, as well as "proper" tablets). But they were all massively hamstrung by hardware (the first generation Palm's had less than 1/1000th the memory of many current smartphones; monochrome low res displays, and resistive touch)
Arguably, even in '99, the idea itself was old - those of us working on stuff like that then, were looking back at Star Trek and other SF, and it was just the feeling that it was an idea whose time had finally come.
Apple's genius with the iPhone and iPad, was realising its time had not come, and waiting and refining their design until the basic underlying hardware "caught up" and they could provide a product suitable for "normal users". Everyone else got to make the expensive mistakes; most of the companies involved are no longer around, or pulled out of that market before Apple made its entry.
Sometimes ideas are just not right yet, and spending time trying to force the issue is likely to fail because the end result will be massively compromised.
But sometimes the ideas are just not right yet also because the public has not "caught up". It's not just that software developers must figure this out, but end users must have caught up enough that the new ideas fit into their world view.
>Apple's genius with the iPhone and iPad, was realising its time had not come, and waiting and refining their design until the basic underlying hardware "caught up" and they could provide a product suitable for "normal users". Everyone else got to make the expensive mistakes; most of the companies involved are no longer around, or pulled out of that market before Apple made its entry.
I know this is really trivial, but I found the extended music intro and his unamused reaction quite comical. Over-analyzing, it's a juxtaposition to parts of his talk.
Firstly, I enjoyed his talk. It was pretty insightful into the ways so many businesses and corporations today think, and how we've lost track of building the future.
However, there's one thing that really bugged me about his talk. It basically boils down to the fact that you have to take into consideration Moore's Law and have to pay a hefty sum to make any useful invention by paying for the technologies that are 10-15 years ahead of its time to do anything useful for the next 30 years. How does one "invent" in his terms today without the equity that he refers to which you need?
Allow me to put forward a historical analogy: standing in 2014 and arguing a case for gentle future changes in [pick your field here] over the next few decades, based on the past few decades, is something like standing in 1885 or so and arguing that speed and convenience of passenger travel will steadily and gently increase in the decades ahead. The gentleman prognosticator of the mid-1880s could look back at steady progress in the operating speed of railways and similar improvement in steamships throughout the 19th century. He would be aware of the prototyping of various forms of engine that promised to allow carriages to reliably proceed at the pace of trains, and the first frail airships that could manage a fair pace in flight - though by no means the equal of speed by rail.
Like our present era, however, the end of the 19th century was a time of very rapid progress and invention in comparison to the past. In such ages trends are broken and exceeded. Thus within twenty years of the first crudely powered and fragile airships, heavier than air flight launched in earnest: a revolutionary change in travel brought on by the blossoming of a completely new branch of applied technology. By the late 1920s, the aircraft of the first airlines consistently flew four to five times as fast as the operating speed of trains in 1880, and new lines of travel could be set up for a fraction of the cost of a railway. Little in the way of incrementalism there: instead a great and sweeping improvement accomplished across a few decades and through the introduction of a completely new approach to the problem.
Besides the Sketchpad, Alan always mentions Grail (GRAphic Input Language), designed by Thomas Ellis and programmed by Gabriel Groner and others at the Rand Corporation. That was from 1964.
> Thomas Paine said in Common Sense, instead of having the king be the law, why, we can have the law be the king. That was one of the biggest shifts, large scale shifts in history because he realised "hey, we can design a better society than tradition has and we can put it into law; so, we're just going to invert thousands of years of beliefs".
30 years we will (ought to) have cars that repel over the surface by a bioether [sic], possible emitted from the street - which have become (replaced as) linear parks that vehicles float over and never crash. Because of all the new park area, some kids in the suburbs (because they will be park rich) will invent a new game that stretches over a mile that involves more imagination than football, basketball and soccer - combined.
For an alternative and cynical view of Xerox PARC, have a look at Ted Nelson's Computers for Cynics 2 - It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC (15 minutes video):
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Yes what was done in Xerox Parc was really amazing and cool, but can you please contain your ego atleast a little?
This talk sounds basically like him explaining to everybody in detail how awesome his achievements are.
EDIT: The best point is where he explains with charts that 80% of people are basically sheeple...
When he talks about the research that went on at the Parc back in the 70s it's not to show his accomplishments but to show the difference between commercial products addressed to the masses and touted as technological breakthroughs and real breakthroughs that happen way before the mass production and slowly make their way into society and bring about enormous changes and wealth.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Universals
Things progressed so glacially for so long simply because, from experience, nothing other than stasis could be imagined, not because we were any dumber. Change was the key innovation for change. Occasionally I wonder if it wasn't an inherently fatal discovery.
One wonders how many other such "basic" concepts there might be that remain hidden from view.
Neoliberalism since the 70's is a well-known culprit, but he also discusses the corporatization of universities — stifling managerialist bureaucracies.
Educating people as to where their tax dollars are going is always a good start. The average joe has some very, very odd ideas about the federal budget and how money is allocated.
Personal favorites: the way many people complain about how much we spend on foreign aid. Ask such a person how much we ought spend as a percentage of the budget and the figure will very often represent a massive increase over what we spend now, since we don't spend much at all.
Or the way many people literally cannot wrap their heads around how much war costs. A couple of years ago an expert came out and pointed out that we spent more than $20 billion on air conditioning for our military every year in Afghanistan when you include road maintenance and fuel trucks and so on. He was a former general who had been involved in logistics but many people needed to just assume he was full of it, since that's more than we spend every year on fucking NASA.
The trouble I see is that if you were a politician and you went around with the charts and visual aids a businessman would use to give a briefing and convey that info... you'd look like Ross Perot. So I guess he just ruined it for everybody.
- think of the future, than reason backwards
- use Moore's law in reverse
- an introvert character can be helpful in coming up with real inventions
- be interested in new ideas for the sake of them being new, not because they are useful now, or accepted, or understandable
- it seems good to sell stuff that can be instantly used, people however, like many other things. they might for example like to learning or get skilled. the bike example is one. but also the piano. or the skateboard.
At least, this is what I tried to grasp from it. :-)
In short, skip the first 20 minutes. He's being a grumpy old man. In the second part, he's a pissed-off genius and revolutionary.
If you think like that, "new" things can only come from storing more data and processing it in new ways. That seems rather limiting...
Off the top of my head, I'd expect the "computer" of the future to know a lot more about my immediate surroundings. That means sensors, not big data, computing power and storage are useless. Can I get sensors that are 20 years ahead of the stuff that's mass-produced today? Maybe, but it's certainly not something I can rent for cheap.
Kay also distinguishes "invention" (what PARC did) -- as fundamental research, from "innovation" (what Apple did) -- as product development.
Other topics:
• Learning curves (people, especially marketers, hate them)
• "New" vs. "News". News tells familiar stories in an established context. "New" is invisible, learning, and change.
• The majority acts based on group acceptance, not on the merits of an idea. Extroversion vs. introversion.
• There are "human universals" -- themes people accept automatically, without marketing, as opposed to non-universals, which have to be taught.
• Knowledge dominates IQ. Henry Ford accomplished more than Leonardo da Vinci not because he was smarter, but because humanity's cumulative knowledge had given him tools and inventions Leonardo could only dream of.
• Tyranny of the present.
http://fixyt.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU
After being exposed to PARC's self-congratulatory self-promotion for decades, Nelson's history is a breath of fresh air.
This is not to devalue what PARC accomplished, but that its accomplishments must be taken in perspective.
It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC is also on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU
This really struck a chord for me. What I got from it was that many people try to build some form of success on pure IQ and get frustrated when they are outmuscled by knowledge in the market.
I think that cuts back to Xerox PARC as well - by focussing everything on IQ, they created the knowledge that allowed Apple to be so dominant.
Where the talk falls a little bit on the obnoxious side is when Mr. Kay makes dismissive statements on how they created what others sold, just 10 or 20 years earlier. I think that ignores the enormous amount of work you have to put into connecting this knowledge that they worked out to the current state of mind that people are in.
Xerox PARC may have invented the future, but the failure of their parent company to bring that future to market shows that even with that knowledge at hand, you have quite a bit of way ahead of you.
There are quite a few talks scattered around the web from former employees about how everything went downhill due to mismanagement.
Back in the late 90's, when I started using Oberon and digging into what was Wirth's inspiration at Xerox PARC, I discovered a new world much more interesting that what Bell Labs could offer.
However they had better luck bringing their research into the market at large, given how it all played with the universities.
does it really matter that Xerox PARC "invented the future"? If not they, then somebody else couple years later. 10-20 years down the road it just wouldn't change a bit.
Without the invention of the mouse, we might all still be using trackballs. A mouse to me is not an "A ha!" invention. I remember when I first used one that it seemed silly to move a trackball around upside-down like that.
And without laser printing, we might all still be using ribbon cartridges at work, because of time/cost concerns with inkjet.
Everything that happens can have profound effects on the future. Think of the Challenger and Columbia disasters. While it's true that the American public had somewhat lost interest in the shuttle program prior to the Challenger disaster, they didn't think of it as risky or dangerous. Think of the lives that would have been saved and how much farther along we might be in space exploration had greater precaution been taken.
A ha! was to me when i first time used trackball instead of mouse. It was so great, such fast and precise movements (don't remember the game though :) And if i remember correctly people with carpal tunnel get trackball instead of mouse.
>Everything that happens can have profound effects on the future. Think of the Challenger and Columbia disasters. While it's true that the American public had somewhat lost interest in the shuttle program prior to the Challenger disaster, they didn't think of it as risky or dangerous. Think of the lives that would have been saved and how much farther along we might be in space exploration had greater precaution been taken.
i come from different school of thought. Whatever number of butterflies somebody squash today, it may (and will) affect only small details of the future while the whole system's trajectory will still be in the same volume of phase space as it determined by the macro conditions (like energy constraints, etc...).
>farther along we might be in space exploration had greater precaution been taken
the technological civilizations follow typical path. A bit faster, a bit slower doesn't matter. What matters is whether given technological civilization hits a bifurcation point like all-out nuclear war or uncontrollable climate change or uncontrollable run-away genetic development or implosion into ant-colony state as result of members being "always connected" ...
it matters "locally" - to individuals who invent and innovate and to ones who gets direct financial profit from it. The rest of civilization will get it anyway, at the time when civilization is ready to consume it, so details don't matter at that scale. Ancient Greeks could in theory build a steam engine [granted very low efficient] - they wouldn't have been able to put it use anyway, it would be just a curiosity like Aeolipile was.
And if the ancient Greeks would have actually built that steam engine into a useful device (even something like a powered fishing lines drawer of anything of even the slightest usefulness), I'm sure this would've completely changed the course of human history, even if they may not have found too much practical use for it. You see, once you physically build something that works and is useful (or actually implement something that can be used, in the case of software), no matter how inefficient and barely-useful it is, you actually seed and idea into the minds of all the people that see that device working or hear about it working. And that idea takes roots and very soon they will think about improving it and finding uses for it. If you just write about it in a book, even if you add building instructions and careful calculations showing that it's possible, you get at most 1% of that mind-seeding power. Most peoples minds get primed to work on improving something only after seeing something that (at least kind of) works. It's the "if we'd only tweak that and that it might just actually really work" thinking that most people can only have after seeing something physical that at least "barely kind of works". Very few people have the intelligence and imagination to get a theoretical idea and turn it into something that works, but there always some Gates or Jobs or Wozniaks that once you give them a piece of practical vision they can carry it on to something that really works.
I think that if the ancient Greeks would have build a steam engine with even the most remote practical use and would've displayed that "craftmanship" to the people instead of keeping it locked in library, the whole middle ages with all their horrors might not even have existed. Humanity might have even jumped from antiquity to industrial age directly. Maybe with a slow languish at first, before something equivalent to the printing press would have been invented to help the dissemination of knowledge, but then faster and faster.
Check out this video for a more detailed history recounted by Kay about PARC and what led up to it: http://vimeo.com/84523828
A lot of Universities and research centers have the same. As most of them are, arguably, not a PARC may be these conditions aren't important? On the other side, we do have a lot of R&D coming out of Universities and research centers, so may be PARC isn't important?
i may sound like trolling, but i did listen live to Alan Kay once and honestly got more confused and got more questions as a result :)
To explain it briefly, some one who can build fast and deploy can learn more as they come into contact with unknown-unknowns sooner and more often.
Contrast this with someone with a huge IQ who thinks about things a ton, and builds really clever first solutions which breaks on first contact with reality/market.
Sometimes running forwards blindly, while ignoring all the reasons not to do something is what finally gets innovations out to people.
It is fun to take methods that are 80 years old and update them with new technology and have them outperform the state of the art.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Brooks
This is extremely important to realize. Eventually your [art|research] will take you beyond what people are comfortable with, and it doesn't mean you're wrong. It is hard, though.
I'm exploring some areas at the moment generally outside the "general acceptance field", and it's uncomfortable. I find that when I run across others, especially others I know, who are expressing similar concerns, or better, are reaching conclusions similar to mine, that I'm strongly reassured.
Smalltalk was at least two steps forward, probably much more than that. The critical thing that put it well into the future was the fact that it made the boundary between users and programmers even more porous. I'm sure many of you have heard the stories of teenagers sitting down to an Alto and writing their own circuit design software in Smalltalk. That kind of power -- turning ordinary people into masters of these powerful machines easily and efficiently -- is just the sort of revolution originally desired and promised us by the first microcomputer marketers.
But of course it didn't do well at market at first, so we had to settle for the thing that was merely half a step forward -- the Macintosh.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxhs-GLE29Q
> Smalltalk was at least two steps forward
... then Smalltalk would be a major programming language today.
I'm not sure computing is going to have a major revolution, unless we see a massive AI breakthrough. The reason is that the amount of computing power available for a few watts and tens of dollars today now vastly exceeds any idea of what to do with it. With all the data in the cloud stuff the limitations are storage related (i.e. just the time to read data off disk), and the use of the CPUs is really fairly low compared to how long they sit around waiting.
Post iPhone is the best example, because all that's really happened is a (much needed) improvement in the underlying networks and a shake up of the business side of the ecosystem, but very little of this stuff that is actually used wasn't available before. There was a gold rush, but I think history is going to judge that era quite harshly in terms of lack of real progress.
Only real example that comes to my mind is PA kind of applications of the type of Google Now/Siri. But still they don't work to the level we desire them to
Arguably, even in '99, the idea itself was old - those of us working on stuff like that then, were looking back at Star Trek and other SF, and it was just the feeling that it was an idea whose time had finally come.
Apple's genius with the iPhone and iPad, was realising its time had not come, and waiting and refining their design until the basic underlying hardware "caught up" and they could provide a product suitable for "normal users". Everyone else got to make the expensive mistakes; most of the companies involved are no longer around, or pulled out of that market before Apple made its entry.
Sometimes ideas are just not right yet, and spending time trying to force the issue is likely to fail because the end result will be massively compromised.
But sometimes the ideas are just not right yet also because the public has not "caught up". It's not just that software developers must figure this out, but end users must have caught up enough that the new ideas fit into their world view.
Aren't you forgetting that Apple made the Newton?
Like our present era, however, the end of the 19th century was a time of very rapid progress and invention in comparison to the past. In such ages trends are broken and exceeded. Thus within twenty years of the first crudely powered and fragile airships, heavier than air flight launched in earnest: a revolutionary change in travel brought on by the blossoming of a completely new branch of applied technology. By the late 1920s, the aircraft of the first airlines consistently flew four to five times as fast as the operating speed of trains in 1880, and new lines of travel could be set up for a fraction of the cost of a railway. Little in the way of incrementalism there: instead a great and sweeping improvement accomplished across a few decades and through the introduction of a completely new approach to the problem.
It allows one to draw CAD drawings, convert drawn letters into labels, etc in a more natural way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad
As far as I know, Alan also greatly admires the work done at MIT in the 1970s like http://www.paulmckevitt.com/cre333/papers/putthatthere.pdf
> Thomas Paine said in Common Sense, instead of having the king be the law, why, we can have the law be the king. That was one of the biggest shifts, large scale shifts in history because he realised "hey, we can design a better society than tradition has and we can put it into law; so, we're just going to invert thousands of years of beliefs".
Pfft, tell that to the 13th-century Venetians: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf . Constitutionalism isn't that new an idea.
30 years we will (ought to) have cars that repel over the surface by a bioether [sic], possible emitted from the street - which have become (replaced as) linear parks that vehicles float over and never crash. Because of all the new park area, some kids in the suburbs (because they will be park rich) will invent a new game that stretches over a mile that involves more imagination than football, basketball and soccer - combined.
That was an awesome video. C++ == Guitar Hero
http://fixyt.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU
The book is expensive, here's a list:
http://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm