Let me try to help this community regarding this article by providing some context. First, you need to realize that in the more than 50 years of my career I have always waited to be asked: Every paper, talk, and interview has been invited, never solicited. But there is a body of results from these that do put forward my opinions.
This article was a surprise, because the interview was a few years ago for a book the interviewer was writing. It's worth noting that nowhere in the actual interview did I advocate going back and doing a Dynabook. My comments are mostly about media and why it's important to understand and design well any medium that will be spread and used en-mass.
If you looked closely, then you would have noticed the big difference between the interview and the front matter. For example, I'm not still waiting for my dream to come true. You need to be sophisticated enough to see that this is a headline written to attract. It has nothing to do with what I said.
And, if you looked closely, you might note a non seq right in the beginning, from "you want to see old media?" to no followup. This is because that section was taken from the chapter of the book but then edited by others.
The first version of the article said I was fired from Apple, but it was Steve who was fired, and some editor misunderstood.
In the interview itself there are transcription mistakes that were not found and corrected. And of course they didn't send me article ahead of time (I could have fixed all this).
I think I would only have made a few parts of the interview a little more understandable. It's raw, but -- once you understand the criticisms -- I think most will find them quite valid. In the interview -- to say it again -- I'm not calling for the field to implement my vision -- but I am calling for the field to have a larger vision of civilization and how mass media and our tools contribute or detract from it. Thoreau had a good line. He said "We become the tools of our tools" -- meaning, be very careful when you design tools and put them out for use. (Our consumer based technology field is not being at all careful.)
Professor Kay, it's an honor to see you taking the time to provide context to this interview. For what it's worth, I was skimming the article until I saw your comments on human universals, and that made me sit up and take notice. From that point on, it was pretty clear to me you were sounding a note of alarm about the addictive quality of our current consumer electronics industry, and the wasted potential of them as pedagogic devices.
Wow, this article is a pretty egregious misinterpretation of those points. I didn't come away with anything even vaguely resembling what you just said, even if we disregard the factual errors.
Candidly, your comments here make a lot more sense than some "We haven't yet built the DynaBook the way we should" piece.
People often ask me "Is this a Dynabook, is that a Dynabook?". Only about 5% of the idea was in packaging (and there were 2 other different packages contemplated in 1968 besides the tablet idea -- the HMD idea from Ivan, and the ubiquitous idea from Nicholas).
Almost all the thought I did was based on what had already been done in the ARPA community -- rendered as "services" -- and resculpted for the world of the child. It was all quite straightforwardly about what Steve later called "Wheels for the Mind".
If people are interested to see part of what we had in mind, a few of us including Dan Ingalls a few years ago revived a version of the Xerox Parc software from 1978 that Xerox had thrown away (it was rescued from a trash heap). This system was the vintage that Steve Jobs saw the next year when he visited in 1979. I used this system to make a presentation for a Ted Nelson tribute. It should start at 2:15. See what you think about what happens around 9:05.
https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=135
Next year will be the 50 anniversary of this idea, and many things have happened since then, so it would be crazy to hark back to a set of ideas that were in the context of being able to be built over 10 years, and would be ridiculous if we didn't have in 30 (that would be 1998, almost 20 years ago).
The large idea of ARPA/PARC was that desirable futures for humanity will require many difficult things to be learned beyond reading and writing and a few sums. If "equal rights" is to mean something over the entire planet, this will be very difficult. If we are to be able to deal with the whole planet as a complex system of which we complex systems are parts, then we'll have to learn a lot of things that our genetics are not particularly well set up for.
We can't say "well, most people aren't interested in stuff like this" because we want them to be voting citizens as part of their rights, and this means that a large part of their education needs to be learning how to argue in ways that make progress rather than just trying to win. This will require considerable knowledge and context.
The people who do say "well, most people aren't interested in stuff like this" are missing the world that we are in, and putting convenience and money making ahead of progress and even survival. That was crazy 50 years ago, and should be even more apparently crazy now.
We are set up genetically to learn the environment/culture around us. If we have media that seems to our nervous systems as an environment, we will try to learn those ways of thinking and doing, and even our conception of reality.
We can't let the commercial lure of "legal drugs" in the form of media and other forms put us into a narcotic sleep when we need to be tending and building our gardens.
The good news about "media as environment" was what attracted a lot of us 50 years ago -- that is, that making great environments/cultures will also be readily learned by our nervous systems. That was one of Montessori's great ideas, and one of McLuhan's great ideas, and it's a great idea we need to understand.
There aren't any parents around to take care of childish adults. We are it. So we need to grow up and take responsibility for our world, and the first actions should be to try to understand our actual situations.
It is a privilege of modern media, like HN, that we get to interact with someone like Alan Kay. Just 30 years ago interacting with a person of great importance to a field only happened if you were lucky enough to work with them or go to school where they taught, which is just a lottery. And it's not just Alan Kay, there are many amazing visionaries who stop by HN. It truly is a privilege that we should not take for granted.
One question for Alan, if he's reading on (and of course thanks for decades of great work and inspiration).
Do you think that your criticism against passive consumption etc might be incompatible not just with how things like modern computers and platforms are designed, but also with how most people are wired to behave?
That is, that it's not just that our tools constrain us to being passive consumers but that we also prefer, promote, and seek tools that make it easier for us to be passive consumers, because most of us rather not be bothered with creating?
If this is true, this might be (a) an inherent condition of man everywhere, or (b) something having to do with our general culture (above and beyond our tools).
I think that by talking about schools etc you alluded to (b), but could (a) also be the case?
Edit: I see that later on here you commented "We are set up genetically to learn the environment/culture around us. If we have media that seems to our nervous systems as an environment, we will try to learn those ways of thinking and doing, and even our conception of reality." which kind of answers my question.
One perspective on this is to think about your definition of "civilization" and compare it with both "human universals" and what we know about the general lives of hunter-gatherers and the extent that we can use this to guess about the several hundred thousand years before agriculture.
Many of the things on my list for "civilization" are not directly in our genes or traditional cultures: reading and writing, deductive mathematics, empirical science of models, equal rights, representative governments, and many more. It's not that we do these well, or even willingly, but learning how to do them has made a very large difference. We can think of "civilization" not as a state of being that we've achieved, but as societies that are trying to become more civilized (including getting better ideas about what that should mean).
Most of the parts of civilization seem to be relatively recent inventions, and because the inventions are a bit more distant from our genetic and cultural normals, most of them are more difficult to learn. For example, as far as history can tell, schools were invented to concentrate the teaching of writing and reading, and they have been the vehicle for the more difficult learning of some of the other inventions.
And, sure, from history (and even from looking around) we can see that a very high percentage of people would be very happy with servants, even slaves, whether human or technological.
In Tom Paine's argument against the natural seeming monarchy in "Common Sense" he says don't worry about seems natural, but try to understand what will work the best. His great line is "Instead of having the King be the Law, we can have the Law be the King". In other words, we can design a better society than nature gives rise to, and we can learn to be citizens of that society through learning.
In other contexts I've pointed out that "user friendly" may not always be "friendly". For example, the chore of learning to read fluently is tough for many children, but what's important beyond being able read afterwards is that the learning of this skill has also forced other skills to be learned that bring forth different and stronger thinking processes.
Marketing, especially for consumers, is aimed at what people -want-, but real education has to be aimed at what people really -need-. Since people often don't want what they need, this creates a lot of tension, and makes what to do with early schooling a problem of rights as well as responsibilities.
One way to home in on what to do is to -- just for a while -- think only about what citizens of the 21st century need to have between their ears to not just get to the 22nd century, but to get there in better shape than we are now. Children born this year will be 83 in 2100. What will be their fate and the fate of their children?
If people cannot imagine that the situation they are in had to be invented and worked at and made, they will have a hard time to see that they have to learn how to work the garden as they become adults. If they grow up thinking as hunter gatherers they can only imagine making use of what is around them, and to move on after they've exhausted it. (But there is not place to move on to for the human race -- larger thoughts and views have to be learned as part of schooling and growing up.)
> I am calling for the field to have a larger vision of civilization and how mass media and our tools contribute or detract from it
That would be nice. Unfortunately outside of Kay's rarefied circles, "the field" is close to being a Darwinian selection machine for the worst (most unimaginative, trivial, greedy, pusillanimous) traits. I've ducked in and out of various IT and development roles since the early 2000s. Nearly every one of the best people I've known in that time has left the field for others where they felt they could develop more of their broad humane selves. Some have retreated to academia, others moved altogether (nursing seems to be a theme, oddly). Those of the best that didn't leave, are embittered and cynical. For all the febrile contrepreneur-speak, the overall picture is pretty bleak.
See the comment by scroot above. It meshes with yours, but recognizes that the underlying culture has gone in directions that are undermining real progress and value of life. This is why I've put a fair amount of time along with many others in trying to get elementary education to a better place. I think we'll have to grow a few generations of "civilization carriers" to pull out. (And, yes, I've been staggered at the low place that much of computing has gotten to, but it is reflecting much larger cultural problems.)
Hi Alan, Here is my latest attempt to realize some of those dreams in a browser using JavaScript (not in the Lively Kernel or Amber way, but a more browser-native way even as some elegance is lost): https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip7
Or also here on a shared experimental server (with some more context on a click-through cover page):
http://twirlip.net/
Anyway, still plugging along on moving the dream forward in my spare time. Thanks for sharing so much good software and humane inspirations with the world. Nice to meet you in person at OOPSLA 1997. Cheers!
Yes. But, even if the field adopted a larger/better vision, you still have a bigger problem: Most smart people are attracted to mediocrity. Example: The LFTR (ie molten salt breeders) people have been trying to get their stuff adopted but most smart people (I know of) are attracted to micro-optimizing wind mills and outlawing coal. Even smart people who want to take on a larger vision are still able to snatch mediocrity from the jaws of succes.
It may be counter-intuitive, but Hans Hoppe's views on how to improve civilizaltion would lead to a fulfillment of your goals. It's not a coincidence Japan, Germany, US, Italy were centralized in the 1800s and became involved in world wars in the 1900s. Medieval Europe had no central empire, yet was able to catch up and surpass China and Japan, with the Renaissance a culmination. A lack of mega states lead to more diversity, cooperative competition and a stable global civilization through variety and choice. If we are to repeat past success and get more Faradays and Teslas, micro states or no states are necessary. The EU is an example of this: A poltical wing of NATO. First they get you by passing regulations protecting the "consumer", then the wars and corruption come about. Goldman Sachs made money when the wealthier states wanted to pay off the debts of its clients (Greece). This is no different when Clinton/Congress wanted to bailout Mexico (who owed lots of money to US banks like Citibank/Citigroup). Singapore amd Lichentenstein both have a powerful de facto monarchy in control, but its small land size and population limits the destructive desires of the state. Yet look at the diversity of race/opinions/demographics that exist in such a small area. Until the fetish for megastates subsides, we are doomed to slow adoption of knowledge. However, I am not a good communicator. Might I suggest this book for a better scholarly discussion: https://mises.org/library/economics-and-ethics-private-prope...
The article was a pleasure to read. I like the way you present important issues in a high-level way, it always puts me into a mood where I sense what is possible, because, just look at what has already been done! The origins of Montessori were unknown to me, and I tried out the thing with the ruler and the iPad :-)
It seems to me that the combination of an iPad Pro 12.9, Apple Pencil, and a bluetooth keyboard is a great environment for computing. It's just that the software running on it is not really that great, but there is no reason why it should not be possible to make much much much better software for it.
I found it interesting that in an HN discussion about how to auto-update comments Alan Kay said, "How about a little model of time in a GUI?"[1] It ties into when he said of smartphone apps, "It's painful to see people using billions of devices that have forgot that undo is a good idea." [2]
It made me think about how things like Redux (or even just Google Drive revision history) where you can 'time travel' through state can be more important for UI than we realize sometimes.
I find it interesting that Google Docs also doeen't have branching undo. There is no way to revert a commit, you can only go back in time. And there is no blame.
I loved the article by the way. The future of writing should be version controlled Juniper notebooks. Next step for GitLab is to build a cloud IDE to bring that closer.
If, like Alan Kay, you think we need a major overhaul in software construction and are in the San Francisco Bay Area, let me know. I'm part of a group that meets on Saturdays once a month and we work on side research projects toward that end. My email is in my profile.
If anyone in the Boston area is interested in whiteboarding high-skill software development environments in the context of 2018/2019 hardware, I'd be interested. So: continuous speech recognition; hand tracking, controllers, and haptic exoskeletons, but still keyboards; HMDs with 30+ px/deg, and eye tracking, but still screens.
Dynabook was a nice vision. As always, society executed poorly, and failed to realize much of the potential of its technologies. No doubt that will happen again with VR/AR. For example, there's a toxic cauldron of patents brewing. Screens and keyboards and mice, have had a good half-century run. And GUIs, and personal local hardware. But perhaps time to shift focus.
I don't buy it that everyone would be a digital creative if they just had the right tools. To make quality content, whether it be apps/music/movies/etc..it requires much more than tools.
I respect Alan Kay, but I don't understand the need to bash on modern day technology.
Have we really come along way in terms of general computing? Maybe not [Example: 0]. But in terms of the digital world, I can take a video of my parents and send it to my cousin who lives 10,000 miles away and he can respond in a matter of seconds.
I can literally meet people in remote areas of the world. I can interact with people who barely have food but somehow can get cell phone access and now they are learning and communicating with everyone else. I can't imagine a better way to level the playing field (socioeconomically) globally then how we have it.
Do we have a lot more work to do? Sure. But Rome wasn't built in a day.
The future of the internet & technology, the direction it's headed, is going to come from small contributions from millions across the world.
What people will need will turn into what we have and use. And there won't be some magical device that just pops out of nowhere that will change everything.
> "I don't buy it that everyone would be a digital creative if they just had the right tools."
That is not Kay's argument. Not everyone who scribbles notes or draws something on a piece of paper is a "creative" or artist. Not all who write at all are professional writers. But we do not have the computing equivalent of paper for everyone. Sure, someone can write in a word processor or draw in a drawing program, but that's not all that a computer is for -- that's just imitating paper. The outstanding question is: can we make something that is as extensible as pen and paper and literacy for aiding human thought for the next level, the computing level? All we have now are stiff applications. Saying that such things make people literate in computing is like writing by filling out forms.
> "Do we have a lot more work to do? Sure. But Rome wasn't built in a day."
Kay is your ally here, a constant gadfly putting the lie to all the hype and BS. He's a constant reminder that we shouldn't feel so satisfied with our mud huts. He's reminding us to build Rome at all.
The right tools shouldn't be about creating "content", they should be about letting you solve your own problems, instead of trying to transform them into problems you can buy a solution for. Creative arts are only subset of this - they happen when someone's problem is "I want to make a piece of art".
> Have we really come along way in terms of general computing? Maybe not
That's the point AK seems to be making, though. All the great things you mention are huge accomplishments, yet they're also disappointing compared to what is possible, what we should have now. Rome wasn't built in a day, but you have this whole army of Rome builders who decided that it's better to sell bricks instead of building the city...
>I don't buy it that everyone would be a digital creative if they just had the right tools. To make _quality_ content,...
who cares about quality ? who is the judge of what "quality" is ?
As long as someone can create the content _and distribute it_, they are a digital creative.
It's clear from the interview that Kay thinks mobile computing isn't where it should be. But I haven't studied the DynaBook. Does anyone know exactly what Kay thinks is needed, in order to realize his dream?
I found a few such things in the article:
- more-discoverable undo
- some sort of AI-based virtual assistant
- a stylus and holder, and presumably input methods and applications that are better suited for that stylus
- something nebulous about having warning labels and being designed for the higher-order cognitive centers of our brains
What's missing in today's software is described by the field of End User Development, the ability for normal people to craft new software artifacts without the need to learn a formal programming language.
For most people, using computers means being force-feed a selection of existing applications; and most applications are pro- consumption, which is favoured by the media companies.
App stores (and the Linux repositories that preceded them) were a significant advance for the public, as they allowed common people top be able to find tools to cover their needs; previous to that, only power users were able to tune the computer to their needs.
However, non-developers still depend on the capabilities put in there by the developers, and can't fine-tune their behaviour.
> the ability for normal people to craft new software artifacts without the need to learn a formal programming language.
The problem is not programming. It's conceiving. You can get 8 years old kids to do pretty advanced imperative algorithms with scratch. What's hard is to get people to write down in a blank sheet what they actually want to do (mostly because you think you want something and then when you've got this thing you notice you actually wanted something a bit different).
>the ability for normal people to craft new software artifacts without the need to learn a formal programming language.
The problem with that is that normal people often have formal requirements that software has to meet in order to be useful.
Therefore I think the secret to end-user programming is not to be less formal. It's to be less complete or less general - DSLs.
But at that point you could legitimately ask whether it's programming at all or just configuration and what was actually achieved compared to the status quo.
I think he wanted more discoverable everything, the undo was just used as a particularly bad example on the iPhone.
He wants the world to be more discoverable, to modify our very culture so that learning is easy (an example he gave was with math, so it's not just a small, 'smart' percentage of the population who actually gets it, but everyone absorbs it from a young age).
> rather than the wheels for the mind that Steve Jobs envisioned.
Proper quote, for those confused:
"I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list....That didn't look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle and a man on a bicycle blew the condor away. That's what a computer is to me: the computer is the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”
Every once in a while I daydream about a sort of "distributed app platform" built on top of Scheme and IPFS. -- Perhaps Red would actually be perfect for this...
Readit News
This article was a surprise, because the interview was a few years ago for a book the interviewer was writing. It's worth noting that nowhere in the actual interview did I advocate going back and doing a Dynabook. My comments are mostly about media and why it's important to understand and design well any medium that will be spread and used en-mass.
If you looked closely, then you would have noticed the big difference between the interview and the front matter. For example, I'm not still waiting for my dream to come true. You need to be sophisticated enough to see that this is a headline written to attract. It has nothing to do with what I said.
And, if you looked closely, you might note a non seq right in the beginning, from "you want to see old media?" to no followup. This is because that section was taken from the chapter of the book but then edited by others.
The first version of the article said I was fired from Apple, but it was Steve who was fired, and some editor misunderstood.
In the interview itself there are transcription mistakes that were not found and corrected. And of course they didn't send me article ahead of time (I could have fixed all this).
I think I would only have made a few parts of the interview a little more understandable. It's raw, but -- once you understand the criticisms -- I think most will find them quite valid. In the interview -- to say it again -- I'm not calling for the field to implement my vision -- but I am calling for the field to have a larger vision of civilization and how mass media and our tools contribute or detract from it. Thoreau had a good line. He said "We become the tools of our tools" -- meaning, be very careful when you design tools and put them out for use. (Our consumer based technology field is not being at all careful.)
Candidly, your comments here make a lot more sense than some "We haven't yet built the DynaBook the way we should" piece.
Almost all the thought I did was based on what had already been done in the ARPA community -- rendered as "services" -- and resculpted for the world of the child. It was all quite straightforwardly about what Steve later called "Wheels for the Mind".
If people are interested to see part of what we had in mind, a few of us including Dan Ingalls a few years ago revived a version of the Xerox Parc software from 1978 that Xerox had thrown away (it was rescued from a trash heap). This system was the vintage that Steve Jobs saw the next year when he visited in 1979. I used this system to make a presentation for a Ted Nelson tribute. It should start at 2:15. See what you think about what happens around 9:05. https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=135
Next year will be the 50 anniversary of this idea, and many things have happened since then, so it would be crazy to hark back to a set of ideas that were in the context of being able to be built over 10 years, and would be ridiculous if we didn't have in 30 (that would be 1998, almost 20 years ago).
The large idea of ARPA/PARC was that desirable futures for humanity will require many difficult things to be learned beyond reading and writing and a few sums. If "equal rights" is to mean something over the entire planet, this will be very difficult. If we are to be able to deal with the whole planet as a complex system of which we complex systems are parts, then we'll have to learn a lot of things that our genetics are not particularly well set up for.
We can't say "well, most people aren't interested in stuff like this" because we want them to be voting citizens as part of their rights, and this means that a large part of their education needs to be learning how to argue in ways that make progress rather than just trying to win. This will require considerable knowledge and context.
The people who do say "well, most people aren't interested in stuff like this" are missing the world that we are in, and putting convenience and money making ahead of progress and even survival. That was crazy 50 years ago, and should be even more apparently crazy now.
We are set up genetically to learn the environment/culture around us. If we have media that seems to our nervous systems as an environment, we will try to learn those ways of thinking and doing, and even our conception of reality.
We can't let the commercial lure of "legal drugs" in the form of media and other forms put us into a narcotic sleep when we need to be tending and building our gardens.
The good news about "media as environment" was what attracted a lot of us 50 years ago -- that is, that making great environments/cultures will also be readily learned by our nervous systems. That was one of Montessori's great ideas, and one of McLuhan's great ideas, and it's a great idea we need to understand.
There aren't any parents around to take care of childish adults. We are it. So we need to grow up and take responsibility for our world, and the first actions should be to try to understand our actual situations.
Do you think that your criticism against passive consumption etc might be incompatible not just with how things like modern computers and platforms are designed, but also with how most people are wired to behave?
That is, that it's not just that our tools constrain us to being passive consumers but that we also prefer, promote, and seek tools that make it easier for us to be passive consumers, because most of us rather not be bothered with creating?
If this is true, this might be (a) an inherent condition of man everywhere, or (b) something having to do with our general culture (above and beyond our tools).
I think that by talking about schools etc you alluded to (b), but could (a) also be the case?
Edit: I see that later on here you commented "We are set up genetically to learn the environment/culture around us. If we have media that seems to our nervous systems as an environment, we will try to learn those ways of thinking and doing, and even our conception of reality." which kind of answers my question.
Many of the things on my list for "civilization" are not directly in our genes or traditional cultures: reading and writing, deductive mathematics, empirical science of models, equal rights, representative governments, and many more. It's not that we do these well, or even willingly, but learning how to do them has made a very large difference. We can think of "civilization" not as a state of being that we've achieved, but as societies that are trying to become more civilized (including getting better ideas about what that should mean).
Most of the parts of civilization seem to be relatively recent inventions, and because the inventions are a bit more distant from our genetic and cultural normals, most of them are more difficult to learn. For example, as far as history can tell, schools were invented to concentrate the teaching of writing and reading, and they have been the vehicle for the more difficult learning of some of the other inventions.
And, sure, from history (and even from looking around) we can see that a very high percentage of people would be very happy with servants, even slaves, whether human or technological.
In Tom Paine's argument against the natural seeming monarchy in "Common Sense" he says don't worry about seems natural, but try to understand what will work the best. His great line is "Instead of having the King be the Law, we can have the Law be the King". In other words, we can design a better society than nature gives rise to, and we can learn to be citizens of that society through learning.
In other contexts I've pointed out that "user friendly" may not always be "friendly". For example, the chore of learning to read fluently is tough for many children, but what's important beyond being able read afterwards is that the learning of this skill has also forced other skills to be learned that bring forth different and stronger thinking processes.
Marketing, especially for consumers, is aimed at what people -want-, but real education has to be aimed at what people really -need-. Since people often don't want what they need, this creates a lot of tension, and makes what to do with early schooling a problem of rights as well as responsibilities.
One way to home in on what to do is to -- just for a while -- think only about what citizens of the 21st century need to have between their ears to not just get to the 22nd century, but to get there in better shape than we are now. Children born this year will be 83 in 2100. What will be their fate and the fate of their children?
If people cannot imagine that the situation they are in had to be invented and worked at and made, they will have a hard time to see that they have to learn how to work the garden as they become adults. If they grow up thinking as hunter gatherers they can only imagine making use of what is around them, and to move on after they've exhausted it. (But there is not place to move on to for the human race -- larger thoughts and views have to be learned as part of schooling and growing up.)
That would be nice. Unfortunately outside of Kay's rarefied circles, "the field" is close to being a Darwinian selection machine for the worst (most unimaginative, trivial, greedy, pusillanimous) traits. I've ducked in and out of various IT and development roles since the early 2000s. Nearly every one of the best people I've known in that time has left the field for others where they felt they could develop more of their broad humane selves. Some have retreated to academia, others moved altogether (nursing seems to be a theme, oddly). Those of the best that didn't leave, are embittered and cynical. For all the febrile contrepreneur-speak, the overall picture is pretty bleak.
You can try it here: http://rawgit.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip7/master/src/ui/twirlip7...
Or also here on a shared experimental server (with some more context on a click-through cover page): http://twirlip.net/
Anyway, still plugging along on moving the dream forward in my spare time. Thanks for sharing so much good software and humane inspirations with the world. Nice to meet you in person at OOPSLA 1997. Cheers!
It seems to me that the combination of an iPad Pro 12.9, Apple Pencil, and a bluetooth keyboard is a great environment for computing. It's just that the software running on it is not really that great, but there is no reason why it should not be possible to make much much much better software for it.
It made me think about how things like Redux (or even just Google Drive revision history) where you can 'time travel' through state can be more important for UI than we realize sometimes.
1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940472
2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6JC_W9F8-g&t=40m30s
I loved the article by the way. The future of writing should be version controlled Juniper notebooks. Next step for GitLab is to build a cloud IDE to bring that closer.
Dynabook was a nice vision. As always, society executed poorly, and failed to realize much of the potential of its technologies. No doubt that will happen again with VR/AR. For example, there's a toxic cauldron of patents brewing. Screens and keyboards and mice, have had a good half-century run. And GUIs, and personal local hardware. But perhaps time to shift focus.
I respect Alan Kay, but I don't understand the need to bash on modern day technology.
Have we really come along way in terms of general computing? Maybe not [Example: 0]. But in terms of the digital world, I can take a video of my parents and send it to my cousin who lives 10,000 miles away and he can respond in a matter of seconds.
I can literally meet people in remote areas of the world. I can interact with people who barely have food but somehow can get cell phone access and now they are learning and communicating with everyone else. I can't imagine a better way to level the playing field (socioeconomically) globally then how we have it.
Do we have a lot more work to do? Sure. But Rome wasn't built in a day.
The future of the internet & technology, the direction it's headed, is going to come from small contributions from millions across the world.
What people will need will turn into what we have and use. And there won't be some magical device that just pops out of nowhere that will change everything.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
That is not Kay's argument. Not everyone who scribbles notes or draws something on a piece of paper is a "creative" or artist. Not all who write at all are professional writers. But we do not have the computing equivalent of paper for everyone. Sure, someone can write in a word processor or draw in a drawing program, but that's not all that a computer is for -- that's just imitating paper. The outstanding question is: can we make something that is as extensible as pen and paper and literacy for aiding human thought for the next level, the computing level? All we have now are stiff applications. Saying that such things make people literate in computing is like writing by filling out forms.
> "Do we have a lot more work to do? Sure. But Rome wasn't built in a day."
Kay is your ally here, a constant gadfly putting the lie to all the hype and BS. He's a constant reminder that we shouldn't feel so satisfied with our mud huts. He's reminding us to build Rome at all.
"To make quality content ..."
The right tools shouldn't be about creating "content", they should be about letting you solve your own problems, instead of trying to transform them into problems you can buy a solution for. Creative arts are only subset of this - they happen when someone's problem is "I want to make a piece of art".
> Have we really come along way in terms of general computing? Maybe not
That's the point AK seems to be making, though. All the great things you mention are huge accomplishments, yet they're also disappointing compared to what is possible, what we should have now. Rome wasn't built in a day, but you have this whole army of Rome builders who decided that it's better to sell bricks instead of building the city...
who cares about quality ? who is the judge of what "quality" is ? As long as someone can create the content _and distribute it_, they are a digital creative.
I found a few such things in the article:
- more-discoverable undo
- some sort of AI-based virtual assistant
- a stylus and holder, and presumably input methods and applications that are better suited for that stylus
- something nebulous about having warning labels and being designed for the higher-order cognitive centers of our brains
For most people, using computers means being force-feed a selection of existing applications; and most applications are pro- consumption, which is favoured by the media companies.
App stores (and the Linux repositories that preceded them) were a significant advance for the public, as they allowed common people top be able to find tools to cover their needs; previous to that, only power users were able to tune the computer to their needs.
However, non-developers still depend on the capabilities put in there by the developers, and can't fine-tune their behaviour.
The problem is not programming. It's conceiving. You can get 8 years old kids to do pretty advanced imperative algorithms with scratch. What's hard is to get people to write down in a blank sheet what they actually want to do (mostly because you think you want something and then when you've got this thing you notice you actually wanted something a bit different).
The problem with that is that normal people often have formal requirements that software has to meet in order to be useful.
Therefore I think the secret to end-user programming is not to be less formal. It's to be less complete or less general - DSLs.
But at that point you could legitimately ask whether it's programming at all or just configuration and what was actually achieved compared to the status quo.
If each piece of functionality is a discrete module, the entire platform suddenly becomes both malleable and stable.
The best way to accomplish modularization is by using a functional design.
I think he wanted more discoverable everything, the undo was just used as a particularly bad example on the iPhone.
He wants the world to be more discoverable, to modify our very culture so that learning is easy (an example he gave was with math, so it's not just a small, 'smart' percentage of the population who actually gets it, but everyone absorbs it from a young age).
Aka you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
Proper quote, for those confused:
"I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list....That didn't look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle and a man on a bicycle blew the condor away. That's what a computer is to me: the computer is the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”
Maybe I'll finally give it a try!
Every once in a while I daydream about a sort of "distributed app platform" built on top of Scheme and IPFS. -- Perhaps Red would actually be perfect for this...
Have a peek at dat and beaker browser, they've done interesting stuff in that regard recently.
Disappointed many comments have disassociated this from where we are now.
Thank you Alan. Excellent read.