Alan Kay - Inventing the Future Part 1 (2015)

hi my

name is Alan Kay and I like to apologize for having

a bit of laryngitis just on the day of

this shoot and I've been asked to talk

about inventing the future and

of course we mostly think of inventing

in the realm of technology but

I think most people watching

this will have been struck by

the fact that living in the 21st century

in the United States is

a vastly different experience than living

a hundred thousand years ago anywhere in the world and

as

far as we know the brains

that we have are roughly the same

as those brains that belong

to the very same species we are

mostly lived in small groups

of people hunting

and gathering and falling

in love and telling stories to each other and

fighting other people taking

revenge caring for the young

and gradually building up a culture

that they

taught to the next generation in

their tribe and the

first great invention of human

beings or of

evolution was this idea of

culture and it came from a slightly

earlier invention of evolution

which was language and

there's a language that just

as a few important ways more different than

our primate ancestors

and that was enough

to be able to deal with sequences

of things and portrayals of things and being

able to make up things which we no

other animals can do but be able

to tell our made-up things to other people and

get them to believe in it that started

to allow us to

aggregate together in larger than about

a hundred people which is what we can deal

with face to face so

this notion of culture beliefs

in the same kinds of religions beliefs in

the same kinds of customs is something

that can spread so that people

we've never met are still recognizable

when we finally do run into them

so we can think about that as

the first great inventing the future

for Humanity and it took

many tens of thousands of years

with the invention

art which may have always been with us in between

before we started

taking stock of the world

around us and starting

to improve our condition and of course we use

tools for a long time before this

but much of the tool use before we

came on the planet

consisted of maybe

a semi accidental invention like using

a shaped Rock to

cut something or pound

something and those inventions

which were very few also hung around

for hundreds of thousands of years the idea of making

improvements or even thinking about how it

is that they did what they did didn't occurred

to people before us and in fact we're

that good at it either so we're basically

set up for coping with the

world around us which makes sense in a subsistence

society making do with it and finding

ways to enjoy ourselves as much as possible

and so when we look at that

from the perspective of today

there was a point where we

started moving from accidental

inventions that in themselves

started changing us like writing

which is intended for a very mundane purpose

as far as anybody can tell which is not

to write down stories but to write down numbers

counts of ears of

corn gradually got

moved into starting

to write down things people were saying and

started taking on

a world of its own that took

again took thousands of years to

make us into a creature

that not only learned

from listening to others but learn from the

past in a way that was

what was written in the past

rather than continually

interpretations of it and

so the last

few hundred years have been the greatest revolution

of all because that was when people became

self-conscious about

how

we deal with the rest of the world which is pretty much to not

understand it to

try and interpret the world through

our belief structures rather than trying things and

I'm talking about the invention of science

which has transformed humanity in

more ways in more directions

and in larger scope than any

other invention in history so

my interest in education

actually came about in

the 60s when a

lot of us back then who were in our 20s

we're worrying about the

state of humanity and in

the early 60s the Vietnam War hadn't

happened yet that we weren't worrying about that yet but

what it started to happen is the

many issues that have been hidden

away in our

country our country that

says it's based on

individual liberties and pursuit

of happiness but people

started realizing people who are

not oppressed started realizing that a rather

large percentage of us were

oppressed and unjustly

stole and I'm not just talking about African

Americans but one

of the trigger points was the intern ship

of native

japanese-americans because of their ethnicity

during World War two do a

bunch of things started happening in the 50s

that got a

cause of renewal of

interest in

what this country actually has been trying

to stand for and so there's a lot of thought

about how can we actually

make good on some of these ideals the

ideals were looked at and they were found to be still

good and the question is how to do something

about it and one of the huge correlates

was

education in the large not

education for specific skills but

education that takes in and

compares and

contrasts knowledge without their cultures

and in fact you could imagine

as Gerry Bruner Jerome Bruner has pointed

out a long time ago it's really hard to

assess your own culture if it's the only culture

you can see because everything looks normal

and it's when you see other human beings have

found other solutions for making their

way through life that you start seeing that your culture is

a collection of local

solutions some of them good some of them pretty dumb

but all of them learned as this is

the way things should be and so this kind of

relative ization of

humanity into moving

view of us

where we're always right out to a

level where there's more points of view is a one

of the primary parts of what education needs

to be about in our country it's actually

vital and that's because the

president and the legislators

are chosen by the people and

by the way the Senate was only started

to be chosen by the people themselves around

1912 1913 before that

the Senate in Washington was chosen by the

the state legislatures and

so what we've seen is that mmm

there is a movement towards more democracy and

as that movement happens these citizens have

to actually be in the same ball game

there cannot be an intellectual and knowledge

gap between the

people we choose as representatives for us and the

people who choose those representatives

and one of the feelings was that if

this was ever good in the United States

and it wasn't ever great as far

as history records that it

was eroding seriously in

the 20th century and looking at it now from

2015 its

eroded seriously and

makes education something much more vital than

whether or not you're gonna get a job

after you finish high school

even whether you can make a living it has to

do with whether there's actually a rich

flowing Society

full of resources for us to do things with that

Society was actually invented and

the particular form of it was invented in

the late 18th century by people

who were amazingly prescient

about the different kinds

problems that were going to be solved and they had a an idea that

was rather new that the world fifty

years from then was gonna be very different than

world and they're creating the country and so they created

it in such a way that it

was not bound to the time it was created it was created as

a set of ideas and processes and experiments

Your feminist hero slept with the enemy

and she doesn't regret it.

I'm gonna stick around until you get canceled.