Alan Kay - Inventing the Future Part 2 (2015)

see my passion for education

has been

education as a use

for going very

far from what a human being is

at birth and very far what a human

being is from a traditional culture to

what a human being can be from

taking on these elevated points of view so

schooling is

not found in any formal way in most

traditional societies because

most of the things that need

to be learned are learned

by watching what the adults do and there

some little

secret society things that are special schooling

for boys and girls in many societies but

the kind of formal schooling we're

used to actually got created

along with writing because

surprisingly enough and it's still a

surprise today when you think about it even

though writing especially our form of alphabetic writing

is nothing much more than writing

down the very sounds that we make most

when they speak are not even aware of they're making speech

sounds they think in terms of words and sentences and

so writing was actually a hard invention we

were on the planet for about a hundred ninety

thousand years before writing was invented it's

shocking and once

it was invented particularly

when we moved forward to alphabetic

writing one of the things that was surprising was

it's still hard to learn and

so schools

were set up to help learn this thing

which now is looked at as

much more of a skill learning than

what it takes for us to learn our native language or learn

stories that are being being

told and as schooling

progressed we had other inventions so we had the

inventions of

around 2500 BC and I've

been talking about science but the other thing that happened

in the 17th and 18th century was

inventions of new

forms of governments that tried to deal

with some of the ideas of what's the

trade-off between what's owed to the society

and what's owed to the individual and all of these

ideas are actually very hard for most

human brains to actually think about and learn

the idea of equal rights for instance is not

found in any traditional Society ever studied by anthropologists

and there are some that

have something a little more like equal rights but they

they almost never apply to women

and so this idea of

equal rights is actually an invention it's

not something we're born with and it

actually hard to learn it's hard to put into practice

and so the

when education was set up

particularly the parts

that Thomas Jefferson had to do with and also in

New England colonies

was set up primarily to teach

people who are mostly

agrarian farmers

how to read

how to learn from reading

what the main issues of

government are and not how to

agree to a party line because

diversity is the very soul of freedom

but how to argue with others to

make progress rather than to just win

and all of these things were part of the larger

sphere of how this country was

set up so the

one of the biggest

things that helped democracy along was

the printing press and

Marshall McLuhan pointed

out he said you can argue with a lot about

a lot of things with stained-glass windows

but democracy is not one of them and

our country was literally argued

into existence through writing

and especially through printing and

many people are not aware of it but even during

the Constitutional Convention when

drafts were done well

err between 30 and 55 people there at

any given time when a draft was

done how did all of them read it and the answer it

was typeset overnight and

printed the copies for everybody

were printed before the session started each

day when they had something to go and there some

of these interesting drafts

in typeset types

printed in a narrow column so

there's plenty of room for writing notes on them so

this idea of

being able to send out

ideas and send out

a few facets of an idea and then having

people be able to debate

these ideas and then

to find some accommodation as

part and parcel of why

the United States has survived and

prospered for so long so my interest

when we started

thinking about personal computers in fact

to invent personal computers both

in the Advanced Research Projects

Agency funding in the 60s and then

Xerox PARC in the 70s part

of the idea was the

personal computer if we could do it

is not just

something that can deal with old media but

it can actually deal with ideas

and especially new ideas in ways that

old media can't and in particular if

you think about some of the things that we're worried

about today they're all processes

we're

not so worried about a single idea

that's just sitting there we're worrying

about global warming there's the population

explosion there

are the ability

to make extremely powerful

weapons for human beings and

you still have these cave people brains that's

all of us and so

one of the things that

mathematics was invented for was to be

able to do thinking about time

and space without having

to make things where are you making

lightweight things made out of symbols and if

your theories were good the mathematics went to a lot of

the work of making mistakes out in the real

world the computers can go much much further than

that in roughly the same way

and much of what we know about global warming is

actually due to computer simulations of

many different kinds it's a very complicated

area and

so an interesting question is

we used to teach children

reading for very

good reasons and most of them not having to do with

getting a job but for getting into the

issues of our time so I got

interested in the idea and I was catalyzed by Seymour

Papert of

inventing personal computing along with

some colleagues in order to put

children into the most important ideas of

our time using the most powerful modes of

expression and well

it hasn't really happened we actually have

the computers we

worked on the the

computer that about 11 years later became

the first Macintosh and a bunch of us worked

on the networks

large and small that we use today

and I'm has worked on laser printing

and a number of us work on many other parts

of this thing I actually

designed the early fonts

some of the descendants of which are used and

by people who read eBooks today and

in fact we weren't doing these

things in order to imitate old media we're doing

things to try to change the educational

system to make the ideas

more powerful to make the ways of learning them

sink much deeper

into the way children think

and the ideal was to

have as many children as possible

grow up thinking much much

better than most adults do today so that doesn't

happen and I think it will

but what we're doing right now because

of the way companies work and consumer

products work as computers are

being used primarily as

something that is not only directly

television but things that are like television

that is they're being used for old media

they're being used for old ideas they're being used

for things that every cave person would rec

recognize but they're

almost never being used for things that no cave person would

recognize like learning about how

cooperation completely

Trump's competition and

better ways to balance these ideas so

that the resources available are

much much larger for all so all of these ideas

have been thought about

for many many years but if you

think about looking forward to a future we'd like to live in

then the best way to predict

the future would be you invent it that's

going to be on my tombstone I think but

the future we want to invent is a

future in which humans

beings have finally grown up into real adults rather

the half adults we have today thank