Alan Kay Keynote at NATF 2013 Part 1
From Viewpoints Intelligent Archive
now I'd like to welcome
our last guest keynote speaker of the day dr.
Alan Kay Ellen is the president
and founder of viewpoints Research Institute here's
of the pioneers of object orientated programming personal
computing and graphical user interface design
dr. K's contributions
have been acknowledged with the Charles stark draper pryce on the National
Academy of Engineering the am turing award
from the association of computer machinery and the
kyoto prize for inamori foundation here's
an adjunct professor of computer science at
UCLA a visiting professor at Kyoto University
and an advisor to the one laptop per
child for more about Alan you can read full bio on
the website but for now welcome Alan thank
you
sorry i was asking
to pointed questions
but just take me a second to get set
up here
so one of the things i noticed i was asked
to give a talk on sustainability because it's in the
the title of this conference
and I've been here for most of the day and I haven't heard
a single talk on sustainability it wasn't
the word wasn't mentioned I listened very carefully the
last panel and Nicholas didn't mention
it and so
I but
I'm going to give a talk on sustainability
the few things I've learned in my culture and at
some some point
the sustainability idea just never
the top of the list you ever noticed that
it's something
that is actually a serious
problem but a very different problem from
something that can be fixed with
Tecna I will do that in a sec you know thank you
just trying to get organized here before
I fall apart cuz I
I actually thought I was going to have a second
to do this beforehand
but instead I just kept talking and
yeah okay all
right now
they they said you have to talk on sustainability
I thought boy I just
don't know anything about it
except what I've read and
when I started thinking about a little bit more I thought
I could at least say something about human
being sustaining our ability to think about things
and maybe look at that a little bit and
so just to start off with
with something simple I'll start
off with something that's not a human being
and it was discovered maybe
70 years ago or so that
if you take
a frog's natural food which are in
this case our flies and paralyze
them but keep them alive paralyze
them with a little chloroform you can drop
this food all the way all around the
fly and it will just absolutely not eat them it will fact
starve to death in the presence
of its food which is still alive
but not moving if
you take this very same fly and you toss
a little rectangles
of cardboard like that one there
the frog will snake out its tongue and eat every single
one of them until it is full to bursting and
all attempts
to train frogs differently have failed
this
was studied rather closely
in the 40s and in the 50s and
was discovered that you
probably know that the our retina
is actually contiguous with our
brain it's not a separate organ that's actually
part of our brain and it does some
thinking and it turns out a frog's
I'd does a lot of thinking it actually does the decision-making
as to whether it should go after food
or not for efficiency's sake it doesn't wanna because
only run few hundred feet per second and
so all of the thinking all of
the sensing all of the visual processing is done in the retina
of the frogs I and then bingo okay well
of course we aren't rocks so why am I even bringing
up this example but
you know when I was thinking about
sustainability I
remember that the original Pogo cartoon
from a zillion years ago I see people who
are in the age range that I am people
are in the age range i am reflect a lot of light
either from white hair or no hair
and people from that era
will remember this
is one of the most memorable lines any cartoonist
ever came up with but you may not remember that
it was in this cartoon which
shows an enormous pile of garbage around and so
this is an actually a reaction of this cartoonist
Walt Kelly in the 50s about what
he and people in the 50s thought was
a serious problem already of course that problem is
compounded itself a trillion fold by
now and the
when I started when I was thinking about this talk
I thought well you just really there just isn't much to say about
sustainability from the technological
standpoint you can actually compute it
all out some very smart people have
if you haven't read amerie lovins
book called reinventing fire it's
one of the best books I've read in the last 20 years
or so he's the head of the Rocky Mountain Institute he's
a physicist he's been
at this for 40 years or so and this is a magnum opus of
a book which takes every
part of the energy spectrum and
looks at it
from the standpoint of what if you could get
the usual selfish motives
of human beings and business people in particular
motivated to actually do
a the right thing for the wrong
reason namely show them how they can increase profits
by actually dealing more sensibly
with energy problems and so this is the result of
maybe fifteen to twenty years worth of work of the
Rocky Mountain Institute it's a masterpiece
and I think everybody
will find it really interesting
originally I was going to talk about that then thinking
might be more interesting to talk about why nobody pays any attention
to this
so
this is always a problem this is
one of my favorite shots because
every
once in a while they get Spock to do this because
Mary's supposed to be beyond cool
being an alien creature and non-human
but he had a human part and
his human part was generally
reflected by enormous emotions
when they were finally boiled over and
okay here's if if we had
more time it's
always instructor to spend 20
minutes or so just delving into what's
wrong with our own brains yes and this won't
work thank you so much for reading it though so
this is the thing that would be handed out however
if you have something it has text in front
of you make that the the
dot and the plus about the width of your eyes
so you know maybe two
three inches you can try it right now it's not going
to bother me if you do it and the
trick of it is is to keep the thing on the desk
and you just move
into it holding focus and
then what you'll see is something like this
and
I'll show you why the dot goes away when
you move in about 9 inches away for
most people see
it somebody do it and but
here's what's cool
there's no blank spot
that dot went away but
there's still some text their
text that you couldn't see when
the spot was there so
that's what's interesting about the blind spot experiment
and here's the way it works in fact we were just talking about eyes
a couple of seconds ago and
so if anybody
here is looking for arguments in favor of evolution
here's one if
you want to exhibit a well-designed biological
I you can't look at us you
have to look at the squid squids have
cephalopods in general have fantastic
eyes but if you look at our I
somehow the blood vessels are actually
in front of the cells
that detect light rather than behind them
as own squid and so
we're when we see something with our eyewear actually the
image is actually occluded all
over the place by all these blood vessels
why can't we see the blood vessels well because
we're filtering them out thus
losing acuity and the place
where the blood vessels
come from the outside into the eye has no
light sensitive cells at all so
if you can get an image there like the dot then
you can't see it there's
nothing there to sense it and
this other part here which you can't
see very well on the projector is about
two and a half two
by three degrees wide which is about the size of a normal
english word
and it is where almost all of the
of your eye isn't this is why the eye moves this is what
i was asking that guy about because he's trying to track
yeah well why is the eye moving at all we've
got a retina that we
could image the entire thing and the problem is is that virtually
all of the acuity in the eye is in there
and we are almost legally blind right outside
of it and we are legally blind just shortly
outside of it so almost all of our peripheral vision
is legally blind so
Northrop Grumman no I'm sorry
McDonnell Douglas did a head-mounted display years
ago in which they tracked your eyeball hasn't
moved and they put a million pixels which is
easy to do today right in the fovea and the
result is instead of seeing an
x vga display like we usually see it
what you see is no pixels at all because
there's about a million sensors
in there and you can give
the illusion of a
perfect but but I'm digressing
so here's what happened
as you move in you're concentrating
on the plus at some point you get close enough so
that the angle places the dot over
where the blood vessels come in and it goes away
so the disappearance is easily
explained but the problem is where did that other text come
from that's a trickier thing
to understand and here's the way it works our
brain is a bit like a pachinko
machine that's fun because
there's lots of pachinko machines in Japan you ever
seen them that's you know the ball goes in and it goes all
over the place and it's very fun makes lots of noise and
so it's sort of a vertical jukebox
a vertical pinball
so we've got a brain and
a sensor something comes in it gets
the visual thing there are about 30 different
places where the image is
split up and sent for
various kinds of processing some of it gets
to our consciousness but
if you excise the part
of us that recognizes that we're seeing images we
think we're blind but actually but the other parts
of the brain are still seeing the image and you can
do things without being consciously aware that you're the
parts of your brain are seeing things and
then
there are some so we can think of this is kind
of a hardware map and
then there's kind of software
and database thing
which I'm going to call the
ghost and the ghost
is all the things that you believe in
all the things that allow you to
navigate around the world that
allow
decide something as reasonable and unreasonable
some of these are our built-in
by your genes
some of them are learn in your
culture but you learn them because things are built
in and your genes and
so this big pink manifestation
of things you just think of as our beliefs and
we're not aware of this because our
nervous system is set up to look for differences
and the most important thing
about us as human beings is not what we think
we're seeing but all the stuff that has been
suppressed in order to look at what's
different in other words we're interested in
news rather than what
and then there's the dream which is what's
happening right now this dream is about
maybe
an eighth of a second to a third of a second
lagging behind our experience why it's hard
to hit a baseball anybody who's
anybody here tried to hit a fastball
when do you start swinging
yeah yep you
have to really kind of make a commitment to what
it is maybe you can see a little hole in it that
indicates it's a curve or a slider but
basically
because it takes a while for things to go through this pachinko
machine you can't wait same
thing when you're a musician you just don't
ever follow anybody else when you're a musician you have to
play what happens is when multiple musicians
are playing together they adjust themselves
but if you wait to
make a decision about what's going on you're too late
right so you're basically casting ahead
trying to get your synchronization ahead and so
what this is the thing that's hard for people to accept
but just as we have
dreams at night which are entirely manifested
with our eyes closed some
them could be very realistic it's that mechanism that
allows us to deal with what's going on right now in
other words we're not seeing what's there we're
seeing our interpretation of what's there
and a lot of these are in terms
tories as we'll see in a second or two and
we have the great misfortune
as a species to call this dream reality
now what if it were a reality
we would have very little to argue with anybody
about and especially between cultures religions
couldn't be further away from reality
and enormous
numbers of lives have been lost over thousands of years by
people deciding what they have is reality and
what everybody else has is bullshit
the truth is we all that pink
stuff in our brain is technical word for
it is bullshit that is what we have between
our ears and getting it out
front in a way that we can deal we
can't get rid of it but we least have to
acknowledge it so
here's a fun one another
one you can do well take
two oranges to apples to quarters
if you want to be precise you can
put them on a mirror on a ruler
so one is exactly twice as far away than the other
by geometry and
by what Descartes did
was actually took an ox I from
a dead ox and peeled off
the sclera on the back of
the eye so he could have the ox I
look at things like a camera and he
would see the upside down images the oxide
because he was interested in whether first oxide
worked the way ours did because they had similar
structure he was also interested in to as to whether
Biological lenses work the way glass
lenses did in the early
17th century and yes and yes and
the interesting thing is that people noticed is
that wow I can prove by geometry what's
going to go on the on the retina and I can see it
that twice
as far away quarter is half the size on the retina but
what do we see when we do this
well we got the same process
half the size and the retina the pachinko
machine go up to the dream the
dream knows these quarters are the same size noses
the oranges are the same size right
knows the apples are the same size
and here's what you actually see
I mean this is the ghost did the dream you
see the farther way quarter
is about 80% the size of the
nearer one instead of half the size and
that is because your beliefs
in reality are
trumping what's actually coming into
your eye this is why it's so difficult to learn
paint should be able to do it right it's right there
but in fact i order to paint you have to defeat
all of these mechanisms including
some deeper ones in order to get at what the primary
sense data this is also why science was
invented so late if you think about this as
a larger metaphor for everything it
says that until you actually get
the realization that what's between our ears is
bullshit you can never invent science because you
never even pay your like the Frog with the Flies you never pay attention
to what's actually around
you you only pay attention so McLuhan
great line is usually said until I believe it I
can't see it that's definitely true of
the Frog and it is actually much more true of us
than any of us would like to admit
and
one last one I just
love these this is Roger Shepard at Stanford and
here's what's cool about this
the
shape the exact shape
and size of the two tabletops is exactly
the same and if
you look at it hard to believe right
this one looks kind of long and
skinny this one looks kind of fat and
again if we had more time we'd actually do this with physical
things so you couldn't claim I was cheating but
and so
I take a top off bingo
still can't see
it right I've done this a thousand times it's
one of my favorite things to show an audience you
can watch it over and over again and it doesn't matter
you cannot learn how to see
this is why it's hard to draw in perspective ok
I'll hollow it out so we'll just have an outline
here so now you can see
bingo
now
this is what so and how do I know this is
because I made the second table from the first I
didn't
make two tables i took i made this one and
then I took this shape from it
and rotated it and made this
that's why it fits so well because they are exactly
the same and you can do it over and over again with
your hands tough beans
so these are just simple things and
why do I want to get you to accept for the rest of
the the talk is just provisionally the idea is that hey
the world isn't what it seems
it just isn't
and what puck bent here is
it's not that we're just
easily fooled it's part of us to want
to be fooled it's part of being a human being this is why
we like stories my wife has a writer and
one of her favorite books
about writing is has a title
telling lies for fun and profit
Talmud
we see things not as they are but as we
are I give anything to know what happened
to the person who said that right because
if you take it to its ultimate conclusion it's
deadly for most dogmatic
religions bingo
and here's McLuhan again okay
so right Francis
Bacon sum this up
in 1610 by saying we've got four
things that are killing us that we idolize
intrinsic to humans one
is what's genetically wrong with us
what things we make up inside
of our head because
this thing is computing all the time and the
simple difference between paranoia and what
we call normal which is slight paranoia is
the what we call paranoid
delusions are simply a person
who is putting much more credence on their internal deductions
than on evidence and there are
all gradations for this
marketplace
what's wrong with language the
way language abstracts
things and
the what he calls the
theater which we might call academia today
fact
Jonathan Smith the guy who wrote Gulliver's
Travels was the Dean of
University in Dublin and he
called his professors the confederacy