Alan Kay at STRAP 2015 - Our Most Important Revolution part (1/2)
From Viewpoints Intelligent Archive
so
you've all heard the phrase the best way
to predict the future is to invent it
you perhaps this one
as well people who are serious about software should
make their own hardware or
perspective or context
is worth 80 IQ points
these are a few insights from our next speaker a
pioneer of computing Professor
Alan Kay can we have a line on the VC
Alan you know I read about this Alan once said
in an interview that he had the fortune or rather
the misfortune to learn how to read fluently
when he was three years old so
by the time he was in first grade yet read 150 books and
he knew the teachers were lying
he's originally from Springfield
in Massachusetts he attended the university
of colorado at boulder he earned a bachelor's
degree in mathematics and molecular biology
he went to graduate school at the University
of Utah in the College of Engineering
earned his masters and a PhD there and he began
to work on graphical programs such
as sketch pad in 1970
he joined Xerox Corporation at the
famed palo alto research center he
was developing prototypes for network workstation using
small talk in those days you can imagine 1970 these
inventions were later commercialized by Apple
in their max he is one of the
fathers of the idea of object-oriented
programming he conceived the dynabook
I'm sure you've read about it a concept which essentially
is the basis of
tablets of e-books perhaps even mobile
devices essentially I think he has spawned
an industry that's worth trillions of dollars today and
Alan believes the computer
revolution has still not happened he
worked at Apple at Disney and at HP
but in 2001 he founded viewpoints
Research Institute it's a non-profit organization dedicated to
children to learning and advanced software
development he's by
professional jazz musician and a theatrical
designer he's been elected a fellow of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences the National Academy
Engineering and the Royal School of Arts royal
society of arts ladies and gentlemen he's joining
us live via video from Los Angeles please help me
welcoming the very very distinguished professor
how to
know what do you thank you
very much
one thing I should
just mention is that the lag
to India
and back again i'm watching this on the
on the screen here is about three and a
half seconds and it takes a little bit longer than
that for the visual content to get
the air and of course it takes another second and
half or two seconds for me to see that it's gotten there
so i'll try not to get out of sync
during this talk
about revolutions which vishal
asked me to put together and
it's in the form of a series
of ideas many of which you're
already familiar with and so
I think for many of you some of
this will be revisiting some ideas about
hat you've already thought about and perhaps there are
a few things in this talk that are
also new to
you so just to start
here's
an idea that goes back to the 19th century
almost as a joke about
human thinking and learning but
in the 21st century it's actually
a pretty good metaphor and that is the idea that
little
random features
on the ground
may channel a little water from a rainstorm
in one place
and not another and that channel itself
is an amplifier for gathering more water
and so quite randomly we get an erosion
gully looks
kind of like this and it
can get a much deeper and
we tend to learn
things that are right things
or familiar with and so
the things that we've experienced at an early age
we experiences reality
but it's actually
kinda random kind of depends
on where we were born what
kinds of schools we went
to where we were and
we build up this structure
that can be beautiful
but it's also kind of a rough so
here's the Grand Canyon and when
you're in it down here you can't
see anything else except this beautiful
pinkish rock you're in a an
entire world and the
walls are so high it's hard to even think about
climbing out if you were to be born
down here the idea
of climbing out would not probably occur to too many
people it's just reality
and that's the way we go
about the world this is why
revolutions are called revolutions
they're simply climbing out of these ruts
that we're in but since we don't know we're
in ruts we really think to climb out of
them and here's a way of
looking at that I'm taking this pink
grand canyon wall and spreading
it out to it so it's an entire
world of pinkish thoughts and
an ant crawling
around in this world doesn't
even know it's pink because it's never
seen any other color and it can explore around
can pick different directions can
encounter an obstacle we can get around the obstacle
can do all of the things that we
associate with thought
and yet they're all pink
and we don't even don't even know it but
every once in a while perhaps were in the
shower out running relaxing we
get a little blue thought but
we
all went to school
we live in the society and so
these little blue thoughts just get rapped out
and but
every once in a while when we're really relaxed
nobody's around we might
get creeped out
something that is really an
outlaw thought it's
completely out of the plane of the
world that we didn't even realize was a plane and
wrong with that escape
we are in
a different context whole
different set of possibilities and ways
of thinking about things and much of human
progress has been
by these escapes from
the mental belief
systems that we may stay
thousands of years and then suddenly somebody has
it as an idea and all of a sudden we
can see things very differently and there
are three ideas here
for people who like revolutions one is
if think is reality then how
sane will people think glueless
so the trick in having these blue thoughts
is to avoid being burned at the stake
because
you're going against things people really believe
in second idea is
if the idea is really knew
then it requires almost as much creativity
as the original invention
so this puts an enormous strain on
education and education
is usually much more comfortable and teaching the pink
stuff it
doesn't even like to talk about the blue stuff and
then the third idea is that this
blue plane is a wonderful thing but it's also a gully
and in fact this blue idea
might not be a very good idea after
all people have weird ideas
all the time and if you think about it most
ideas are
going to be mediocre down to bad
as having a really good idea
is very rare even for people to have lots of
ideas so
revolutions require some
sort of escape from reality they
require other people to learn about this
escape the escape
has to be vetted
or else you might have millions
of people following a really bad idea
and we have to set up conditions in
order to escape from this new idea when
the time comes instead
of treating it as reality again
so here's an idea that
vishal
wanted me to put in and one of my favorites which
is to imagine somebody
as intelligent or maybe twice
as intelligent as Leonardo DaVinci but
born 10,000 years ago
suppose you were have twice
the IQ of Leonarda mentioned you're born 10,000
years ago how far would you get
the answer is not too far because IQ
is the weakest thing we bring debate we
just aren't that smart took
us hundreds of thousands of years of even
invent writing and since
we speak it would seem natural to
up with something where we could write write down
what we speak but it wasn't natural at all
so
somebody who's not nearly as smart as a
Leonardo
da Vinci was Henry Ford in the United States who made
millions and millions of inexpensive automobiles
about a hundred years ago
Leonardo could not invent a single
engine his vehicles and Henry poor
could make millions of automobiles that people could afford
what was the difference well it wasn't the Ford
was smart Ford was born into
the century that allowed this to happen but
he was able to hook into knowledge which
in many many cases Trump's
raw I cute but
if you can buy knowledge at IQ you have something really
powerful and why did was
Henry Ford able to be boring into a better century
for on a lot of vehicles
and the answer is because of
this man Isaac Newton
and what Newton did was to
change the context he
took us out of the gully that we're
in up through the middle ages and
started looking at the world in
completely different way of course he wasn't the first person to
look at the world that way but
he made the biggest lead of anyone
and so he's the good symbol for
this idea about context and
escaping the gully and so
we have the saying that was in
the introduction that context is worth AED IQ
points another way of looking at it is if you pick
the right dolly it's worth the ad IQ
and if you picked the wrong golly it's worth minus eighty
IQ points because
just getting out of one value doesn't automatically
guarantee you're going to get into a good one at the
other end so let's take a look
at a couple of revolutions
writing little over five
thousand years ago and writing
did one
thing that we understand
very very well which is a transcends
time and space it can travel
around the world it can travel in
time but the thing we really think
about writing is what's most important
about it is that if we become
a reader and a writer we actually
become a different kind of thinker than a thinker
in a normal society so
writing is not just an extension of what we
do orderly in an amplification of
what we do orderly in action changes us when
we learn how to do it and this is what one
thoughts we want to carry through the rest of this talk that
whenever we go into a
new gully a new more powerful gully we're
not just extend any things that we already thought about
but we're actually by learning
these new things we're actually creating a different version
of us so
handwritten books may
big changes you could they're
probably the simplest correlation with what
we call civilization but
they stagnated
a way because they were too hard to produce so this is a
library in the Middle Ages in
holland which has a few hundred books
you can see that those books are chained
to the wall because many of these books in today's
dollars are worth about a million dollars
the sum
of these books took almost 10 years for
a copy to be made and
these books were not affecting
enough people this is a town library in
live
in Holland but a few
hundred books and a few one
percent or so people reading wasn't
enough to make
a really big leap and
so of course we have the printing press
but many of you will
know that the big invention of the printing press wasn't
the printing press because they existed
in Europe for several hundred years
beforehand and
wasn't even movable type
because the Chinese had
movable-type a thousand years earlier so
these are all known about that the great
invention of the printing press was how
type was made and I
a lot of time so I
brought some along here
you
can see because this
is one of it one of the great
changes in Western
society was to be able to
make type cheaply enough
to have presses everywhere and what was the invention
well good bird was a goldsmith and the
way you make coins out of soft metals
like gold is you don't mold them but you strike
them into a steel
died and the striking
them forces the metal to
expand and take on the impression of the die
and at some point a good
bird got the idea that wow
if I made a steel punch
ere with
the reverse with an H on it I could punch
it with a hammer into a
softer metal like grass and that
would make a mold that I could then
pour led into and I could make thousands
of pieces of type each day and
so the printing press in your visit if
you like parallels this is a parallel
to the integrated circuit
we had computers before we have the integrated circuit
but we didn't have computers for everyone and the
kind of computing that we have today until the integrated
circuit solve the problem of how to make
zillions and zillions of gates
same idea here and
so people who made type could
have their type making
stuff in their backpack and they went all over Europe
and only 20 years after the invention
the printing press there are more than 20,000
printing facilities in Europe
each with their own type so
technological invention of the printing press
a revolution and being
able to spread the means of spreading
ideas what
we get from the printing press
is a child sitting underneath the tree reading
a book all to herself
because the real invention of the printing press the
real revolution of it is there
now enough books so
a single person can learn many different
ideas from different sources by themselves without
being socially coerced
and they can come up with ideas
and points of view of their own and
the sense of identity on their own
and that changed everything for
what happened in the next few hundred years you
can think of this great invention of the printing press
was it started making us aware that we were in
a go so once you start encountering different
ideas about things that you thought
were fixed it starts getting you thinking
about this is wherever I am
isn't really reality it's just
a set of beliefs that I have at this moment
so silence came along
with this and this
is a pocket globe from
the end of the 18th
century and people reason I show this
actually I have one of these I love them
it's hard to
see because it's old and dirty it's
everal hundred years old here's a modern copy of
it or
this up well this is what people did in the coffee houses
in Europe during this
time they look they
could take them out and talk with each other
about what the earth look like from space and
what was interesting is
200 years later when we got out there and look back
at the earth there are no surprises
look just the way it
looked 200 years earlier
and one of the ways of
thinking about this is that what
happened 200 years earlier was the
process of science which is taking
lots of measurements stitching ideas together
coming up with a model
understanding how accurate and inaccurate
the model is and we get this
nice picture and what we
did a few years ago was engineering
we built rockets that could go out there and look back at
it those Rockets required science also
so the
idea here is what science started to do is to
get us to realize that
the other goalies are all around us
they're invisible but we can make things more
visible so science
the best collection of stuff we've come up with for
helping us identify the ability that
we're in and how to get out of it and in
India there is this a
famous tale
that I learned as a child about the
six blind men and the elephant and
one says the
trunk oh it's like a rope or it's like a spear or it's
like a wall and so forth
and so several reactions to this for
example a normal
human reaction is to fight about this and don't
worry this is not the Indian Parliament this is Italy
just in case you were worried
every
gentlemen there is a distinguished politician
who at this moment decided
everybody else was
completely insane
and that they were the only one that had a hold
on reality okay well one
of the ways of solving this is we can compromise
so we can make an elephant out of everybody's
point of view if that is better than fighting
but we can
do more than compromise we can actually cooperate
and what science does is to
cooperate to get us outside
the gauley and cooperatively put together a much
more accurate view of the thing we can't
see for ourselves and so they're a couple of ideas here one
is we can't learn to see until
we admit we are blind
so this is a big ones whereas while saying to
yourself each day because we think we can see
but in fact compared
to what we can see today
using scientific instruments
engineering new
ways of thinking about things it's a complete
revolution from the way things where 500 years ago and
then the other idea is
instead of thinking about science as
being technical
which it is and thinking about
it as involving lots of mathematics which it usually does
implest way to think about science is it's a collection
of the best ways we know together
well what's wrong with our brains
once
we realize that our brains were not actually set
up for thinking clearly then
we can actually start making progress
so these ideas
at the same time were used in the United States
to design the country
actually one
of the ways of thinking about this at
the kept the a convention
to come up with the constitution
for the United States 55 people they
did not agree when they got
here they spend six weeks working
on it they did not agree at the end but
in the end they came up with
this but
you can think of as a one-page operating
system that
was good enough to run a millions and millions of
not terribly cooperating processes
for hundreds of years without a crash
because that's what the Constitution
is and a couple of important ideas
first one was that
according to accounts of this
convention all 55
decided that the goal
was not to win or lose
according to what their point of view was their
goal was to make real progress during these six
weeks and so even
though many of them hadn't changed their
minds at the end they still were able
to come together to put something yeah this is kind of like
that middle elephant
made up with different parts
and a second idea was I
think a profound one for anybody today
who's trying to put together a
large plan a revolution is
that often revolutions
will start from ideals
and that's good they'll
often start from aesthetics which is
could make something beautiful make
something important but in fact
the key to the American Constitution
was that it had
essentially no laws in it it
was mostly about how to detect errors and correct them
before the country could come apart
which it almost did a couple of times
so this idea about making a dynamic
system that does
dynamic error detection and correction is
something that not only works really
well in software the internet is
completely made about it but also something
to think about for when we do human revolutions
Ben Franklin
towards the end made a speech and
in the speech he said when you assemble a number of
men to have the advantage of their
joint wisdom you negatively assemble
with these men all of their prejudices their passions
the errors of opinions their local
interests and their selfish views
from such an assembly can
a perfect production be expected and his speech
was no but
what we did do is to come up
with something that is capable of being
improved in
other words like
all operating systems constitutions are
gullies and the most important thing about
them is whether they can adjust
to the learning curve of the society so
in America this has not happened
the people have
been very timid about
adjusting the Constitution is every
time an amendment is made it is a enormous
fight and
perhaps given the the
people we have in our Congress right now that's a good idea
but if you think about it as a larger
principle when you make one
of these things that helps organize ourselves just like
the software we wish we were doing is
really not just about today
but we should be really making our software so
that it's easy to modify as conditions
change down the road most companies
are not willing to pay for the amount of extra
work needed to make the future easier
and
we know from
the Indian Revolution
the importance of the Constitution
here the having constitutions
that are not terribly long
but spell out the nature
of the environment we wish to live in