Alan Kay at The Association of American Medical Colleges (1996)

[Music]

good morning ladies and gentlemen would you please take your seats welcome

to the association's final plenary session our presider this morning is the

president of the association dr. Jordan Cohen

morning everyone I'm really excited about the opportunity to participate in

this morning's session before I introduce our speaker though I would

like to encourage those of you in the back to come forward there are plenty of seats up for that they're going to be a

number of graphical elements to the talk

this morning that you'll certainly benefit from being closer to see so if

you want to come forward please do and I've been assured that our speakers will not mind if you get up and leave early

if that's necessary so come forward if you can well this is a very special

session we've entitled it information as

the bridge to the future in keeping with

our theme about building bridges of the future and as I mentioned in my remarks on Friday clearly one of the major

themes we wanted to have clearly in evidence at this meeting was the fact

that information and the incredible revolution that's occurring in the

information sciences offers all of us in academic medicine I think an unjust an

unprecedented opportunity to make quantum leap forward in the way we do

everything that we're responsible for in our institution so I really commend you

to listen carefully to what Alan Kay has to say this morning because I think it

has tremendous relevance for for everything that we do and I think those

who still believe that this is a passing phase a passing fancy really do so at

their peril because I think there are a few advances in technology that that are

as as exciting and as meaningful as what is going on in information ability to

harness information to create it to collect it customize it organize it

disseminated ability to do all those things I think are clearly going to be

the things that sort out the winners from the losers and the leaders from the

followers in the next century and beyond

well someone who has always been aware of this particular attribute of

technology as Alan Kay always a visionary he is credited with developing

the idea of the personal computer the concept of a new

generation of laptop computers and the overlapping window interfaces that we

now use and take sort of pretty much for granted as as as if it were always there

while a scientist at Parc Xerox labs he

led one of the research teams whose work ultimately led to the development of the workstation the Macintosh computer the

Ethernet the laser printer and the networked client servers just a few of

the minor tools that are now in evidence later he was chief scientist at Atari a

that was before he joined Apple Computer in 1984 where he stayed until literally

just a few weeks ago when he joined Walt Disney Company as a Disney fellow and he

is now the driving force in Walt Disney's Imagineering x' research and

development organization where he works to find innovative ways to enhance the

educational and entertainment value of Disney's offerings dr. K seems to have

been on hand whenever the big events in the computing field took place and I

want to give you just one quote from him yet that's published in the Nicholas

Negroponte EES book the quote from dr. K is that point of view is worth 80 IQ

points think about that ones point of

view is worth 80 IQ points so as you

listen to dr. K's remarks keep in mind that we are looking for that boost in IQ

in academic medicine and I'm really greatly honored to introduce to you Alan

Kay

thank you

thank you well gosh I just didn't think anybody would come out at nine o'clock

in the morning on Sunday thank you I'll try and make it worthwhile for you maybe

the first idea we should take issue with or at least explore a little bit is the

notion that information is the bridge to the future and I can't think of a better

way of doing that than to take you back

to a Harvard commencement Harvard

graduation a few years ago and we follow

an NSF camera team right after the

diplomas have been awarded they asked a few simple questions of some of the

graduating seniors alumni and faculty so let's roll that first tape and check

this out

[Music]

Aaron Lee fingerman candidate in art

[Applause]

despite a lifetime of the very best education students in our classrooms are

failing to learn science many of these students will graduate from college with

the same scientific misconceptions that they had on entering grade school to

test how a lifetime of Education affects our understanding of science we ask

these recent graduates some simple questions in astronomy consider for

example that the causes of the seasons is a topic taught in every standard curriculum okay I think the seasons

happens because as the earth travels around the Sun it gets nearer to the Sun

which produces warmer weather and gets farther away which produces colder

weather and that's it and hence the seasons how hot it is or how cold it is

at any given time of the year has to do with the the closeness of the earth to

the Sun during the seasonal periods the earth goes round the Sun and and it gets

hotter when we get closer to the Sun and it gets colder when we get further away from the Sun these graduates like many

of us think of the Earth's orbit as a highly exaggerated ellipse even though

the Earth's orbit is very nearly circular with distance producing

virtually no effect on the seasons we carry with us the strong incorrect

belief that changing distance is responsible for the seasons I took

physics and planetary motion and relativity waves I've never really had a

scientific background whatsoever and I and I got through school without having it I've gotten very far without having

it I had quite a bit of science in high school yeah through physics

want first year in two years of chemistry regardless of their science

education 21 of the 23 randomly selected

students faculty and alumni of Harvard University revealed misconceptions when

asked to explain either the seasons or the phases of the Moon when it's further

away from the Sun then it gets colder the earth

position interferes with the reflection

of the Sun against the moon so I think

we can see that the real curriculum at Harvard is confidence 101

[Applause] actually when I when I first saw this

tape a couple years ago I kept on waiting for NSF to ask the logical

second questions of these people and they never did because they were on a

they're on one track but it happened

that a couple of weeks after I saw this this tape the first time I had to give a talk over at UCLA to basically a

first-year graduate course that had some also had some seniors who are going to

graduate and a few professors so the end

of the course I asked for volunteers to come up and talk to me afterwards and I

got a chance to ask the very same questions about the seasons and about

the phases of the Moon and I found about the same roughly 95 percent had serious

misconceptions the the NSF here cites 21

out of 23 had serious misconceptions about one of the other or both and I

found about the same but of course I got a chance to ask the second question so

the people who had this notion about the

relative distance of the Earth from the Sun being the cause of the seasons I

asked them well tell me when it's summer up here in North America do you know

what season it is down in South America in Australia and what is it it's winter

everybody knows that and these kids all did and then I just did one of these

Jack Benny Waits

and the wheels started slowly turning

and to the the kids and professors that

thought that the phases of the Moon had something to do with the earth being in

the way which of course is what causes lunar eclipses I asked them will tell me

your entire life have you ever seen the Sun and the moon in the sky at the same

time and have you sure everybody has and

often the moon is in phase so again that

that long pause while they struggle to realize what was actually going on and

my claim here is that NSF was barking up

the wrong tree we have to be very very happy that these kids could not remember

the explanation of the seasons or the phases and the moon that they were

taught in grade school because we learned something the problem here is not a science problem the problem is

what I would call a math problem in the sense that math is about how we can

infer things from premises and every

single one of these kids had the information to contradict the very

theory they were formulating so confidently and couldn't find that

information it was buried somewhere else

even though it was about the same subject that's a math problem it's a

thinking problem and one way of putting

talking about information here is that most people in fact in a conference like

this most people come to conferences like this in search of information but

in fact most of us and these kids especially what they need needed was not

more information but more context they couldn't deal with the information that

they had in an interesting way or what we would call an operational way so an

image for that I'll go to the slides

here is my favorite saying of McLuhan which is I don't know who discovered

water but it wasn't a fish and of course he wasn't interested in fish or water he

meant us where the fish and the water is our beliefs

now here's an interesting thing to think about which is if we could directly

perceive reality we would then have nothing to argue with anybody else about

because there's just one reality and if we're perceiving that reality that's all

there is but in fact the reason we're constantly fighting with each other all

over the earth for thousands of years is because we don't perceive reality at all

what we do is we make up stories about it those stories are beliefs they become

the goldfish bowl at the we swing or swim around in and what happens is that

at some point most of these great stories we make up get reified by us

into dogma that is we start claiming these stories of reality and then all of

a sudden our stories are different from other people's stories we think they're reality and all of a sudden we have

incredible conflict so this is something that happens over and over again let me

ask the AV people to keep the slides on

so here's another way of looking at this idea here I flatten out the goldfish

bowl into a plain pink plain and this is

an idea from Arthur Kessler who was a terrific novelist who became a cognitive

science at Stanford late in life and his

way of thinking of it is that we're kind of like ants wandering through a context

terrain in this case it's colored pink as we snake our way around through it

every once in a while we might have a little blue thought but our entire life

of parents and culture and school just

smashes that blue thought right back down into pinkness and when we make

progress we make progress by advancing in the pink domain for instance the the

railroads in the 20s and 30s never

invested a cent in either airplane

factories or airline travel everything they thought about was making well

better better track faster locomotives meanwhile the

competition that was going to do them in was flying up above them where they weren't even looking there were

two-dimensional people optimizing

locally and missing the big picture and this is a theme that this is one of the

most important themes it's something what's interesting about this is

something that everybody knows about it's like the theme of hubris in Greek

tragedy that most of what goes wrong with human beings has to do with our

capacity for overreaching we all know

that but in fact we keep on doing it there's one of these things that has to surface then Kessler says every once in

a while when you're maybe when you're taking a shower out jogging waking up in

the morning these constraint mechanisms

for making you be a pink type person let go and all of a sudden you have an

insight you see that what you thought was a pink thing is that suddenly a blue

thing and this is an incredible revelation and in fact it sometimes has

the trappings of religion and it's like

it comes from God almost and Kessler pointed out something that was quite

quite interesting says if you're telling a joke then the reaction is ha ha if

it's science or die I guess medicine

it's AHA or sometimes it's oh and an art

it's ah because in each one of these

cases what we have here is what Kessler calls the act of creation is to see

something that you thought was one kind of thing to be able to see it completely differently and it's this kind of change

in point of view that I meant when I said point of view is worth ad IQ points

if you imagine a person like a Leonardo

with a 250 IQ or more 10,000 years ago

or even in the time that Leonardo lived you can see how little a person with

unbelievable IQ could actually accomplish compared to what's been

accomplished by the shifts in point of view that have taking place more

gradually and given as more powerful tools for viewing the world and of course here's one really

unpleasant thought which is in order to get those blue ideas you have to have

some blue knowledge and so in fact some

of the most highly educated people I know are completely uncreated because

they've only got good at pink things a lot of engineers I know are that way

I dare say more than a few doctors because when you get really really good

at that thing it is so it so creates its own reality that it's hard to imagine

that there's anything else there and the the new ideas are pretty much invisible

that's in part what was happening to these to these college students another

thing was happening to them NSF goes in a little bit is that the way that they

remembered things that they had learned was not what mathematicians would call

operational learning or scientists would call operational learning that was

compartmentalized learning the learning was kind of in terms of stories or

almost like learning proverbs King

Solomon was the wisest person in the Bible and it says why because he knew

3,000 proverbs which is more than anybody else and the way a proverbs work

is if you come home from a trip and your significant other is really glad to see

you then the reason for that is absence made the heart grow fonder but if you

come home from a trip and your significant other is not particularly glad to see you then what's the reason

for that out of sight out of mind

if you're faced with a situation that

really confirms one of your beliefs then

you say where there's smoke there's fire but if you're faced with a situation

that you don't happen to believe in beforehand what you say is you can't

tell a book by its cover and in fact this is why proverbs are mostly used in

literate semi illiterate or illiterate societies because if you list out the

Proverbs in fact this is one of the big transitions in Greek thought was when

they started actually putting out there but their beliefs about legal systems by

chiseling them on the wall walls of things so the citizens could read them

they started discovering that when looked at that way things that it seemed

perfectly reasonable in fact the law is all about case based reasoning these

under these circumstances the following thing happened back then they started

noticing that that if you compare this one with this one over here out here in

your visual field they started contradicting each other and

contradiction is actually one of the major bases for doing real mathematical

kind of thinking so the part of the

problem with these students was that they were embedded we could say in the

most technologically rich culture in the

world and we can imagine that every single one of them had access to

personal computers all the way through school and at college and yet their

thinking patterns were being done in a Neolithic form in a preliterate form

their knowledge was being compartmentalized in forms of things of

Proverbs in which contradictions didn't matter to them so one way of thinking

about this is that we have a natural way of thinking about things built into us

which is to think about things in terms of stories one of the problems with

stories as I mentioned is this this tolerance of contradiction one way of

thinking your own experience if you see a movie today you really like

or play and it happens to contradict in every way shape or in form the movie you

saw last week that you like it's not going to bother you not going to bother

you at all because stories create their

own context you evaluate them by how good they are right now this is why it's

very dangerous when you think of the

difference between going into a theatrical context where you willingly

give yourself up to the context that's been created on the stage by the author

and by the actors by the scenic designers and the almost exactly same

environment of a political rally all the

people darkroom music rich words rolling forth and so

forth and it's quite clear that some

other mechanism has to interpose itself of saying in the theater well it's okay

for me to give myself over to this fantasy land but I think it's clear that

in a political context it makes no sense at all to give ourselves over to that

fantasy land but in fact most of us do and that's why politicians keep on doing

it so - two other big systems of

thinking that have been invented that are not directly built-in to us we have

to learn how to do them our logic which I think we're all familiar with which is kind of a taking thought and making it

into a mechanism where you link one thought to another through inferential

chains of thing is there's one break in the infirm an inferential change then

the Machine doesn't run and the idea that we're thinking about doesn't doesn't hold water that has been the

basis of many different systems including the arguments that depose the

monarchy that created this country and then a more recent kind of thinking

which you could call ecological you could call the first story logical the

second one logical and the third one ecological in which what we're dealing

with is really systems that have the

same complexity as the interior of cells or the interior of tissues

the complexity of the human body or Ecology's in which if something goes

wrong it doesn't kill off the organism there are dozens and dozens of

homeostatic mechanisms there to

constantly bring the system back to a kind of dynamic equilibrium those

systems are just starting to be studied and particularly just in the last thirty

years or so because the study of these last kind of thinking is very much

facilitated by having computers to help you with you can think of the logical

thought systems as being facilitated by having a particularly in particular

alphabetic type reading and writing they

came in at the same time and if you think about it for five minutes or so

you can see why reading and writing and particularly alphabetic reading and

writing might have something to do with evolving logical thought I'm going to

talk about that and a little bit more so part of the problem is that these kids

who went to Harvard never learned how to do either of these invented kinds of

systems that have been so important over the last three or four hundred years it

simply wasn't part of their education at any point meanwhile they're taking courses in mathematics and science but

they were learning them in in this proverbial form certainly one of the

most disputing experiences I have ever had are the occasions where I've wound

up have trying to have scientific conversations with high school science teachers and by and large they simply do

not understand what science is at all they teach it as religion it is taught

as something that is this was found out by great people it's true you have to

learn what the truth is you have to be able to regurgitate that truth and so forth very discouraging so the important

thing about this goldfish bowl metaphor is that the human mental iam our ability

to think is because of the way it's set up basically always forces us to be in

some sort of goldfish bowl sometimes we can pretend to be in more than one

goldfish bowl at once but nobody has

found a way of training us out of this particular context dependent way of

thinking about things but of course the culture that we're born into and even so

we can think of being in the green culture might be incredibly helpful if

we have diabetes some cultures are have

a context that allows us to do something serious about in other cultures can't we

can also think of this green goldfish

bowl is something that we might actually create this has been the big thing

that's happened in the last 400 years is this understanding this enough so we realize hey we can create systems of

thought calculus is an example of creating a system of thought it's it's a

completely different way of looking at the world in terms of the integration of

differential equations a very very powerful idea not something that's built

into our nervous system at all and the the halving of it turns a person with an

ordinary IQ into something at the level of a Newton that's where the original

idea of the ad IQ points came from and

of course any field like medicine or

computer science or science in the large itself has to have this in mind as it's

trying to progress so Joseph Campbell once pointed out that the biggest

problem with with religions and the

origin of religions is that most of them he said came from social geniuses having

an incredibly useful insights about the way people should live but the problem

and these insights being abstract are

put in some kind of metaphor usually a story if you look back

historically to try and get what the import of this new insight was but a few

generations later the followers of this religion have reified it into dogma that

as the metaphor is taken literally and now people are supposed to believe in

the metaphor itself and forget what the actual insight is and we see that

happening over and over again in science so Thomas Kuhn who wrote a book about

the structure of scientific revolutions pointed out that even in science the

place where people are the most concerned about what's really going on

in trying to not get fooled by their senses in the context in which they live

he said even in science revolutions take about 25 years and the reason he gave

for that is that you have to let the old scientists die off because once you get

good at something there's less and less motivation to get out of that pink

context once you've optimized being able to do things in the pink so another way

of thinking about what I'm talking about here is that we mainly get smarter by

changing the way we represent our ideas this is not an informational idea at all

but an architectural idea here's something that your kids will love you

for if you copy down these numbers from 1 to 9 exactly as they appear there and

you can play this game with them you pick a number they pick a number you

pick a number they pick a number the first person who's any of who three of

whose numbers first person who picks three numbers that add up to 15 wins and

you can always beat your kid doing this

and they will not like that but they will love you when you show them how you're doing it so they can always beat

their friends and what you have done they're playing with this but what

you've done is simply to take this and draw four lines and now can you see what

game you're playing what game is it

Tic Tac Toe something everybody knows how to play with and when we now see

that these numbers are a magic square in which every column Row and diagonal adds

up to 15 so this is a simple example of what calculus does for us which it

basically pre computes powerful results

in an area that's of use to us and gives us a framework for thinking about now

this is not the same thing as information this is context ting

meanwhile the poor kid over there is struggling having to remember kid is

still in an oral Society the kid has to remember the numbers that have already

been picked and doesn't have this automatic computation mechanism working

for them that's basically what we're out after when we create a new kind of

goldfish ball now what I want to do now

is turn to some inventions in personal

computing that we made a few years ago give you a little bit of a sense of how

they how they happened and why they've

taken so long still are taking so long to get into the general culture in

particular in a way that would help you the genesis for personal computing goes

all the way back to 1945 we just celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of

this last year a bunch of us people who

have a lot of gray in their hair met at MIT to commemorate the 50th anniversary

of Vannevar Bush's idea of Memex Bush was President Roosevelt science

advisor and in 1945 he wrote an Atlantic Monthly article called as we may think

and in there he just said in not too

many years from now everybody will be able to have in their home a desk and in

the interior of this desk will be the equivalent of a small-town libraries

worth of books five to ten thousand volumes held on high-resolution optical

storage and we'll be able to look at all of this wealth of information with

multiple screens on top of the desk will be put in information they'll be both

pictures and text and most importantly he said there will be cross connective

trails he called them that will cross connect up the information and start

turning the information into knowledge and even maybe into wisdom and he said

that they'll even be a profession born with this device which he called

pathfinding so there'll be people called path finders whose job will be to find

interesting connections between the raw stuff that's here and they'll sell these

connections as as products so this was

bushes bushes notion and it happened that a lot of the people that had something to do with personal computing

were aware of this Douglas Engelbart whom you'll meet in a minute read this

he was in the Navy in the Pacific as I guess a 19 year old or so read in 1945 I

was only 5 years old in 1945 but I came across it when I was a teenager in the

50s and other people were captivated because who wouldn't want to have 10,000

volumes worth of the best that humans have ever found out all cross-index and

linked so that you could add to it and etc etc I mean it's an incredibly

romantic vision and around the end of

the 50s and early 60s people started

doing something about this already in the late 50s people had

started writing papers saying the destiny of information science is that

before too many years are out we will have what was termed then an information

utility and the idea was to think of

something like the power and lighting utility that we have for bringing in

water and gas and electricity that's now

in a one-for-one correspondence with our

with our our houses with our places of

living and among them John McCarthy said there's going to be an information

utility like that as to is everybody will have a terminal at home and be able to

connect be connected into the world of information and this was literally the

the first solid proposal for what became

the Internet there's a direct chain from this proposal through the internet that

we have today the people who did the internet were part of this early group

and I show you here just two interesting things from the very early 60s 1960 to

the invention of computer graphics by Ivan Sutherland which was done by the

way on a on a computer the size of this

room the last computer in the u.s. large enough to have its own roof it was the

building and we like to think of that time of when there was only one personal

computer which was when Ivan Sutherland used it from 3 to 6 o'clock early in the

morning was about the power of an X T of

10 years ago computer graphics was

invented on that and there was already a thing that I think of as the first personal computer called the link also

done at Lincoln labs at the same time by Wes Clark and you see that one of its

design criteria was that you should be able to look over it literally Wes Clark

did not walk this thing looming over you he wanted it to be something that you

could loom over it and that was one of the impulses towards personal computing

and then Engle Bart came along and what

I'm going to do is show you the the first cut on the second videotape here

which is Engelbart around 1966 to 68 and

I think you'll see it's a very modern picture so let's roll that tape that's

not it but now it's it

so here's a photograph taken around 1966

down at s RI and Menlo Park I daresay

most of you in this room do not have a two page display on your desk e so I'll

say I'd like to go to produce but I'd like to go to produce they get big I

like to say one branch only and let me look just that low can I see it

oh I can say I'd like to see one line

only I can see it but there's another

thing that I can do there's a root I said I have here

so here I'm afraid I'll need a different pictures of you so here's what I do with

a picture drawing capability here's a slight and lamp if I start from work and

here's the route I seem to have to go to pick up all the materials and that's my

plan for getting home tonight but if I want to I can say the library what am I

supposed to pick up there I can just point to that you know oh I see overdue

books and all while there was a statement there with that name on it go back what if I what's my supposed to

pick up the drugstore mm-hmm I see you've everything all right

[Music] can do things if I want we'll just say I'd like to interchange the Protestant

and materials bingo and they're all numbered right and if I care to look and

are changing them very quickly cans are going to get interchanged with Prados

they do it and all gets renumber okay so

does 30 years ago and you might have noticed that the response he was getting

on this system was a little faster than you get on your PCs today so it's

something we can talk about later but it's an interesting phenomenon that of

the many interesting things that Engelbart was the first of course he was

the inventor of the mouse and the inventor of hypertext that you see there

so what what people are just starting to experience on the Internet now through

the World Wide Web is like what he had 30 years ago in Menlo Park and the

important thing for you to realize is that there was nothing about the technology back then that precluded you

from having it back then nothing it was

possible on the tiny that machine he was

on served 20 people and it had a memory

a ram of a grand total of 192 K 192 K so

it was all possible back then and one of the people sponsors he went to to try

and get them to take it over and make it part of our lives was AT&T and they

threw him out on their ear he just they just had no sense of what

it was that he was actually driving at the other thing it was really interesting about angle Bart is he said

way way back in the beginning that most interesting things that people do are

done by more than one person working together and so his idea it was

I don't want as he likes to say I he says I didn't want to invent personal

computing I wanted to invent group computing that he want what he wanted to

do is boost the collective IQ of human groups working on important things

together these ideas that he has and he

would be a good speaker to have maybe next year because he gives a great talk

which is essentially the talk that I heard him give back in 1966 that I think

is more compelling to most people today than it was back then people are now

starting to get to see this is a blue idea right and it's only after 30 years

of peach will grudgingly starting to get

involved with these things that they can understand what this genius was able to

think out think of right out of the blocks so in 67 this is my first

personal computer was a desktop computer for a very special desk namely those

made out of steel it's a weight about 400 pounds but it it had all of the

paraphernalia had a tablet instead of a

mouse so you could draw on it and it had

actual windows that clipped had many it

had multiple views of things at many of the paraphernalia that were used to

today and while I was working on this

machine I visited RAND Corporation in

Santa Monica and saw something that really blew my mind and this isn't now

in the summer of 68 so let's show the second cut on that tape here's the

system without a keyboard

we erase a flow arrow then move the connector out of the way so that we may

draw a box in its place recognizes he wants a box and makes one now it's

recognizing his handwriting the printing in the box is being used as commentary

only in this case the box is slightly too large so he may change its size

that's where modern window control came from literally then draw flow from the

connector to the box attach a decision

element to the box and draw a flow from it to scan we then erased the floor

arrows attached to the process post new area and move the box to a new position

this allows us to draw a new box okay

now you might have noticed that that system works a little bit better than

the hand writing systems you might have seen recently and again the reason here

is even more interesting which is people in the computer field are almost

completely disinclined to look back in the past for any good ideas that might

have been done this is in part why systems are worse today than angle Bart

conceived of them and it's in part why the pocket organizers the PDAs today are

worse than these people that ran conceived of them people that ran were

actually much better than the average programmer a designer of today but in

fact it didn't even matter because the program or designer of today is

egotistical II involved in doing their own invention

even if it's worse and because you the

public don't know about this stuff in the past you don't even complain about it there's an interesting thing to think

of this these videos are still shocking to people today now the same summer I

visit a seymour papert and saw that he was trying to do something really

incredibly interesting which he was trying to get kids to think in these

more powerful forms by getting them to do certain kinds of things with

computers to make simulations on computers of complex ideas and learn the

ideas from the inside by actually constructing them that changed my life

completely that was one of the biggest blue things that ever happened to me and

flying back on the plane to Utah in 68 I

designed this in May when I got back there I made this cardboard model of

what I thought a children's computer would look like which later became known as the Dynabook and we made it Hollow

we filled it with lead pellets to see how heavy you could make it before you didn't want to carry it anymore on the

notion that portability meant you can carry something else too it's not point

five herniation spur block and we

discovered that the maximum weight you could make this machine was two pounds

and I believe that we'll find that when the industry eventually gets around to

making reasonable ones of these things that the maximum weight of those things

will be two pounds so this became kind

of a holy grail now the idea of let's let's not worry about adults anymore

they're hopeless but let's actually try and make something that will help

children go up to be more interesting than the than the average adult is and

the reason we knew this would work is that Gordon Moore had started noticing

that there was a possibility of doubling

the number of components on a silicon chip and having their size and so forth

somewhere between the rate of a factor of two every year and a factor of two

every two years and in fact the interior

jacketed jaggedly lying there is what actually happened so here's the guy who

gave us a 30 year prediction of exactly what was going to happen in silicon you

know what IBM and Dec didn't pay any attention to this that's why they're

almost out of business today but some of

us started thinking about wow all we have to do is go out you know because

that's a factor of two every 18 months or so is about a factor

of a hundred every decade so we thought

gee whiz factor of hundred every decade in ten years we'll be able to have a

machine that has the same computing power for a hundredth of the cost and it

will be one hundredth the size incredible and so we could start

thinking about how long it was going to take to do these various technologies

and here's another thing just to give you yet another understanding of how

long ago these ideas came about the whole idea of virtual reality goes back

to the mid 60s and was actually implemented in the late 60s so here's

the first real reality helmet done by Ivan Sutherland again at the University

of Utah in 1969 and again this is an

idea that's taking and I think doctors especially can understand why being able

to deal with things by immersing yourself inside the computer rather than

having the computer outside of you might be incredibly useful for learning

understanding communicating and so forth

well at this period there were three

ways of thinking about doing interactive computing there was a really expensive

terminal into a mainframe there is my

little desktop computer the Flex machine and then this new idea that I'd had of

the laptop computer and that reminded me

of something I had seen before which was

the history of printing manuscript

Bibles for instance cost millions of dollars and often had precious gems on

them because the gems were nothing compared to the 10 or 15 years it took

to have one of these things copied and made how many people in the room think

they have 372 or more books in home we

all probably do and you might why did he say 372 well its hat it happens that in

the Year 1400 they took a census of the Vatican Library which was the one of the

largest libraries in Europe and it exactly 372 books in it the richest man

in France the brother of the king is about ten times as rich as the King Jean

Duke Du Barry was a bibliophile and had many books created for him and he when

he died the inventory of his library was

154 books this is in 1435 so this first

phase of books and interactive computing

only an institution could own then in

this middle phase came the Gutenberg Bible which looked as much like a

hand-done Bible as possible Gutenberg even had two hundred and fifty three

separate characters in his type font so he could mimic every abbreviation and

style that the Gothic scribes had and as you see there the Gutenberg Bible was

actually hand illuminated so they put it through the press then they would have

people come in who had worked on manuscript books to put illuminations and because they wanted this thing to

look exactly what if they thought a book should be liked and these Gutenberg Bibles if you've seen they're about this

big big heavy bulky things and then

something really interesting happened about fifty years later around the Year 1500 Aldous whose last name was not

pagemaker [Laughter]

Aldus Manutius a Venetian printer

decided that book should be this size fact the size the most books are today

was specified by Aldous and what's

particularly poignant about the story is the reason that books are this size

today and this is something you'll never forget now whenever you look at a book is to realize that Aldous decided they

should be this size by going out into Venice and measuring people's saddlebags

because the first run from his press was called the portable library in the books

now instead of being millions of dollars in these institutional books or sixty

thousand dollars in the case of a Gutenberg Bible were now down to about

$100 a piece and Aldous was actually the

faux mentor of the real revolution in printing now think about this the fifty

years between Gutenberg and Aldous in the history of printing did not count

nothing that happened in those 50 years is like what happened since then guess

where we are in the history of personal computing we are squarely in the middle

trying to as McLuhan said driving faster and faster into the future but only

steering by looking in the rearview mirror and in fact it was that was what

it was the similarity of the Flex machine personal computer to time

sharing terminal it made me realize hey wait a minute we're not even thinking here we're just slavishly reusing forms

there's no reason why a personal computer should look like a time sharing

terminal we just didn't know any more about what they should look like then Gutenberg

knew what a book should look like so that means that any belief systems

you're likely to have generated about computing today are likely to be totally

obsolete over the next ten years because we are now going through this phase

transition to this third form of computing and I back then in the late

60s I gave names these phases or belief systems

institutional personal computing and intimate computing an intimate computer

you can think of as being kind of like part of your clothing something that

would be remarkable only if you didn't have it and one of the things we

realized that if it was going to be portable like your course in California

here will will weave computers into our

t-shirts because again that's another way of thinking about what Moore's law

is all about and we realized that the

the big differentiable factor for intimate computing was going to be

Portability and it meant that the networking was going to be by wireless

and so when you're looking for and this is again they're interesting things

about should you even buy a PDA that can't do wireless communication and the

answer is no you shouldn't bother buying a PDA that can't do Wireless and try and

set what the criteria for that might be because that is when the leverage of

learning this new way of thinking about things starts getting into balance now

once you have the world organized into

separate belief systems you can start asking questions like how do you print and of course the institutional printing

has these fan fold paper personal computers are not mobile so we decided

well we better invent something like a laser printer but the intimate computer

is far enough in the evolution of things

so that we aren't going to want to print and in part because if you think about

what angle Bart was doing there of dealing with hyperlinked stuff you can't print out hyperlink stuff you can't

print out the world wide web and you can't print out dynamic simulations so

all of the things that computers are actually good for and in fact the things that are going to be the biggest impact

in your lives are not printable of course bills are printable

so maybe I am overreaching here but I

certainly remember a couple of years ago I found out that my doctor was still using this green and white stripe

fan-fold paper I wondered what other old techniques he

might still be hanging on to so again

just two asking questions about this we realized that sort of a high-resolution

printing approach to things required us to invent a new kind of computer ethics

in fonts and eventually there'd be enough bits in the world by Moore's law

to take every kind of medium that has ever been used to hold our

representations and to make them all digital so that differentiates that

third area just even how you measure performance response time from a

time-sharing system we measure MIPS or megahertz when we buy personal computers

which is completely irrelevant but the most important way to think about it is

access can you sitting at your computer or with your computer with you out on

the field or in a hospital room will you be able to access all of the different

things that are relevant to what your task is can you bring those things to

your machine will they interoperate with the things that you have the answer

right now is absolutely not you can't do any of those things and the things that

you need to push for are these it's not a question of dealing with information but again being able to contextualize

the information we realized new

interview user interfaces would have to be invented when you only have a few

thousand people learning a system like on an airlines reservation system you

can train them but most of the people are going to use personal computers in

the middle there aren't going to be in a situation to be trained there will be millions of them so the user interface

has to be learn about by them and we realized again that by the time we got

to intimate computing that the computers would be powerful enough to learn the

user all right so this another phase transition is tremendous is going to

happen just to the next few years my friend Nick Nicholas Negroponte

has a couple of powerful images his images from Moore's law which is the

ability to make everything digital said to him that there's going to be incredible implosion between three

fields that don't that didn't 20 years ago talk to each other at all publishing

entertainment and computing they were all going to fuse into one thing another

interesting idea he had that every signal that now traveled through the air

like television was now going to travel

through the ground there's going to be this change abrupt change would all go to cable and fiber and everything that

now travels for the ground like telephones were going to be sent through

the air right now of course this isn't

going to be completely true but the way you get the truth is by completely exaggerated by throwing the quartz lamp

on it - enough to get contrast and his

insight was really good because mobility is part of the destiny of personal

computing as the computers get smaller and smaller as people get more and more mobile there's only so much bandwidth

out in the ether and therefore almost all of it should be used for a mobile

digital whereas television and other kinds of things might as well go into

the ground and there so this is an insight by knee growing to about 20

years ago or so and here's my favorite eager Ponty one which is he said we'll

know it's the future when my left cuff length can communicate with my right

cuff linked by a satellite

now again you could say well that's hyperbolic Nicholas but how many people

here have found themselves at a restaurant table with somebody who else

has a cellular phone anybody have you ever tried calling them

you ever thought of where your call might have gone in order to get to the

other side of the table now it's the important thing for you to understand is

that it is indeed totally possible in even in the next five years for your

left cufflink to communicate with your right cufflink by satellite the same

amount of power that your portable phones put out now is enough power to

get up through the ionosphere to a low-flying satellite and within the next

five years we'll be start buying even the StarTAC of Motorola which is only a

three and a half ounce phone could be fitted to go up into the ionosphere now

of course we might want to have something more noble to do than just having our cuff links talk to each other

but the metaphor here is the powerful one okay now if we go back to where is

the computer you use what we decide to do at Xerox PARC is to implement the

middle one because that's where the technology was and the first proposal

was to do something like this this is 1971 or so then in 1972 we built this

machine which is the first thing to be like a workstation or like the Macintosh

this is the first image you ever put up on it because you you all of a sudden

you could paint on it you can make really nice characters on it you could

have something to look more like printing quality text on it we invented

desktop publishing and screen painting multimedia and the overlapping windows

interface and now if we could go to the

let's go to the the overhead thing here

I'll just show you that by 1975 about 25

people had created this machine I talked about the interface desktop publishing

object-oriented programming pages second laser printing the ethernet and

pierre-pierre client-server computing

these are all the technologies that you're wrestling with now they're more than twenty years old now now what

happened well nobody showed up at the wedding and here's what happens we go

back to Kessler again and notice that

when a technological advance comes along there's two basic ways you can think

about doing this you can try and force it into being something that you already

know like Gutenberg did with the with the printed Bible and that's what has

happened or you can try and embrace it as a blue idea and try and think of

what's new and important about and let's leverage that but this pink way the

staying on the pink I think gives you an idea that the about the same mental

effort as it took to invent the stuff in the first place is required for people

to reinvent it in their mind there's a problem with imagination that's a little

easier to learn calculus than to invent calculus from scratch but only a little

bit easier we have to go through the same changes in process we have to build

the new structures in our head similar to what Newton went through when he

invented it we can be guided but the fact that we can be guided doesn't mean

it's going to be easy and it generally isn't it's much easier to try and first

reject it as Schopenhauer pointed out and then to say oh that's obvious

because now it's been assimilated as being like everything else that's around and then ten years later the original

rejecters claim to have invented it these things get absorbed in and very

little changed takes place so I want to finish the talk by just exploring a

couple of the ways that humans shoot themselves in the foot why can't we

learn things faster and of course this is a talk all of its own but I'll just

show you a couple of interesting notions here's another way of looking at the

goldfish bowl this is one that scientists particularly like it's an interesting fact about

frogs that if you take their natural food which your flies paralyze them with

a little chloroform so they're still alive put the flies around the frog the frog

will starve to death because the frogs nervous system cannot see that these

paralyzed flies are its natural food if

you flip a little piece of oblong shaped cardboard at the Frog it will try and

eat it every time and one way of thinking about this is these little

flies are actually the ideas that we need to have they're around us all the

time but we just can't see them we're always snapping at the cardboard that's

in what our nervous system is willing to let us notice another interesting thing

about some frogs is if you heat up the water slowly enough they will just

remain in there and get cooked this is one of my images of Corporate America

and of course the opposite image of this is also true which is when the

saber-tooth Tiger does appear of getting so frightened

the only reflexive things are done so this the joke is well I don't have to

fix the roof because it isn't raining and when it's raining well I can't fix the roof because it's raining so nothing

happens so both the extremes of this picture are important lots of different

layers of our nervous system are set up to give us completely false information

about the world there are dozens of these illusions where here the

rectangles of course are the same size you're all familiar from your psychology

class as long ago but seeing isn't believing we see what we believe our

beliefs about the world are what

conditions what we're able to see here's a more profound one if you take a look

at this upside-down face here can you

see anything unusual about this what's the teeth or what teeth or side down

okay so let's pretend we're in medical school actually I'm allowed to make these jokes

is like one of my undergraduate majors was molecular biology it happened to be

it was in a small College where the biology majors did exactly the same

track as the pre-meds and so one of the things we got were all

sorts of wonderful pre-med type jokes let's suppose we're in any normal

American institution of learning where it's believed that knowledge is a fluid

that you can transfer a drop by drop from the full teacher vessel to the empty student vessel and of course the

transfer is done in terms of English sentences so an English sentence about

this picture is we've taken a picture of a young girl extracted her mouth and her

eyes turned them upside down put them

back into the picture and then turned the picture upside down I see you

nodding that that sounds reasonable so you should be quite prepared for what it looks like I notice you had a completely

different reaction but I didn't change the amount of information that I'd given

you back I'm going to change this back because I've discovered that nobody will

listen to me when it's on the other way

this is why McDonald's doesn't run print ads saying that if you eat McDonald's

hamburgers you'll become a better-looking person because in language is absurd but in fact what they

do run our ads showing gorgeous looking people eating McDonald's hamburgers and

a different part of your brain does the inference that the advertisers want it

that some psychologist once said to McLuhan why do you keep on making up all

this obscure jargon why don't you read psychology books and use the correct

terms for all of this stuff you're talking about and he says in the 50s he

said all you psychologists only study right rats he says I like to see what advertisers do they are the ones who are

really studying human beings so the

notion here is that even though we think of ourselves as a single identity our

minds are actually made up of separately

acting modules contending for a single body and

this one is actually this particular effect over here is understood quite well and it's actually built into most

mammals this reaction that you have so if you try this out on a dog I suggest

you pick a small one and one of the

biggest problems with teaching is that the parts of your mind that you want to

have learn often don't understand English this is why it's so hard to

teach many things in terms of English sentences because many cases you have to

do it you have to feel it you have to

see it okay so let's roll the next the last cut

here I think everybody will recognize

this go ahead of one of the most unforgettable news stories ever reported

the scene Midland Texas 1987 another

yard several youngsters had been playing

here and one of them 18 month old Jessica McClure has toppled down into a

narrow unused uncapped well she is

wedged in there 22 feet below the ground dozens of rescue workers are frantically

trying to get her out but it's a long difficult job hundreds of neighbors are

watching praying Jessica's teenaged parents chip and sits

on the floor stand there looking very young and very scared

what's your prayer [Music]

the media moves in like an army of course the biggest problem is the

rescuers if everybody is everybody remember this it's wonderful I've been

able to use this over and in Europe and even in the Pacific Rim the entire world

sat glued to their television sets for the 58 and a half hours she was in that

well she's in there for more than two days and they finally got her out and

here's an interesting thing in those in those 58 and a half hours that all this

activity was going on according to the World Health Organization 105 thousand

children died of easily present preventable causes for lack of water for

lack of a dollar inoculation and a fact

there's about 10 million children die each year a holocaust worth of children

each year from easily preventable cause now I think you are aware of this but

this is a perfect example of the difference in human beings Minds between

a real disaster in which people will

risk their lives for perfect strangers and gang together and jump into rivers

and lift cars off people go into burning buildings and wean the big the enormous

true disasters of our time which aren't yet happening like the World Health

Organization estimates 50 million people in the Pacific Rim alone are going to

die of AIDS in the next 10 years and 35

million in Africa in spite of the fact that there's treatment for it so one of

the things you could say about us human beings is we have incredibly puny

imaginations and especially we cannot

look at an exponential curve that represents what it happens in an

epidemic and have it the enormity the concrete enormity that would cause us to

muster ourselves into action to leap into our mind vividly enough in order

for us to do something because it's one of the hallmarks of civilized societies

that we have developed some of that imagination we plan a lot more than

traditional societies do and B we plan because we do have that we are starting

to develop some of that but I think the lack of vividness of imagination

is probably the thing that holds most of us back from dealing with a new idea

when it comes we just can't imagine what

it's going to be like one of the ways of dealing with us by the way is to take

yourself 15 years into the future and try and imagine things in which it would

be ridiculous for them not to be there just from judging what I for instance

Moore's law is going to go on for another 15 years that means every 18

months the computing power will that you have on your desk right now will cost

half as much or the size of the computer will be half that size carry that out

for 15 years and you have something that you can put into a ring there will be

many times more powerful than what you have on your compiled a and just try and

imagine what it would be like for that to be there and how ridiculous it would

be if it didn't happen in fact it is going to happen so we have this little

keyhole the keyhole we can see something

in there it could be something simple and exciting like a little girl dropping

into a well or it could be something really boring like the start of an epidemic we have to open up the keyhole

and again this is another way of thinking about let's look at the blue stuff as well as the pink stuff we are

great problem solvers this is one of the hallmarks of our civilization a problem

solving is one of the worst things to have as a central goal too many

mosquitoes let's dump the DDT in but in fact it wasn't a problem it was a system

all sorts of other things are actually at work there and we wind up with

something much worse than we have in fact there are three general ways of

solving problems this first one is the kind of the drunkards walk the random walk so I think of the executive way of

solving problems which is you can get two from A to B if you walk around

randomly enough and eventually you get there and that's so much fun that

exactly was keep on doing it and it's also an interesting

explanation for why executives want B to be so close to a right because random

walks work much better the closer B is to a now as problem solvers going to

college we learn to reduce the differences between us and our goal this

is the general American way of doing things it's also a disaster because

what's usually going on is that there are enormous Grand Canyon's that we

can't see the world is not two-dimensional it's actually three-dimensional so they're Grand

Canyon's the huge mountains and if we just plot towards the goal tell you an

interesting story Fineman was convinced to work on the atomic bomb project

because it looked like hitler was going to develop an atomic bomb and he tells

the story that he was jumping around

with everybody else when they tested the first atomic bomb and then all of a sudden they looked at each other and

realized that the war in Europe had been over for six months the sub goal had

become the goal the solution of the problem had become the problem now the

way things really work well is the bottom one in which you have to go away

from the goal until you find a superhighway superhighway is called a

powerful idea you get on the superhighway it will take you over very

close to B and lots of other interesting places and you get off not going away

from the goal in order to find the superhighway is called scientific

research it is the hardest thing to explain to potential funders why they

should fund going away from the goals in order to get these super hires in spite

of the fact that everything interesting that has happened over the last four

hundred years has been from finding the super highways here's one of my favorite

ones it's a hand axe and you notice that the one on the left is designed so that

when you hit with it you grab it from the bottom when you hit with it it also hits you the more you chop with it the

more it chops up your hand then sometime later people invented a modified hand

axe which had a blunt ER end that didn't chop up your hand as much when you chop things with it and I wonder if anybody

in this room knows what the period of time between these two hand axe

as was anybody got a guess

okay two-hundred thousand two hundred thousand years but I'm sure that in many

villages somebody was chopping with this

thing and said man this hurts I'll just

I'll just whack off the end of this thing and this is much better in the

persons chopping with it and some elder in the tribe came along and said what are you doing this person would be

ejected from the tribe immediately or burned at the stake or something so one

way of thinking about where we are is that we're essentially cave people

carrying briefcases around our brains are roughly the same brains as far as

anybody can tell us we had so long ago and whenever we act like a cave person

in face of these new contexts we lose

okay so here's the last idea how can we

get around this well in any challenge we

bring some ability or skill when the challenge and skill are pretty much

matched we have this nice condition is called flow everybody has experienced

this the time seems to pass very quickly the problem is is that the balance

between challenge and skill is a very

narrow one very chancy if the challenge is a little bit more than the skill we

start getting anxious if the skill is

more than the challenge we start getting bored and the problem is that most of

the good learning that we do is done in this place where we're in this flow State

so one of the ways we can deal with

places that are anxious is to increase safety that allows the flow area that

means we can take on more challenge than we have skill for and that allows us to

do more learning but the most important one I think the hardest one for

Americans to deal with is that what to do and we have more skill than the

challenge the answer is we have to increase our awareness we have to and

one of the ways of doing that is increasing our stead cents over what it is that we're

actually doing this is what allows us to widen out and getting get one of these aha and ahhs so if you want to get those

terrific ideas you have hiding behind your good pink ones the best weapon for

it is the one between your ears providing your that weapon is loaded

thank you [Applause]

thank you very very much dr. kay that concludes this morning session on to the

focus sessions thank you [Music]

good morning ladies and gentlemen would

you please take your seats welcome to the association's final

plenary session our presider this morning is the president of the

association dr. Jordan Cohen