Alan Kay talk at Coors Television (late 1986 or early 1987)

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play our guests I delighted to see so many faces that I don't recognize
judging by the number of phone calls that I've received in the past few days
I know that there's that our universities and colleges are well
represented here as well as one of the
gifted and talented programs from northglenn I wanted to make a comment
about the donuts out in the hall those are intended to stay you over until
lunchtime those really intended as a lunch for those of you who haven't been
here before I just like to say a couple words about our program our program is
intended for two things first thing it's intended to be educational and to allow
us to look at what the future could be and the second thing it's intended as a
networking forum and I'd like to
challenge every one of you here at Coors to meet someone new and exchange some of
your ideas our speaker this morning many
of you have had an opportunity to hear him last year while he was here he's a
graduate at the University in Boulder he
is easy to track you pick up almost any
electronic magazine throughout the year and you'll see his name mentioned he's
on the forefront of technology I would like you to help me welcome dr. Alan Kay
Alan
so discovered it's not very easy to stride confidently down the aisle with a
full cup of coffee Thanks well last year
when I was here we talked about what I
think computers really are which are not
gadgets for number crunching or even
things made out of silicon but to all of
us that use them computers are to us what appears on the screen what we can
move around in other words computers are really a theatrical experience as we use
them today even people who design them
really don't know what's going on inside except abstractly you have a machine
that can execute six million instructions per second even when it
appears to be doing nothing then it's very very difficult to understand what
the heck is going on in there and so in order to understand computers we've been
forced to find simpler ways of relating
to them in one of the ways that we worked out at xerox parc many years ago
was a way every eight relating to them as though there were a stage that actors
could appear on the actors could wear costumes the actors could be influenced
and that off stage was all the other stuff the scene shop and so forth that
you didn't want to see most of the time and that what you had was not reality
that we think of in the objective world but the kind of reality that we have in
the theater in other words in a theatrical presentation you can show
magical things and the audience will go
along with it as long as you don't violate expectation so one of the things
you always do in theaters to try and let people know in the first few minutes
what the rules of the game are and if you don't violate those they'll go along
with whatever you do the worst thing you can ever do in theater is at some crux
moment when the heroine is in trouble and the train is bearing down on her is
to go to the next scene and she appears
without it here ruffled and she said all I got out of that one fairly easily the
audience's won't stand for that because a rabbit out of the Hat has been pulled
it wasn't part of the original premise that's why Superman always has to have
kryptonite if you have an all-powerful being without any weaknesses you don't
have a show so what we did at xerox was
to work on one part of this theater idea and it was the part of the theater where
the actors on stage we're pretty much like puppets in other words you as the
audience move these actors around on stage and so you had something also that
could be compared to the top of your desk the things the structures inside
the computer the processes that are going on were objectified into things
that appear to you to be like objects and of course I'm talk the modern
equivalent of what we did at Xerox PARC is the Macintosh how many people have
used a Macintosh are familiar with that
well that that is the idea where whatever it is inside has been projected
into a much simpler representation that you can move around as though it were a
real thing and the movement and the
influence of these things is tried to try to be made as uniform as possible
across applications so we have this interesting thing that happens on the
Macintosh is a remarkable number of people who use the Macintosh have never
opened a manual and in fact the if you
think about it that only is really good if everything important about the
Macintosh can be figured out without the manual we know that isn't true I
discovered when my secretary has learned the Macintosh I was really intrigued
that they never opened the manual at all in order they were able to do documents and everything else but
they never learned for instance about extending selections you know in the
Macintosh that's done with the shift key and a click and there's no way of
finding out that that works on the Macintosh without opening the manual so
you see if you do a system that's easy to use you have to go all away with it
the next versions of the Macintosh will actually try and do away with the manual
since people hardly use it now in the few little things that are not totally
obvious will actually be part of the user interface to be found out so what
we get from this is a way of dealing
with computer objects that works until
the resources available to you gets to
be about 100 if you realize that the
being able to browse for instance without having to know the names of different files and so forth is
wonderful we all remember where we put a book at home by its position now it
works perfectly well until you get several thousand books and it starts
breaking down the same thing happens with this objectification idea on the
Macintosh is as it gets hooked up to a network and as we discovered at Xerox
PARC ten years ago that this simplistic
way of looking at communicating with computers starts to break down right now
it's not terribly important because networking is something that the micro
industry is just starting to discover in five years from now it's going to be
critical and the I predict that the
whole way of dealing with computers is going to completely change from what now
I would term manipulation you have tools
you use your hands you move things around as though they are real it's
going to change to management in other
words I'll give you an example today
there are slightly more than 10,000
differ databases that you can dial into via the
phone now most most personal computers the largest database you can have is
about two thousand records so most personal computers like the IBM PC and
the Macintosh can't even have a database that has one record for every resource
that you can now dial in on the phone how are we going to find out there might
be something useful there when the resources get up into the 50s and
hundreds of thousands we now have a completely different problem of getting
to things that might be of use to us and at Xerox PARC we started thinking about
this problem and decided that what would
probably happen is we would change from this way of dealing with things directly
to something more like managing projections of ourselves slaves if you
will of the computer everybody would love to have slaves but we we don't want
them to be human beings anymore but we'd like to have servants around that can
carry out extensions of our purpose I'm
going to show you some examples of those so for instance one of the things that
we did at MIT five years ago was a system that you could you had an agent
this agent could learn your preferences
for news of various kinds that Co system
was called news peak and over a period
of some weeks it would learn your preferences for news in a variety of ways and every night it would spend all
night long logging into different news networks would log into AP would log
into the New York Times that would log into Nexus and what it would be doing is
looking for things that it thought you might be interested in it wouldn't be
just looking directly for things you might like to read about plane crashes
or invasions of SK Afghanistan or things like that but also will be looking for
wild card things things of general interests and things conform to your reading patterns and in
the morning when you come down you would wind up with on your screen with
something like your personal version of USA Today because this agent that we did
at MIT would read these articles because
it had to read them in some fashion in order to retrieve them but saw a name
like mitterrand it would look on a disk
that we had that had 42 thousand pictures of famous people and would find
a picture of MIT Iran not the last one it showed you of mitterrand we got this
from The Associated Press and it would use that and if there was a place named
like Paris France it would go to another
disk that we got from JP donnelly and find a set of maps so you could see
where things were related so in other words it was doing color related things
as well as just retrieving an article the whole thing was put together and
related so that topics that were
happening over in this article were related dynamically with topics over
here and that's what you'd see each morning now it also looked at your
electronic mail so for instance the headline in your personal newspaper
sometimes would read instead of the Russians have invaded Afghanistan again
it might read your three o'clock meeting has been cancelled because the agent
might have decided that that was the important thing of the day that you had
to know about there might be a sidebar that said your children slept well last
night in other words news what news is
something that has lost its meaning to us it's hard for us to remember that the
the original reasons for newspapers back
before the telegraph was actually for pamphleteering which is actually quite a
different way of conveying things pamphleteering is an extension of the
book and most newspapers back before the Telegraph were extensions they're
essentially fast books or a way of getting essays and thoughts about
various things and it is remarkable to realize that our Constitution was
actually designed and debated in public in the New York newspapers so a
collection of essays called Federalist Papers written by John Jay Hamilton and
Madison and these were public this is not something that wasn't thing these
are published as they wrote them in the paper so that all of the citizens could
read them now we relegate them to something that we're supposed to learn
in school but back then that was news it was the Telegraph that fragmented the
news into what it is today and once you
have repeatable you have this kind of journey but once you decide that a
newspaper or magazine has to appeal around a regular basis it requires the
people who do that to create news all
right news as always things are always going on but in fact it doesn't now when
you have to fill space it doesn't matter whether things are interesting or not because the space must be filled and now
news has been created as an idea as electronic media is going to redefine
news again news is once again going to mean those things that are of interest
to you so it's personal news rather than interest to people in general it's a
whole different ball so that's an example of an agent the agent partially
decides on what to get for you on the basis of watching you read the newspaper
so every couple of weeks it may say to you I noticed you haven't been reading
about terrorist attacks anymore are you no longer interested to know should I
stop retrieving you say oh no I really i still love reading about crime and
violence please retrieve that for me I just haven't had time to devote to that
so now the point of this is that although it's quite possible to do what
I just described to you by hand there's nothing to prevent you from going in
each night and spending 12 to 18 hours
logging into all of those networks that's what people do today and you can
find all of those things and if you have a long checklist of all the things that you're interested in that would give you
a set of keys with but you're not going to do it we're going to do it
and in fact so the message of networking is that we have to go from direct
manipulation to indirect management and the difficulty with this as we
discovered building this news peak agent at MIT five years ago was that there is
nothing in artificial intelligence that is it all helpful we built this as an
expert system that is the artificial intelligence technology it's available
for dealing with something like this and we found out a lot about expert systems
and most of what we found out we didn't really want to know and I came out of
the experience feeling that expert systems were the designer genes of computer science in other words they're
a phrase that conjures up much more than what they can do in fact expert systems
to me are just large programs and rule-based systems are just a way of
organizing large programs in a way that doesn't get you into trouble for a while
but as far as having any overlap with
the idea of intelligence expert systems have none and the characterization I had
of them was that they were like termites now you probably know that termites are
the only species on earth besides mankind that build structures out of the
true arch or maybe you didn't know that but they do and termite Hills and
Australia particular amazing there are on the order of 10 million termites
living in a hill the hills are air-conditioned and the air conditioning
is not gratuitous it is something that is part of what it means to build a
termite Hill and whenever you get four
or five termites together they immediately start building arches these
termites are these honeycomb structures of true catenary arches like our Gothic
cathedrals are built out of and are completely marvelous they're very few
mammals that you could compare to what termites and other social insects are
able to do but in fact they aren't intelligent they don't learn and
everything that termites can do is built into their nervous system wired into
their d na now you I think you may also know
about insects as they have this remarkable structure that insect brains
are derived embryologically different from ours and the bug in I can use that
expression when talking about insects in the design of insects is that the the
ganglia from which insect brains are derived happens to surround the
esophagus okay because it didn't matter
when there were worms but as they got smarter and smarter and got bigger and
bigger brains you have this remarkable thing that the smarter and insect gets
the less able it is to eat and that in
fact is why spiders which are quite smart insects have to dissolve their
food externally they digest the food first and then suck it up as a kind of
soup because their esophagus is almost closed and so nature in order to get us
which we think of as being lot smarter than insects it's not clear yet we've
only been around for a few million years and they've been around for 350 but we
think of ourselves as being much smarter than insects because we can learn things in order to have a brain that can learn
Nature had to back its way completely out of that pathway of in vertebrates
and start over again it had to go to
organisms much simpler than the in vertebrates in order to eventually get
mammals and so what I got out of this experience was G in the 50s the
artificial intelligence people claimed that they would have superhuman intelligences in fact there isn't any
philosophical reason why a some arbitrary computer in the future can't
be much smarter than us right there just
because a brick when you look at it is
fairly obvious of how you build a wall and people have figured out how to build
dog houses but took a thousand years to go from Romanesque architecture to the
gothic and I was using the same bricks so in any comp
flex organization of things architecture dominates the material so and the the
people who work with computers in the 1950s realized very early that there are
no real limitations to what could be built out of a computer and therefore
there is no reason to suspect the computers couldn't be much smarter than us so that's what they claimed and I had
not the faintest idea how to do it nor do they today so in the 60s they decided
to modify these claims and said well computers will be as smart as humans and
that again is philosophically possible but in fact that didn't happen then the
military started wanting the results and so they said well we'll do expert
systems they're smart as termites and in
fact we've been able to do some pretty good termites in the 70s now I claim
that in the 80s what we want to be studying along these lines are mammalian
mentalities for instance if in two or three years we could do something that
was a an honest squirrel that you could
put out into an invite com Plex environment and it could complete the
learning laid down by its DNA and survive and move along and make more of
its kind and so forth that would be an absolute triumph because there is no
system today that you can look at and said if we did this twice as well or ten
times as well we would get a squirrel in other words what I'm saying is that
there's a qualitative gap between the kinds of architectures that we're
building now for what we call intelligent systems and what we actually need so what I'm going to talk to you
about for most of this talk is an
attempt that we're making at that's now being funded by Apple and is involving
lots of interesting people about how to find out something a little bit more
about the way mentalities actually can function before I do that I'd like to
I'd like to do it sort of as an analogy to some of the work that we did at Xerox
PARC many years ago in order to do that I first have to warn
everybody I've discovered it people used
to complain when I gave talks that I would whip IBM too much but in fact so I
made up the sign to warn everybody that if you don't like hearing IBM jokes now
is a good time to leave of course the
first IBM joke is that you can't do this slide on IBM equipment it's done on an
apple laserwriter now one of the funny
things about difference between
designers and problem solvers is that the designers often don't know what
problem they're working on problem solvers usually have goals that they're
trying to reach and designers usually have nothing better than directions
directions are kind of fun because they outlast goals they're stronger than
goals they're like a magnetic field or what a salmon smells when he was working
his way up stream it doesn't know where he's going but he can tell when he's
closer and in order to work with areas
in the future where we don't know what the answers are going to be and we don't want to prejudice the what we're trying
to do we try to come up with simple metaphors the one we came up with long
ago at Xerox PARC was this notion of a pencil
that instead of a desk or instead of a
car we could think of a computer as being our information vehicle just
pretty much what it is today we thought gee a pencil is a fantastic information
medium we wait until kids are 18 to
teach driving and we don't want to wait until they're 18 in order to teach
reading and writing although it seems like that's happening these days but
generally we'd like to have the the dominant ways of communicating in our
society reach people as young as
possible pencil is so portable you can carry other things too all right you
can't say that about too many computers point 5 herniation spur block is not
portability so one of the tests we had
for is it a personal computer back in nineteen seventy is would you be willing
to do anything so mundane as to write down your grocery list on it take it in
to the supermarket and be willing to walk out with two bags of groceries okay
in other words the right now almost all systems including laughs computers would
fail that test that gets this how many people have their computer with them
right now I rest my case
that's really when technology starts being used for mundane things that it's
inserted it sells into our lives I was really amazed when i went to xerox in
1970 discovered that thirty eight percent of their domestic copy revenues
were from outlaw copying like party announcements and picnics and so forth
it was a large part of their business and they claimed that the other
sixty-two percent was largely there because of the thirty eight percent in
other words when xerography becomes a way of life you do it casually and thus
you have to be able to this is something that people never understood in order to get people to xerox at all you have to
break down the barriers and one of the ways to do that is to be able to use it
for other things and official purposes now unfortunately instead of this pencil
what our industry the best our industry has been able to come up with so far as
something like this which is also a way of writing a letter you can jackhammer a
letter into the asphalt of the street you can pry up the asphalt put it on a
truck and carry it across town and deliver your message it is definitely an
information manipulator and of course it's painted blue for good reason now
come on you know I'm talking to speaking the truth so in other words the it's not
a question of being able to formally satisfy the ability to impress
information into some medium that's not what counts what counts is what the how
many barriers they actually are to doing it casually because it's only when it's
done casually that the thing starts modifying our ways of doing thinking one
of the interesting things about this is not this is more of an observation than
a slam at IBM but the few observed
people using IBM computers they do not sit for at them for any great length of
time and the reason is that the display is not good enough to keep them there
without eye strain and doesn't matter whether it's a monochrome display when you display
light characters on a black background we discovered it Xerox long ago that
your eye dark adapts so when you move from that that mostly dark display down
to the light papers that you're looking at for their spread around your eye
lighted apps in fact what's going on is a constant change in your iris when you
look at a display like that that's why the the Macintosh and that as we're the
machines at Xerox PARC flood the screen with light it's the key that display was
designed in 1972 at Xerox to allow
people to sit at it for six and seven hours at a time without any eye strain
and it's only when you're sitting at the thing for that wrong you start using it
for what it's really good for which is thinking other slide that I like to show
just so we understand a little bit about where we are I used to be a molecular
biologist before I got into this racket and once a few years ago when I had
nothing better to do I decided to look at an intestinal bacterium ecoli we have
millions of them in our digestive tract and they're rather small there about 15
hundredth the size of a typical mammalian cell typical body cell and in
our body and if you take that ecoli and
model it as an information system which it is and leave out electrons as you
model it only at the level of which it really represents information then one
of them contains 100 billion bytes that's a lot that's 12 million 8k games
cartridges
fifty thousand to megabyte Lisa systems for people in the humanities 600 Louvre
paintings had a resolution so high you can't you can't see the pixels that's a
lot and you can tell what company I was working for that i showed the president
of atari this one day and I said there are 12 million 8k games cartridges in
one ecoli and he looked at me and said how can I get some of them e.coli nice I
said you can either use a feather or looking or look at yesterday's stock
reports the point is that even though
there's been a fair amount of relative progress in the last 40 years we aren't
even close in dealing with computer
stuff to building systems that are anywhere near as complex as some of the
simplest living things we don't know very much about dynamic architecture one
of the things that's true about living things for instance is that they're not very fragile pull out a few molecules
from an e coli it's not going to care it
will keep on going because it's enormously redundant and it's designed
to keep on function you pull out a few bites from the average code on any kind
of pc and old crash there's no redundancy there at all and so what
we're dealing with right now are very carefully poised houses of cards they're
just balanced up by the applications programmers and shipped out with the
hope that they will work so there's many
long ways to go now let me show you
very quickly I think I have to go up on the podium here get my remote control
let's see I think these to turn it on yeah
now this whoops this is an example of
what I claim is the first personal computer goes back to nineteen sixty two
and this is an amazing machine that
actually had virtual memory on it on
those tapes about 2,000 of them were built and mostly for bio medical
technicians and when Dex saw this machine deck was a young company when
this machine was done they said boy what a great way of building small mainframes
but nobody's used to looking at display so we'll make that an option and nobody
knows about virtual memory so we'll put files on those tapes and out of this
machine the mini computer was born but it's sobering to realize that the good
idea that of personal computing was right here and nobody could see it back
in nineteen back in 1962 here's the
first personal computer I did called the
flex machine it was done in 1967 this is a picture of it on its own display they
can sort of see what display graphics were like this machine had two
interesting characteristics first it was a great coffee warmer had had 700 they
didn't really have integrated circuits back then just barely and had 700 little
chips in it and put out an enormous amount of heat the other thing it had
was a very powerful language on it that I designed that completely repelled
every user we ever stuck on the machine
and that was the first time in my life that I realized that graduate students
and other people were different the graduate students love this it was
incredibly powerful and we started dimly
getting the idea that actually it wasn't enough to just have the strict form and
build in power that there had to be some way to access it also the same year of
1968 this gadget appeared which is the
world's first flat panel display this
has been a technology that has never gotten to us in any practical form but
it goes back a long ways and we realized back then there was only going to be a matter of years before all the hardware
that took cubic feet in computers back then would be able to be put on the back
of something the size of a notebook that's where this idea of personal
computing really was born of something that you could carry around casually we
did this machine at xerox parc in order to study how all this worked this is the
alto computer and this is the forerunner of the leaves in the macintosh it's 1972
it's about twice the speed of the macintosh we built about 2,000 of these
dark spent somewhere in excess 100 million dollars on this experiment back
then they really wanted to see what it would be like what computing in the
1980s would be like and so they were willing to spend any amount of money to
find out and they hired people who are willing to sit down we just simply
anticipated what the computing power would be like in the 1980s and then built a bunch of them using 1970s
technology so this is the first bitmap
screen this picture is taken in 1972 and I already mentioned why we decided to go
black on white it's the same reason that we use paper black on white in that you
want to keep your eyes adapted to what the ambient lighting actually
is windows were invented at that same
time in order to allow access thing to
things but also to greatly magnify the display area and finally almost all the
work that we did at xerox parc was done for children this is a very important
one of the things we discovered that when we were trying to design this stuff for adults there's always a place where
the design process got hard and we would say to ourselves oh what the heck we'll
send them to training school for two weeks because that's what people do with
the dots when something gets hard we'll send them and get training and for the
children though we didn't want to send them the training school they're already
suffering and school enough so we wanted to give them easy access so they didn't
have to learn and in fact during the last several years of the experiment
with children we work with about 900 children over a period of four years the
last several years we didn't teach the children to program at all we just left
the stuff materials lying around and they learned it on their own I'd like to
show you giving an example of a couple
of things that some children did how many people have used mac draw not mac
paint but mac draw it's the one where the drawing the object nature of the the
things that you draw is retain so you can move things around and make copies
of things and move them that is an applications program done by some
talented people at Apple and our mode today is that we go to a store and we
buy a program written by somebody else that's called an application then we use
whatever allows us to do what I like to show you is this example
here's a similar system this is done in 1975 and I think I he got her off I
switched over like that program you the pointing device called a mouse well you
see a little handle there she has a menu down the lower right-hand corner there
she's changed the color exist in the quite gentle and allowed five sizes and
colors to change it will you know I
think to realize about this is that this
applications program was written by a 12 year old girl she wrote the application
program herself and she wrote it after less than three months of programming
and the program itself was less than a page long less than 50 lines she had to
write in order to do this thing from scratch and the system was not set up
beforehand with the building blocks of graphics this is a scratch program one
of the first instances in history when an actual tool was done by a novice user
the idea that system to a drawn something every column is damned intuitively because they already know
about drawing in school in order to
design a business of them however Susan had to gain a fairly deep symbolic
understanding of some of the semantics of drawing even more important she
enjoyed the graphs the very powerful notion which have something to do with
inventing comprehensive models that not only capture her desires and ideas that
would also run
here's another example this was done by a 15 year old boy this is about 80 lines
of code about a page and a half he was a
interested in ham radio and he hated to draw a circuit diagram so that one of
the first programs he wrote was this tool to allow him to make circuit
diagrams you can see his hand on the mouse here again this is a from scratch
program the menu of shapes is down below and you see every once in a while where
the cursor is a pop-up menu like that will appear where he's put tools that he
uses very often where he doesn't want to reach for them so he has things like
open and closed dots you can pick up things like he's picking up picking up a
battery here and he can rotate it and position it I particularly like this one
as an example of novice user programming because less than 10 years before this
was done a PhD thesis was awarded for a system that wasn't as good we felt that
there was some hope the reason I showed
this is this is the logical extension of where we are today over the next three
to five years it's the next step in the
short term in personal computing for people is going to be easy ways for
people to tailor and build their own vertical applications you see sort of
very messy and annoying attempts today
in the form of keyboard macros and 123
and other abortions like that the the idea behind them is good namely that
people should be able to customize and capture their actions and be able to play them back later it's just that the
the people who designed it had no idea how important it was and how important
it was in order to make customization
really easy and understandable the next round of systems will see in the next
three to five years will be like this
systems will not be written in machine code anymore they'll be written in a
very high level language this is these children were programming in small talk
which is an object one of the first completely object-oriented languages and
the size of the code you have to write to get something in Smalltalk compared
to say Pascal or C is about a factor of 80 and this allowed we discovered the
children especially most novice users let me stop this because it they're just
further examples we discovered that most novice users could program and could
understand their programs as long as the programs weren't larger than one visual
field and that meant practically back then about two pages or about a hundred
lines of program and we discovered by experiments that it didn't matter what
kind of language it was whether it was a very low level language like basic or
medium level language like logo or a high level language like small talk that
there is a way of teaching each of these but in fact the ability the short-term
memory ability of novices was much stronger than the level of the language
that in fact one of the differences between a novice and expert ism is how
much they have to use their short-term memory to do to in place of what experts
are able to use their long-term memory and chunky that got is very interested
in how people's minds work let's see if
I can go on oh I've everything's fine i think maybe i just turned it off but let
me go forward this way
the slot of the slide time oh great thanks well this the legend on the slide
actually says how people's minds work and I can tell you that when we started
this at Xerox PARC we really did not want to go into psychology we what we
were hoping to be able to do is to just simply sit down and have a few bright
ideas and have them be right and be able to implement them and then we would have
succeeded but in fact what we discovered that we had not the faintest idea of
what was going on inside of people's heads and here's an example of why we're
confused if you look at this for a while you'll see there's something wrong with
this picture how many people see it okay
I was I was very taken by gave this talk
in japan this summer and it was
wonderful that the Japanese took just as long as we did to see that but what's
wrong with this picture mouth is upside
down what else the eyes are upside down okay here's what it looks like right
side up now notice the huge difference
even though you knew it was wrong before noticed a huge difference in reaction
here let me we go back there we go okay
so this is excite swear to you this is exactly the same whoops this is it
exactly the same picture
ok now I have to move I have to move it back because people won't listen to me
when it's the other way now this
illustrate it happens that this is a good illustration and a talk of
something that's very complex to understand and that is it is an illusion
in fact the theatrical illusion that we all live in that reality is objective
and seamless but in fact the truth is
that we all live in a dream and hallucination of our own devising and
you can start to see some of the seams in this dream by certain kinds of visual
illusions this is one that is understood very well so on the under right hand side of the brain where facial
recognition is done there are two areas more than an inch apart they're
contributing to what you see here one of them is the thing that allows you to see
faces and clouds it's just generally good at recognizing face like things and
it's reporting an upside-down face like thing it's also this area that scares
children when they're around five and six years old in the Twilight so
everything starts looking like monsters and what it's seeing is it's picking up
shadow configurations that are things like but are not human like so it's
saying this is a face like thing and about an inch away is a patch of brain
tissue that say only cares about eyes and mouth and it's saying that's an okay
mouth and those are okay eyes so there's very little conflict here upside down
with the eye is a mouth guys say that's fine no problem go to this one and the
face face guy is saying that's a right-side up face like thing and the
eyes and mouth guy is saying something is very wrong here
and we can imagine why we might have that reaction because an expression like
that might mean you're going to die in the next 10 seconds and in fact all
mammals this is something that's not peculiar to humans all mammals will have
that reaction to that picture if you'd like to try it out on a dog I suggest
you pick a small one so in other words
what I'm working up to here is the idea that inside our skull is not a not
something as they believed in Washington the perception is reality this is a
frightening statement when you think about it but something much more like
Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy which has the great line reality is frequently
inaccurate in other words what what is
going on here another good way is since the this is this is a good crowd to talk
to you'll go along with anything right so put hold up your left hand with your
thumb up like this if you have any if you have two quarters in your pocket you
can pick a quarter up and hold it but if something is pretty good and then take
your other hand and hold it about half way as close to halfway as you can
measure between the two you can put it on axis but it's easier to compare if
you just hold it a little bit off axis and look at the relative size of the thumbs or the quarters and what most
people will see is that the further away thumb is about 80% the size of the close
one right on your retina the further away thumb is one half the size in other
words what you're seeing is not what's there we don't see what's there we see
what we are and there are dozens of examples of that that what we're seeing
is actually a recreation of partly
queued in by what's actually out there but mostly queued in by what we've learned if we were a primitive society
right now we would not be able to see perspective very well meta evil art
there is no perspective because in meta
evil art which is a primitive non self conscious society you're a member of the
community not an individual and when the community looks at the building they
look at it from all angles at once and when they draw that building they draw
it as it is so they draw all what all walls as being the same height because
that's what they are same way as children draw a table showing all four
legs because that's what it is seeing it from all angles at once it's only when
you are in a society like ours sprung from the Renaissance where we think of
ourselves as individuals and having individual points of view that something like perspective could be invented in
fact perspective was invented for the first time ever in a solid way less than
40 years after the printing press became available and those were not cuenta that
was not just a coincidence one cause the other the book that you can take with
you d tribe Eliza's you because it's
something you can go off you for the first time ever in history you could learn something without being in a room
with a bunch of other people and have it be a social event that's where individualism comes from and that's why
perspective was invented when it was these things are really mysterious
because our society seems like the only reasonable one that there is but in fact
most of the things that we think are inevitable our product of of the culture
that we grew up in so I'm dealing with
they move off this so dealing with
people oh I'm sorry I went backwards
there we go so dealing with these issues means that what we're dealing with is
not something simple but we're actually dealing with multiple mentalities that
work inside people's heads that we found very confusing
and we got very interested in three of these
we all know about I think we all know about the French psychologist Piaget now
poj thought that children went through
three major stages one was a doing stage when they're very young an object is to
grab it a whole is to dig it in other words objective reality is in the
actions necessary to make tactile contact with it in some way later
there's a stage which is very visual that's one where you know in the PGA
experiment we use pour from the squat glass into the tall thin one everybody's
heard of that right children in this stage will say there's more water in the
tall thin glass because it looks that way and then around 11 or 12 children
shift into a symbolic stage where they start using facts and logic in order to
drive things this is the first stage in which you can decouple yourself from
current reality now in a wonderful
series of experiments in the 1950s Jerome Bruner showed something very
startling that these things that Piaget thought were phases of development were
actually completely separate mentalities all working at the same time there was a
change of dominance so one of the experiments he did was to take a child
who would say that there was more water in the tall thin glass and pour that
water and then he'd immediately cover up the tall thin glass and the child would
say oh but there must be the same amount of water because where could it go and
Brenda would take it away and the kid would look at the glass and he would say
oh but there must be more look at it and Brenda would cover it up again and the
kid would say but there must be the same amount of water because where could it go so if you have any 10 year olds you'd
like to torment
this is a great way to do it because what Brynner was doing is bouncing this kid back and forth that he was showing
that the child was dominated by this mentality but in fact the other one was
functioning and it was by preventing the kid from seeing what was going on that
the kid could start using this in fact this is a very powerful way of learning
things and Berner came up with some curriculum ideas that said it's a great
idea to be able to learn things in this order the same order that recapitulates
our own development and thus we have more than one mentality to fall back on
when our symbolic fact ridden way of doing things fails great mathematician
Hadamard did a study of the 100 most creative mathematicians in the world
which being French he included himself in the list in fact he was and so he
interviewed all these people who were friends of his asking them how do you do
your thing and only a few of the mathematicians i think it was three
claimed that they use mathematical symbology at all this is nothing to
think about when you have children in school and what they're being taught is
only mathematical symbology the under great mathematicians in the world don't
use mathematical symbology because that is a way of expressing mathematics not
doing it they all claim to have visual
interaction with the ideas and an amazing thirty percent of these 100
mathematicians including Einstein said they had tactile sensations Einstein
said I have feelings of a kinesthetic or muscular type so Einstein did
mathematics by feeling he could feel the
multi-dimensional space as he was dealing with so we see here an
illustration of the cliche that genius is the ability to recapture childhood it
will but another way of looking at it is what these people were that we think of
as supremely creative we're doing is using these other mentalities that are
mostly shut down in most adults and these mentalities have completely
different rules and this is the key to my talk today this is the most
important idea this one is Aristotelian
it loves things like a is not not a everybody learned that in college right
a is not not a thing can't be itself and something else at the same time sounds
sounds logical very logical this one has
a completely different set of rules in the visual arts the graphic arts
figuring ground exchange that's a is not a the thing in its opposite are the same
this is like alchemy here good and evil darkness and light okay in other words
the visual mentality is one that groups
not by logical structures but by
abstract similarities those similarities are figurative rather than logical so
this this area is a very mushy place to live right because almost anything is
possible however it is the world's greatest place to go to for a little
vacation because here the rules are
completely different and most creativity I assert is done by traveling to these
areas getting stuff that couldn't possibly be true and bringing it back
out here where it can be worked on by logic in other words what I'm saying is
logic is a weak method it only works
when you have the right context and the saying I made up at Xerox PARC was that
point of view is worth 80 IQ points in
other words if you want to multiply two numbers together and you happen to be in 60 ad you're in trouble you have to be a
genius if you want to find out where Mars is going to go in 1325 you have to
be a genius because you're in Ptolemaic astronomy or Roman numerals neither one
of those are context in which logic is simple for what you want to do but by
rotating or changing our paradigm as
Kuhn has called it we find the context in which logic works now the problem
with the way most people are taught in school and an American business as dibona
appointed out is that one of the main things American business does when they
get into trouble is to redouble their efforts right usually the reason they're
in trouble is in there in the wrong place this is like digging for gold and
you've dug down five feet you haven't found any so you decide to dig twice as fast if the gold is 20 feet to the side
you're going to dig all the way to China before you find it because creativity is
not single dimensional and logic is so a
simple characterization of Western civilization at its best is our
civilization as a civilization in which artistic ideas are conceived the way
they are in every society which is down here at a visceral an iconic level a
difference between Western civilization and all other civilizations on the
planet is that we can then have apply centuries of technique to those new
ideas in order to bring them out that's what's the difference between our music
and the music of other cultures our music isn't any more heartfelt it isn't
any more beautiful than other cultures where our music is the only music that
has applied technique to art okay and
that is the difference that is a civilization that is able to use more
than one way of dealing with the world so we got very interested in these ideas
and I want to give you an example two quick examples of why it's powerful
here's an experiment you can do with some children children are really fun
because they'll go along with most most things that matter how wacky they seem
the idea here was to get children to draw circles and logo it's a programming
language fairly easy to use and you take a five year old who's in this body phase
you take a ten year old is in the visual and a 15 year old and the symbolic and
you try and get them to draw circles well the way you do with the five year old is you close get them to close their
eyes and say we'll make a circle with your body so the five year old starts
doing this and after a while you ask what are you doing Johnny and he says
well I'm going a little and turning a little over and over so if you type that
into logo you'll get a perfect circle that's because the five year old knows
differential equations
right circle is that thing of constant curvature so the change in curvature is
zero and that's exactly what a person's body knows how to do in other words
egocentric coordinates are something that it took mathematicians thousands of
years to arrive at differential geometry was invented by Gauss in the 1840s so as
only 130 years ago the mathematician started using what a five-year-old will
use instinctively and logo is able to
deal with those egocentric coordinates on purpose for exactly this reason
because children of that age don't think the way adults do well if you take a 10
year old 10 year old is too grown up to do something as silly as the five year
old will do and he's in a visual stage and he wants to draw a lots of circles
so he give him a compass and let him draw circles and after a while he will
figure out that what a circle is is a gadget that has in which the points are
the same distance from the rim so he will eventually write this logo program
which is you pick the pin-up go out measure a distance like a hundred out
make a dot back up to the center turn one degree perfect circle it's what we
had to learn in school as the locus of points equidistant from a given point
okay much harder way to do it but you still get a perfect circle now of course
I wouldn't be telling you this story if the 15 year olds succeeded in fact the
15 year old is in the symbolic stage and fails miserably because he knows the
most horrible fact ever thought up by the mind of man which is this one right
we all have learned this but we have to realize that it's in the wrong
coordinate system and even if we're in a
this was done by a friend of mine but I
didn't know him then in 1975 a guy by the name of Tim Galway wrote a book
called the inner game of tennis and this
book enraged Harry Reasoner who was at ABC in those days and had a Sunday
afternoon show and Harry I think was from Iowa or something and was a
grudging tennis player of the worst kind a knew damn well at tennis wasn't easy
because he'd been trying for 20 years and he still hadn't gotten very good and
so in this person who actually lived in Malibu California wrote a book saying
that you've just really shouldn't try too hard and you could really go out and
play tennis fantastically in just an hour or two Harry Reasoner got very
upset and he sent apparently an ABC hatchet squad out to California to do
Tim Galway in they rounded up a whole bunch of people I think it's 35 or 40
people and got them to sign legal affidavits saying that they'd never played tennis in their life they took
all of these people out in the courts and they picked the worst one who was a
55 year old lady 40 pounds overweight five foot two and a moo moo
and hurry affidavit said that not only had she never played tennis but actually
it not exercised for 20 years and she
tried to get out of it but they went out and they bought her tennis shoes and so forth then on live television one Sunday
they set a clock at the side of the court and said to Tim Galway you have 20
minutes to teach her how to play tennis and this is what happened now for people
there are various ways of watching this this is this was gotten directly from
the television show and you might when you look at it you might try and see if
you can guess what he's doing to get results I'll give you a couple of clues
as it goes long but take a look fly through the air I want you just to watch it we're very instance the ball hits the
court I want you to stay bounce the very
instant the ball hits the racket I want you to say hip this became bound okay
all you need to do is watch the ball okay the key of all the exercises in
either game it's two focuses minds attention somewhere where it will not
interfere with the body's ability to hit the ball automatically you stand here
until pro and you just continue doing the same
thing not at first if Chris just say bout when the ball bounces and hit when
you would hit it but doing it then after you feel like a nerd go ahead and do
okay so you might watch your right arm here okay cuz something's trying to hit
the ball right now
the players first learning the game of tennis and what he says bounce he's also
how the corner of his eye watching me so
even though he's not trying to see how I hit the image and refitting it is going
right into his memory enjoy yourself yeah really think about me Oh written on
tennis about to watch the ball notice
they're really suitable the reason is
they get bored so I tried to give them
something to see in the ball that's interesting so we want the trajectory of
the ball there the gracefulness of the line made by the balls are flying
through the air hallway hit the same put the mind somewhere work and stay calm
and not get you up tight but relaxed and
interested there's a body does so beautifully so beautifu my car listening
to the ballboy down to the rocket yeah
yeah
I don't that sound like Derek go he'll he's like one that one stop people is
nano you'll hear the sound in your life within this blender
sighs
watch the footwork here now be aware that writing as part of your arm I did
this feeling so i thought i'd let it
happen that's it do what's comfortable on every time i did start to think
things went wrong
the body seems to know what to do you
feel with your left hand where I girl just win the back there feel it
we're going to do one of those jokes now and this one's called the curb and the
server is this like a dance it just like again we'll come back here I'll show you
how to do a dent call the shirt I've
done this dance a little bit to all just do it okay in fact you can start coming
if you want the rhythm like this Wow ok
now we do won't you stand there shut
your eyes Oh God imagine yourself doing
that same damn my start humming a little bit as you doing it yeah
ok now we're going to there's no thinking that's gonna do it quick
nothing to close her up to well don't
worry about looking keep going keep the whole thing go do do do quick that's it
fine again don't worry about him they watch the wrist snap here there you go I
get them to home the rhythm of my serve
so they're not thinking Paul didn't what are you doing with his elbow this is what he's doing in hand and that's kind
of a number all that they start humming and they see themselves doing very
similar things must kind of movement to what I did but they're not thinking
about so it just comes out naturally and fluidly that didn't take long that's
called serving
gin double fault the entire match okay
okay happy fourth point down it was 15
home no need the universe all of a
sudden everything became effortless this is sort of like floating along now I'm
doing what came naturally playing tennis this is a 30 ball rally I
have a clear idea of what you want then let it happen don't try too hard I'm
going to go tonight we miss Martin's going on too long he sings a couple at
her here get a little bit harder you
just keep watching the ball
well when I saw that on television I said something approximating holy cow
decided what I saw was something I just really it took me a while to take it in
I eventually got that book and read it when I learn tennis myself from what was
in the book and then we started using those ideas very heavily in working with
the children and in fact the stuff that I showed you in the early part of the
children being able to do these applications programs after only a few
months was due in part to what you can do with small talk but the large part it
was due to what you just saw in the several examples i showed you that in
fact the user interface design and the
way the kids approach this was designed to get them into a place where they could be very powerful when they were
thinking about things not powerful logically because human beings aren't
powerful logically you know it took our race which is supposed to be brainy more
than 200,000 years to go from one kind of stone hand x to the next back in the
ice age and we really needed that new design we aren't smart but what we are
able to do is to pick up what other people have already laborious Lee figured out real easy and it's that
distinction that we have to understand when we're doing schooling now what I'd
like to talk to you now about is what the next phase of this I think is going
to be as I mentioned the this notion of being able to directly manipulate
objects and to create your own tools as one I think it's going to be played out
over the next three years and it really is going to be better than what we're doing today now let's talk about agents
for a bit because I think I established in the beginning that no matter what we
do on this pathway there are barriers to being able to get further I for one
would like to be able to sit down at my computer ten years from now and be
connected with the wisdom of the ages but in fact it would be like one of
those horrible stories of the three wishes and Grimm's fairy tales if that
were to happen tomorrow zero would be connected to the wisdom of the ages and
not able to find a single thing they know the amount of information that our
civilization is accumulating is doubling now every two and a half years and what
that means is our ability to get at it at best is having every two and a half
years and so what we're going to wind up with is the ability to do almost
anything and the ability inability to find out anything at all so we have to
stem that tide and so I'd like to talk
to you about agents a little bit and to do that I want to give you a couple of
examples of agents that have been done in the past here's a very simple one but
I think it will give you the idea of how different things are likely to be this
is one that we did when I was at Atari but it was originally done at MIT hotel
what color blue we're there create a red
Atari we're north of all that up you see
if I can start and stop that again and see if we get it
there put that there
he put that where their name the hotel
the del monte highest move to Del Monte
hired where to the Bahamas change your
voice as you wish the green sailboat
plan their name that next year's BTW
move next year's meeting where put your
backup plan with the Baker
create a red cruise ship where their
name acoustic corporate research delete
corporate research we have to be careful
when you make prophecies like that because that's exactly what happened to it said Atari but you get the idea that
the interchange with the agent is first
going to be done in some more natural
way some way that we're used to may not be completely in terms of natural language because nobody knows how to do
that and the agent is also customizable in the sense that you should be able to
build your own agent of you don't want
to have an agent supplied to you'd like to have it built in terms of maybe a
cartoon figure something like that or something where you can change the voice
of it so on it's customizable thing because the worst thing you can ever do
with agents is to think that they're actually intelligent so almost all of
the work that we did when we read Atari is to find ways of defusing the notion
of intelligence and one of the ways we found was too instead of using highly
high-resolution computer images we use low resolution cartoon type images so
here's an example of that that we did as
a joke this is the what you'll see here is the this is the president of Warner
Communications Manager argh and we wrote a program that would take any photograph
and make it into a caricature and be
able to animate that caricature and we had a program that could take voice
samples that I had a phone call with this guy and got his very distinctive
voice samples and then we were able to hook it up to our information systems
such as the one that you saw and this is the result where is Miami oh yeah that's
right I gotta move past this headboard
so I forgot about this is the pain of using one of these that doesn't have a scan feature where their name that LMK
room Atari through the right of Warner
roof LF k plan to the right of the car
where is LMK west central and okay I
guess one thing I should mention here is that I didn't explain is our vision of
the personal computer during this phase is instead of having a notebook size
machine the idea was to that in the
later phase in the 1990s what we'll do is we'll wear an ID bracelet which will
be be a watch and besides telling us the time it will tell the computers that are
now built in to every wall that it's us walking from place to place and so this
is a model where you could just walk into a room and the thing on your wrist
told the computer in the room that it was you and it also told the computer in
the room where your hand was in space that's how he was able to point he's
wearing this wristwatch gadget that is kind of a three-dimensional mouse but
it's something that travels with you and you don't have to pick it up or anything that's what you're seeing there now
let's see if we can get on to this other example we've done
thanks LMK what description a cruise
ship delete alakay what command delete
this is sort of showing the subconscious feelings of researchers
okay so here's a database of the future
super desktop with all sorts of different things oh baby oh my god are
you there you help us out we're the
middle of a higher argument about world war two okay now here's an example of
you have to realize that the the agent here knows nothing about World War two
and we found out that what happens to people when they work with an agent is
they expect it to be an Oracle it's
exactly the way six-year-olds feel about the library and the first couple of
times they go to the library the librarian is supposed to know the answer and they don't realize that the
librarian is really a guide so as soon
as they mentioned World War two what Manny did is say oh well let me look it
up and I'll talk to you tonight because he knows enough about all he knows about
World War two is it is a huge area and
the chances of him delivering on anything they want is extremely low so
what he's doing here is diffusing their expectations before they start asking
him any hard questions okay so our
question is could we have is dated Europe earlier but you're dead right def
we fucked that one up what could be where they loved it he is a complete
fanatic be crazy maybe
can you show us okay why did the
strategy fails to show up so he
retrieves a simulation would you game
Eastern Front where you can actually try and go through the problem oh that looks
far to the killer I think maybe around for the East who will have any take it
to the enemy lit most people / couple oh well thanks Manny having fun in there
thanks for your help see ya so well it's
a certain requires a certain amount of hood spa actually to Manny actually gave
us permission to show that in public this is a good but the idea back then
was that in the agent user interface
what you're trying to do now is set up theatrical expectations that aren't
going to be zapped by reality and so what the interface here is trying to be
helpful and it can go off and do lots of things for you but what it must do is
always subliminally remind you that it's not intelligent and one of the reasons
we picked cartoon characters are they were the one anthropomorphic thing that
we knew about that we're like people but people didn't expect to be smart most
cartoon characters do not act as though they're intelligent and I think that
this strategy is going to work in the in the future now let me yeah so now time
is running on let me show you very quickly about what we're doing with
children in Los Angeles this is an
example of what we expect to do with
with kids and that is to get them to
think about intelligent behavior by studying the way animals Co
with things let me give you an example
I'll just take fish as a as a group that
aren't too smart but I think you'll get the idea here what if a cartoon
character could play with you the interactive animation group at corporate
research is creating an interactive character through a synthesis of ideas
from artificial intelligence cartoon animation perception and theater we are
looking at four areas a behavior model graphic representation expressiveness
and tools for an animator a caster
misbehaves making its own decisions that had to react to changing situations a
simple rule based decision model causes interesting motion in this Atari 800
example the smart thing is attracted to
the food and Republican show follows a path that's reasonably improvement
empower our colleagues at Cambridge Atari research have built a
general-purpose behavior model which can act as a grain for many different
characters but how can we provide a way for this brain to tell us what it's
thinking our computer characters must puppeteer their graphic representation
in ways that the viewer will see their thought processes we must provide our
characters with graphics they can change in real time puppets who pull their own
strength
we do not want to simulate real life changes we want something more
expressive and exaggerating which will communicate meaning more precisely
Disney animators have provided a set of rules we find more rules for expressive
gesture and traditions taught two dancers minds and actors in perceptual
psychology we find explanations of how exaggeration may help us understand our
perceptions we see what computer-generated dot pattern as a
person walking can we gain control system
red complex behaviors even emotions with interactive graphics absolutely an
important aspect of this project is building tools which can be used to
create expressive interactive characters the animator must create movement cycles
and provide ways for the character to modify these cycles what will we be able
to do with interactive characters the children of all ages fine animal
specimens cartoon animal characters our
behavioral toys which a child could be friends
a group of characters comprising an
ecosystem could be an entertaining learning tool demonstrating
interactively dynamic and complex ideas by the balance of nature or how society
functions a dance machine could create
graphics which change with the dances movements
okay well you get the idea so the idea
is that what we're going to do is try and not do intelligent that with
intelligence that we think of as being anthropomorphic but intelligence that would be acceptable in the animal domain
and in the elementary school in Los
Angeles we're working with second and third graders and fifth and sixth graders in a project to allow them to do
something like this is to take a shape and stretch it edit it smooth it out
show it what to do and then start to
give it behavior patterns behavior patterns and aren't your stimulus
stimulus response but behavior patterns that lead to true learning many of these
are filled kind of ideas so these are examples of what the user interface will
probably look like the people will be showing examples in forms of images
dragging things around and so forth and the system will be assimilating them
into a larger pattern there's a lot
there so one of the problems in this project just as it was when we were trying to reduce applications programs
that were 50 or 60 k bytes long to a page of small talk we have to find a way
of collapsing ideas into something much more powerful so the number of things
that people have to worry about is much less
then of course a simple test is when you
make a sample fish you should be able to stick it into an aquarium and if you
knock on the screen the fish should be able to do something in response to it
so the fish have to be able to sense they might have to eat each other
because it's very hard to build in motivation to kept to these characters
without having some goals that they are trying to work on it's very important to
have a complex environment that can complete the learning so the children
have to build the environment also here
for instance is this is one iconic way of dealing with the dynamics of a coral
reef here's an example of an actual
system that was done last year and showed at the National graphics
convention people could sit down this is in the art exhibit which is kind of
interesting thought of as being a kinetic art you can sit down and design
your fish and you could give the behavior patterns of the fish and how they were to learn and show here that
there are rocks and various kinds of algae and so forth and the fish were
animated in three dimensions and would
go about their go about that sorry go about their business another example is
to be able to see this complex environment from the mind's eye if you
will of each of the characters so here is seeing a frog and the feet of a bird
from a fish fish point of view here's
looking at things from the herons point of view here's looking at things from
the frogs point of view and the
experience of the children is to be able to all be looking in from their own
points of view into this single world one of the things that we feel is very
important that if school did nothing else to children than just one thing and
that is the idea of teaching children that there's more than one way of looking at things more than one
perspective it would have done far more than what it's trying to do now it's one of
the disasters of the way school is being run is that far too often things are
thought of as being facts and this is this is the truth this this is a
relativistic system that tries to show the truth is something that as much of
it is in the mind of the beholder and each of these characters has a different
way of apprehending the world now one of
the problems with a system like this is that the children after a while might
think that they're playing God and in fact we have to defuse that because what
we really don't know that what how animal mentalities work and we don't
want the children to think that what they're doing is building an animal mentality when we did musical synthesis
at xerox parc we had actual harpsichords and other musical instruments in the
room so that when the children built at ombre they could understand the
difference between the simulation and the real thing so one of the plans is to
defuse by moving into fantasy after we've built fish fish that can motivate
around so we give the animals some personality we can make fanciful animals
here's an example of an animal that
could exist 50 million years from now it's a very reasonable product of
evolving processes there's another
example of that
one of the things you might wonder is whether these what would a fish look at
on television if it had television in
other words one of the nice things about this 101 dalmatians shot is the notion
that there are also social activities and portrayals within portrayals and
finally we get to this notion of what should things look like now I personally
hate current-day 3d graphics not because
people haven't worked hard on it but I don't like the way it looks it looks too
much like plasticine shiny has it's not
organic enough and we are one of the people we're working with on this
project to interesting people one is Jim Henson of the Muppets to do physical
models that the children will be able to animate and I'm working with the head
animator of the Fox and the Hound from Disney to find a graphic look that was
much more organic that can still be done by computer graphics this is an example
from Fantasia probably the best animation has ever been done in history
in which every frame was airbrushed you get this marvelous past like animated
pastels there's another example stuff
and this is what we expect the simulated computer world look like something with
this kind of power to it let me give you an example of that here's it this is a
example of computer animation let's see
let me I think that's just about it yeah this is an example of computer animation
done by this animator Glen Keane from Disney and I think you'll see that's
completely different from any computer animation you've ever seen before this
shows the process of creating it
you
this is quick because it takes a takes a long time to do these things so they'll
say don't blink here
I think you'll see the whole feel is much different this is all done a
computer
so we expected to look something like that now let me I think we're way out of
way out of time let me let me sum up by saying that the telling you a couple of
user interface jokes that I think are appropriate to what I've been talking
about today the first one is what we
call the Mexican airlines joke and it
was a almost true story of a friend of mine who had to fly from Mexico City
down to the Yucatan Peninsula and he got to the airport and saw that the plane
was an incredibly old dc-3 with paint peeling off it and oil dripping out of
the engine and he was very weird he looked inside he saw that in the cockpit
that half of the instruments had been removed from there just holes there and
the other ones were twisted about at crazy angles he thought oh no I'm going to die on this trip but he had to go so
he got on they had a terrible take off and they're dodging mountains down there
and he decided you look in the cockpit and see what the pilot looked like and he poked his head in the cockpit and saw
up on the control panel that every needle was pointing straight up in other
words this pilot had solved the user interface problem the one that you want
to solve first and foremost and that is how can I tell when everything is all
right and how can I tell when something is wrong any instrument that wouldn't
conform to that he just ripped out they twisted all the other one so that normal
man up now you think about that that is
a heck of a good idea and the people who had designed that cockpit had probably
been designing cockpits for 10 or 15 years and they never thought of having
an iconic representation for goodness it's sobering to realize that according
to the Air Force figures that sixty-two percent of all of their jet fatalities
in the Air Force are single pilot errors there's no other plane in the sky and
they think that most of them have to do with the inability of controlling a Mach
two or three aircraft in understanding what state it's in by these current day
instrumentation really sobering something to think about in any kind of computer system that
requires interaction and the other joke is the Winston Churchill joke and there
are many wonderful Winston Churchill jokes they all have the format of him being at a party he was well known to be
able to function much better than ordinary people under the influence of
whiskey and usually the the joke takes place at one stage of the party or
another this particular one was early in the party and the hostess came up to
Winston Churchill and said mr. Churchill was what can I do I'm very distraught a
famous Earl over there just stole one of my silver salt shakers and Churchill
looked at her and he stuck his cigar in his mouth and he said don't worry madam I I know what to do he went over towards
the Earl and on the way he took a silver salt shaker and put it in his pocket and
when he got to the early took it out and said I think we've been noticed perhaps we should put these back this is why we
won World War two in other words if you want to get people
to do something you have to involve them in the same conspiracy and what personal
computing is all about and the user interface for personal computing is a
conspiracy of man and machine we need to
make that conspiracy better thank you very much
Alan will be here a minute if you want to come up y'all stay I'll stay for four
questions people are welcome to leave