An interview with Alan Kay for at XT 20 Conference

something you mentioned there was that the

park of the methodologies behind

Park came out of or was a descendant of the

methodologies around radar yeah the

in a radar happened because of

a developing very very critical situation where

the the

chips are down the evening that this is in

in the 1939 when no better

than how it worked at all okay now what

actually happened was that in 1933

when the UK

was very

isolationist and worse and

that was the baldwin

government but followed by the chamberlain government

so they were not interested

in doing anything it was actually a scientist Henry Tizard

who was alarmed by Hitler coming

to power in 1933 and on his

own hook started he

a physicist and he started talking to other physicists

and people in electronics first asking

for a death ray like in War

of the Worlds and they calculated

that would take too much power death ray

meaning could you boil some something organic

in a plane at a distance and

the answer is no there's too much power but on the other hand there

have been things in the 20s and we

are certain even

though the return is so faint that we should be able to bounce

microwaves off objects

and be able to detect how far away

they are and so forth and that's how it started it was

done completely on the hook had

nothing to do with politicians or anything

because they had a party line and everything but the

ahead because that's the job of science is

to look ahead and to take a deal with the Invisibles

and so

a remarkable series of events happen besides the

inventions that they did they

were able to convince below

the top levels of the government to start funding this thing

that became known as the chain home system which

is a ring of radar stations going

all the way from the north of Scotland all

the way down through the South of England I

think there may be as many as 180

or 190 of these and

so by the time the

Germans decided to try and fly over the channel

this system that had been done long

before anybody in power wanted it

was operational and detected

the planes and the RAF

Spitfires and hurricanes were scrambled and

a few days

later the Battle of Britain have been won

by the UK not by the Germans and of

course the big deal about radar was not even

you know the Germans shifted tonight flying and

the famous taffy Bo and

invented airborne radar

and so night fighters were

invented to deal with the night bombers and so forth but the

big deal about radar was that it was the

dominant technology that won World War two for the Allies

not just for planes but primarily

for submarines and the

goal of radar the radar research

all of this was going on was to be able to detect even

periscopes sticking up

and so it's a great story and

the one

of the key issues on it was

the British government once they had it wanted to negotiate

with the Americans who had the

manufacturing capacity where this stuff

and hairy-chested said no no let us not do that let us just give everything

we know including the atomic secrets we

have let's just give everything to the Americans and let's rely on their

goodwill and so that is what has

happened there was a famous plane flight with a famous briefcase

that had the most important technological

invention of World War two the cavity magnetron

which allowed practical high-power

small wavelength

radar to be done that was carried in

this briefcase it was just given to the Americans

and within a week Bell Labs had made

fifteen of them and

some of the Brits like taffy Bowen stayed

in the United States to set up to the grad lab at

MIT and the

rad lab at MIT did designed more

than 180 different radar

systems this is in three and a half years of of

the war and these were all manufactured

by the companies around Boston through

128 companies and distributed by the hundreds

of thousands all over the world

as small as fighter planes as large as coastal

installations and everything in between all done

by a group of about three or four thousand people

in building 20 at MIT in

three and a half years so this is one of the great stories

of all times and of

the people who worked in the rad lab nine of them became

Nobel Prize winners later and

none of them enduring the work at the rad

lab we're working on the stuff that earned them the Nobel Prize they

were they put aside their physics hats to

do physical engineering on

behalf of this much larger cause this

is a great story and it's something

that everybody in government should

not only know

about it but have their nose rubbed in it and the

other part of it is to take a look at

the the

aftermath which

of a terrible war but

the aftermath of that war was that industrial

capacity and industrial wave

methodology the

level of inventions and every other kind of thing

had been boosted in a way that was

not happening incrementally and so

after World War two there was an

essentially a whole new engineering and a holding an industrial

revolution based on everything

was learned there and by the

way it was happening over here except

he combination of the government the bankers and

the academics could not cooperate

so this

country was leading in computing all the way

up to the early 60s both

in hardware and software was ahead

of the Americans by perhaps five years or

so and all of that got blown by

the different

priorities and different levels of understanding that existed

here and we were the benefit of it because I went to half

literally half the graduate students I went to

grad school within the 60s were from the UK

and from France which had had its own way of self-destruction

and so we got this

fabulous group of talented

PhD students who came over to the US because

ARPA was funding a

lot of important stuff and in

a way it never came back over here except as

goods to be sold

so I'd like to just ask

a question on the subject of cooperation

between let's call it politicians

community I mean if somebody's I've lived

in the UK most of my life and my

impression is that there has been quite a lot of

distrust between politicians and scientists here even

a kind of that politicians would hold

even the language that's used to describe

scientists as boffins and techie

artists exactly the problem is that

the you

know it's in a way it's worse here

we have our own problem with basically in

the US and here pretty much the

only elites that are allowed and admired

by a wide part of society are

sports heroes right

place where people can be better than ordinary and

people are happy about it but

over here we have the

two cultures and he was not talking about

working class culture at all he was talking about the

latter's culture and the science culture

in the high level universities here ya know and

that is a huge problem because

of sinking stone pointed out it

is far more likely for a scientist

to know quite a bit about Shakespeare he and it

is for Shakespeare specialists know anything of all about

silence yes and then it said certainly in

Europe politicians or certainly in the

UK politicians have generally been drawn from the

Arts side rather the science side so

the huge exception of course

recently was Andrea

Merkel who

has a PhD in physics and is

few heads of state who can actually understand the

dynamics of a contagion

like kovat 19

and she laid it into Germany

a couple of days ago of pointing out that

it could very well be 50 to 70 percent

infected which is actually

what the epidemiologists in the United States

think and this is incredibly

inconvenient for people

trying to make money and people trying to do that and

like Al Gore said

in his book an inconvenient truth about the climate problem

people who don't have the imagination understand

the consequences try to sweep it under the

rug like president Trempealeau poses

will go away he claims it will

go away but it's not going to go away so what's what's

in this paper I wrote for the Ellen

MacArthur Foundation one of the main

points was the only time when

regular people are willing to call on the

boffins and is when they're deathly afraid of

something and

often the boffins have been working away anyway

because part of the deal of being

of Zionists of looking ahead so they

are often already working on it but yeah so

you had in the 30s the

enough people got worried

about what was happening in Germany to get

the radar stuff going and to get

a Bletchley Park

going in the u.s. it's not

wasn't any better except Roosevelt president Roosevelt

was for

helping the the

UK but Congress wasn't Congress

was not interested in doing

anything that wasn't an investment

in a possibility of a war so

it happened in the u.s. maybe in typical US

fashion that a very smart guy who

had made the equivalent of billions today

by

understanding how the Depression was going to go

he converted everything into gold right

before the depression happened and then bought

at the bottom and

so but as a recovery happened he got richer

and richer he happened to be an excellent amateur

scientist to the point that he was eventually elected to

the National Academy of Sciences and on with

is own money he set up a huge insulation called Tuxedo

Park so this is the American

side also going on in the 30s he invented many

of the navigational aids that

are still in use today make more money

on those but he was especially interested in radar

and so when this thing started

happening the government was still allow yeah

eventually get around to funding something at MIT

and this guy Alfred Loomis said well the heck with

that I'll just fund it but he just stepped in

and funded the whole start of everything and

was great for any it was anyway

another part of this really interesting radar

story pretty much nobody whose

job it was to to do

something reasonable did their job

reasonably was done by

people who weren't in a better

imagine what was going to have and

some of them had means to start making things

happen so so the ARPA Park thing

Xerox was

one of the ARPA projects it

was just that by the time Matt was set up

for another set of reasons the

DoD had been shut down from doing

kind of research funding that they were doing and ARPA

got changed to DARPA the Charter

got changed the kind of projects they could fund got changed

and so finding Xerox

as a funder was the goal of one

of the original orbit Arbor funders who was afraid that the work

wasn't going to get done and it needed about half

of it had been done at eight years of it have been done and he

thought another five to six years

could finish off the whole deal that

turned out to be the case and a lot of that remaining

five years was funded by Xerox you

were about

in your in your preprint

about the imagination required that

imagination of catastrophe and one of the problems with

climate changes the human blindness to actually seeing and

imagining was that know it

so again the climate thing

no we again there's a sallied

ISM thing but what most most people

don't get about science it is actually qualitatively different than

normal human reasoning and normal

human ways of looking at the world is qualitatively different

it's not like a better version of what

Kay people used to do yeah it's a whole new

deal but it almost anybody can learn how to do

it the problem is most people don't learn how to do

it and the educational institutions

have not taken it seriously as

something that young children should learn how to do it's

an epistemological thing it's a world view kind of

thing so it is most easily learned

by most people when they're children if you

don't learn them when you're a child you are faced with something

much more difficult than learning a foreign language when

you're older but what the way the

true about climate is this that

Caltech scientists

in the early late 50s invented

the apparatus needed to really

accurately measure the co2 in the atmosphere

that was started in 57

by 1962

enough careful measurements

have been taken to show that not only was it increasing

but it was increasing exponentially the National Science

Foundation of the u.s. issued a

warning saying we are

going to be in complete trouble in about 50

years if this isn't taken

care of immediately so

the way I counted that was like 57

or 58 years ago and

no sciences job

is to make the Invisibles more visible

people we are all going scientists

are blind but we can make instruments and we

can make measurement ways of

modeling things that extend what

we can't do without them that's the

whole point here so the things they're starting to talk

now like carbon tax well it's way too late what

people don't realize is respect to the climate we are right

in the middle of a war we have been

invaded it's not a question of the enemy

being over here or being small it's

invisible to most people they can't see it and

nobody is taking it seriously yet

same thing and you probably

are aware that among various degrees I

picked up in my misspent youth besides one

in in math and the computing ones there's one

in molecular biology so if we switch over

to biology

every and I think every every

scientist in the physical sciences and certainly

the biologists have been warning for

decades about

the

certainties of Panda

make deadly pandemics

there is nothing new here there's nothing surprising

about coronavirus in any way to

any scientist nothing it's

just the details but

that it's even a respiratory disease

is not surprising because we've had SARS and

MERS already we were lucky

with SARS because even though it was really deadly

and MERS also they're

not very contagious so

but the whole point of

doing this stuff ahead of time is to get is

to take the imagination that science

is able to do pretty darn accurately for instance with

regard to the climate there was just a recent

study that looked at the 30 main supercomputer

simulations starting back

right before the 70s so

a supercomputer back then was about

200,000 times less capable

in an iPhone 6 but

supercomputers compared to the other computers but every

single one of the climate simulations starting

back then run and

looking at what they predicted back then to what has happened

today the worst one was only off by a couple of couple

of percent the

ones we can do today are much more

accurate and much more detailed but

there's never been a time

once the detection

of the greenhouse gas increases that

scientists haven't been able to imagine this

disaster never so

you could imagine you know I'm sounding frustrated

right but yeah the inmates are running the

asylum here and they're going

to suffer that that faith I think there's a good

chance that major parts of

the ecosystems on the planet are going to be toppled

and one of the one

of the things I do in Cox often is I bring in a coke

bottle and set

up the normal way I pointed well you can poke at it a little bit

and it'll come back but if you turn the coke bottle

and stand it up on its neck just a little

poke will topple it over and now imagine the difference

in the amount of work that has to be done between what

it took the top lit and to put it right-side up and

what if the toppling rolls it off the table now think

of how much work has to be done so these are the

kinds of things and the same thing is true with covin

the big problem with these viruses

is what most people can't see

so they are reacting to the tip of an iceberg

the scientists were reacting to the fact that

there were going to be icebergs so these

are these warnings 20 years ago people are reacting

to the tip of the iceberg but science knows

estimate the mass of the part of the iceberg you can't see

and similarly there are models that can take what

you can see and find

good estimates of what's actually going on which

is usually about a factor of 15 or 20 more

infections than have actually been shown up

both the US and the UK have

essentially been I would

call it scandalous at not testing

like in the whole US there have only

been five thousand tests administered so far and

maybe proportionately only that in the UK

I don't know I haven't been tracking it every day but this

is like crazy because how else are they going to be able to

estimate what kinds of emergency

measures have to happen the other thing in the UK

is that UK for instance

compared to the US the UK has 1/7

the available hospital beds per capita

1/7 and I

believe the UK is almost the worst country

in Europe as far as hospital beds

available per capita

don't we go to Washington the state of Washington

they're taking care of people out in the hallways

because they got swamped anyway

so the Chinese got started a

little bit slow but then they they have man to

shut the thing down now it

may not happen here reason there's a thing

called the pandemic is because

other countries didn't act as

soon as the chosen up in China anybody

with half a brain would shut

everything down because of course

it's going to spread and especially if it's viable

for days on surfaces like the

corona virus is that means

you don't have to be sneezed on to get

it means people can carry it around for days and their hands and transfer

it and so that's that's

the recipe and there are plenty of models that will tell you exactly

what's going to happen and those models are being

right but you know it's a Pyrrhic victory isn't it

yeah of course the models are right so

so these things are very frustrating

to scientists and they awry

they are one of the causes

of the friction between scientists and politicians

because they in general

you know except for somebody like Al Gore

who was a perfect guy

he was really interested in the stuff he did his homework

he liked scientists he

interested in what science was saying about the climate he was concerned

so he was a big exception

to that but you know most politicians find

you know treat scientists

as Cassandra was treated and

you would think that the letters people over

here would actually know that story wouldn't you

I

mean it's the it's in

the Iliad right there Cassandra was telling

them what was going to happen and they didn't like what she was saying

so they just ignored her even warned them

about the Trojan horse so so

that is one of those stories from antiquity that shows where

roughly the same species we always work which

is that we project our own beliefs onto the world rather

trying to find out what the world actually is so

this is a huge problem and of course business is

its

main problem is its goals are too small

like living in the twentieth century and if

your goal is just to make money you're

in real trouble and you're likely to mess

things up for other people as well that's

way off being

century like in American businesses

basically like hunters and gatherers a hundred thousand

years ago there's a lush Valley

we have instincts to go exploit

the things in the lush Valley and when we deplete the value

there's another Valley the valleys right now we're

created by all of these scientists that nobody wants to fund anymore

and the

businesses don't even think about where this stuff comes

from they're just trying to make money off it and

none of the billionaire's I know

happen putting

out big funding even in their own companies

for the kinds of research that

gave them the technologies in

place so I find that the

level of blindness and blindness

has a kind of arrogance that goes along with it

because it's a kind of a blundering

arrogance oh yeah

so you

know if you turn it around look at the plus side

of the thing the people

who did these eight and a half inventions just at

counting the one the other ones that are padded

the most

of those eight and a half inventions were done by

a grand total of 25 PhDs or PhD

equivalents was cheap cost

hardly anything well

I did a calculation

recently of

let's see what it wasn't it was

companies

tend

to you know tend to allocate maybe 5

to 10% for Rd 10% of their

revenue and so

if you take that and

investments theory says you should invest a small amount

of what you're investing in high-risk

high-return things so that's kind

of the kind of research that we did so

let's say one to five percent of the

five to ten percent and

so I took those figures

for what would it take to do a Xerox PARC and

I took the low ones I took five percent for

Rd and 1% of that for Mad Money and

that level and

multiplied back out gave the

top 63 fortune 500 companies

so they could afford it in a shot and if

you took the larger percentages of investment

it went to the top 600

fortune 500 companies so we're

talking about Stanford as far as government's go we're talking about nothing

here you're talking about fingernail clippings

money that is wasted so

the coming up with the money is really

easy why don't people want to spend it and the answer

is because they're more

than always more than one reason one good one is

the

people who are responsible for this money feel

like they should have some control of the process

right because we're used to top-down processes

about it people who spent their lives making money

or winding up controlling money have not spent their

lives doing science so they are

the last people who should ever be put in charge of deciding

goals and there

is a famous effort

over here to match up to our club before and to

the Japanese fifth generation in the 80s called Alvey

you guys are all too young to remember that but

you can read the documents of what happened

in the end they could not bring themselves to

fund fund the way ARPA funded

instead they democratized it

and spread it around and that is not

the way you get David Beckham

on was it Manchester United

now if you want to put together a championship

team don't spread the money around

at the same time Europe

did a

similar effort called Alvie

that was called a spree Alvie

over here is pretty over-the-air both of these were

complete busts and the current EU

version which is

money monetarily wise is

it was a really good idea which is they have have had matching

funds for R&D for companies

in Europe for years almost nothing has

come of these things because the EU

has retained the prerogative

of deciding what the projects are and the

important thing there is in this far out research

is problem finding and part

of the funding Arco spent probably 40% of its entire

budget funding problem finding

for which there is no result at all

except people would occasionally say

oh now I know what I want to work on right

and that doesn't trickle out except in

wartime or a cold war time to something that

especially the public they don't understand any

of this stuff right what they understand

is somebody being given a task and their job is to do that this

the way it works so we're talking about this crazy thing

where there's almost infinities of money available

ironically a lot

of it from these inventions that we did in the 60s and 70s but

nobody will put it back out

because they don't want to move from hunting and gathering to even

in bending agriculture in agriculture

has this idea that you have to renew the land

because you're more or less permanently settled

right and even the Bible

loud has a famous

thing in there where you should leave your fields fallow one

year and seven so they can recover so

14 percent and that's a very good R&D budget

it's that 14% you're not

using for day-to-day stuff

that is going to allow you to be around and prosper

a hundred years from now yes today

about are you positive about the future Allen

I mean one thing I looked up with the current

situation it was there that there

was one little thing that was heard on the news that the politicians

were saying we're doing everything the scientists are

telling us to do which was remarkable

you've never heard yeah yes that's

a just at least on the US that's completely wrong

yeah yeah well they're not doing

they may be saying that but yeah

yeah you again but there was an it was

an interesting thing to hear nonetheless

and I was wondering whether because there's not an election

coming up in the UK and this thing is developing so quick

so that there isn't that that kind of concern for politicians

about losing their seats or doing something that is

politically unpalatable whether that was or all maybe

weather coded itself would would be a

demonstration of a meeting if it's

successfully contained which is probably not gonna

happen now but the showcase of what happens when you do listen

scientists I mean I'm trying to search for very few

positives in a sea of negatives yeah

but nobody who

you know nobody who's a research

scientist is other than

an optimist you know

we like to work on hard problems and

we don't expect to

you

working on the fringe I forget what

what's a good batting average in cricket

it's like

50 similar

to baseball I think so

what that means is 65% of the the

time something not

desired happens so it looks

like terrible failure but in baseball certainly

and I'm sure in cricket that

is considered to be overhead for trying

to do something really difficult though

an error in baseball is not catching a fly ball that's

technique you should be able to you

know in baseball you're supposed to catch 98 or 99 percent of

the time successfully because it's mirror

technique it's something you can get good at but

nobody can get good at being

so SEC's successful create creatively

because

the good thing is much less probable

than the millions of bad things right

it's a special or it's like life compared to

all of the organizations of exactly the same chemicals

that are not alive there are trillions and trillions of

ways of not having in a live thing from exactly

the same chemicals in exactly the same proportions

so so the way this thing

works is yeah people are very optimistic about

their process

what they usually measure themselves on is

not percentage of results

so if you get 0 you

need to think about a different field but

what they measure themselves is on the quality of the effort and

the way the thing works out with the amount

of method that's available now a

very high quality of effort by high quality people

is going to generate trillions

of dollars or pounds of

additional wealth and can

also deal with some of the problems created

by people who lack imagination and have

been polluting the planet for

the last 150 years or so yeah

so you know if you ask me whether I'm optimistic

about the human race

I never have been but

I've spent most of my life trying to move

education into a place where it can do much more with

children than the imaginations of most parents

and governments children can do

a lot more along these lines than

parents and governments and/or their teachers really

want them to because all of these things are different

from what the parents teachers and governments

are comfortable with so they're

these comfort zone issues and these issues of convenience

and inconvenience are the ones that

wind up taking small problems

into enormous problems maybe intractable problems

and that is a that is one of the

many tragedies that is inherent to our species

it's like irony you know Americans

don't really get irony but

my father was an Australian and he loved British

culture so I was schooled in irony early on but

the thing he pointed out to me about irony

he is a little bit of it as humorous

but deep ironies are usually tragic

right and so

one of the ones were just seeing

now is for instance Biogen

which is a company in Cambridge Mass of

full of biologists

physicians they do neuro physiological

stuff but still they know all of this

stuff nevertheless they decided to have their

yearly conference they

are in-game 'bridge massed and they were

the center of the outbreak in Boston right now

you know and another one

of these tragic ironies is you may not be aware of

it but somewhere between 200,000

and 300,000 people each year in the

u.s. die is the result of diseases

transmitted by physicians

not being careful about sepsis

probably over here too

but they have the gloves on

they say oh I we don't I don't worry

getting infected but what they're doing is carrying

stuff on their gloves all over the place and

like I say as many people now in the US

has died from smoking died because the physicians

in the hospitals have infected them so

this is irony but it's it's the tragedy

of the human race that

we can't educate

the children to

more aware of these things that are invisible

and to be able to think

about them without being fearful so

it's just like teaching a child about a big dog

teaching a child about automobiles in the

street you want to be afraid of an automobile

but you don't want to think you're

impervious right so that this kind of elementary

training of what you might call epistemological perspectives

that are demanded in the 21st century is

not being done

so all of the worries are about vocational

things in the US and

maybe over here also and that's completely missing the point because

the learning to program a computer

is not going to invent you the Internet

not even close the internet

was invented as part of a large project to

help people learn to think better

and to cooperate better

as part of his lofty goal it was humanistic

that was such a grand vision

that people who are scientists and technologists

just loved the idea of working on this

thing and we were able to pull it off after about 14 years of

you