Difference between revisions of "Alan Kay Talk at MobilFest 2007"

Revision as of 00:23, 18 December 2017

0:00 Thanks very much for inviting me to MobileFest. Today i am going to try and say a few words about some of the mobility ideas originally came from, how they affect children and maybe a little bit about how the future is going to turn out.

What I would like to do is first to look at perhaps the most important mobile tech. to ever been invented. And we can think of this tech. as wanting to encompass the entire organization of human knowledge. We want it to be solid state and mobile of course. We want extremely hi-res and high contract, ambient lightnenig display to be used anywhere in the world. Really easy to use basic interface from getting from one place to another in it. It's got to have a wide range of the kinds of knowledge it can hold. It needs have unlimited battery life. And we want it to be bio-degradable so it won't pollute the planet.

And of course what I'm talking about here is basica organization of knowledge which is called, "The Book". So this tech. has already been invented. It has change basic human civilization in many ways. 1:26 And is very difficult to do better than the book using computer tech. today. We can do some of the things the book can do, better. We can do some of the things a book can do, more cheaply. But, it is hard to do everything that a book can do.

1:45 So it's a good thing to think about as we compare what are new technologies are going to do.

When the book was invented people thought about the future of printing. About the best they can think of, in the 19th century when the Industrial Revolution came in, that they will be able to go from a hand wheeled printing press to something run by steam and then by electricity to really make inexpensive books and lots of different kinds of books.

2:20 But, in fact what has actually happened to the surprise of most publishers and most makers of printing presses is electronic technologies came along and completely changed the dynamics so we didn't have something that is a slightly cheaper version of a big electrically or steam-driven web printing. But, what we have is something that people can carry around with them and do printing on their desktops and so the future here was quite unexpected. And in many ways still is. Many publishers are still grappling with something that they were told was going to happen 30 years ago but they didn't believe it.

3:04 Much of the same as happened with content so the Catholic Church does not try to stamp out the printing press in the 15th century because it was being used to print Bibles and that seemed to be okay. But, within 50 years printers started making much smaller books that people can carry around. Much less expensive books. And these books we're not about religious subjects but about ideas of all kinds. Many from the Greeks and the Romans.

3:45 And about a hundred years later the huge change in thought from the Bible happened with Galileo and then with Newton. And a 100 years after than we had huge changes in the way governments and social organization was thought of.

3:58 So whatever people thought the printing press was in the mid-fifteenth century it turned out to be something completely different. And most of us today think this was a good thing. I think it's a good thing. But, it certainly changed almost everything about the way the 15th century thought and did things.

4:22 And McLuhan pointed out something really important which most of us did not pay attention to and don't think about. He said, "We shape our tools and then they reshape us." And [Henry David] Thoreau said a kind of a more pessimistic version of this much earlier than McLuhan. He says, "We become the tools of our tools." So once we make technologies we windup starting to serve them in various ways.

4:50 So I can think of McLuhan's way of looking at it as optimistic and Thoreau's way of looking at it as as pessimistic.

And Thoreau had an interesting comment about networks also. When the first Atlantic telegraph cable went in, about 1865 or so, they asked him what he thought about it. He said he thought he would be afraid that he might find out that some European princess had just gotten a new hat. So he correctly anticipated the inability of people to use technologies seriously. But, in fact they would use it for all sorts of general human concerns and there would be a real tendency towards triviality. And that certainly happened today.

5:40 And for me I started off in math and science. I was a math major and molecular biology major in the mid-60s. Around 1966 I saw the first real computer graphics program Ivan Sutherland had done a few years before called, Sketchpad. It was a completely different use of computers that I was used to. I was used to programming big mainframes and here was a system that was done on a big mainframe but basically what was interesting was a 10 inch by 10 inch display on which you can draw things. You could give them behaviours, sometimes mathematical behaviours. This system would stimulate them dynamically so this is a completely different way of looking at computing. My reaction to this was to think of this as if you extended it you could do all computing that way. So I came up with this idea of dynamic objects.

6:41 Next thing I saw was Engelbart's vision of personal computing, which was not unlike what we have today. This picture was taken in 1966. There he is with the mouse he invented. He's on a black and white display. He's dealing with hyperlinked documents. He's collaborating with people up in Oregon from California. So he's doing something that is like the web, maybe a little bit superior to it, about 40 years ago.

7:14 The idea I got from that was, "Boy, this is hard to do on time sharing. So maybe we should do it on a desktop computer." So this wasn't the first personal computer, but it was a pretty modern looking one. It had a pointing device, multiple windowed screen, and so forth. Because this Flex machine that Ed Cheadle and I did were was aimed at non-computer professionals I started visiting people who have been working with non-computer professionals. The most interesting person I found was Seymour Papert who been working with children.

7:53 Papert was a mathematician like I was. He started doing some really profound things with kids. Not just having them make pictures on the screen, but actually thinking about these pictures in a mathematical way, using an advanced form of mathematics called, Differential Geometry, that was actually paradoxically much easier for children to understand.

8:20 So Seymour would take a young child and get them to close their eyes and walk in a circle with their body and ask them what they were doing. They would say, "Well, I'm going a little and turning a little, over and over." In LOGO, going a little forward and turning a little is "TURN 5" and over and over again is "REPEAT". And so if you tell a Turtle to do this, then the Turtle would make a perfect circle. It doesn't need Cartesian coordinates. It doesn't even need a center because the circle is that geometric figure that has constant curvature.

8:58 So I thought this is the best idea that anybody ever had for computing. Which is, "Here is an area where it actually went beyond the book to be able to embody a special kind of powerful mathematics in a way that very young children could learn it." So I got very excited about that.

9:18 And my reaction to this was to draw a cartoon on the plane home that showed a couple of kids sitting out in the middle of a grass field having just programmed their own game of Space War and learned about "f = m a" and other parts of physics. Their little DynaBooks here are communicating with each other with wireless communication. The research community I was embedded in at that time, the ARPA Research Community, had been working on the ARPAnet. I had also started on a wireless version and so I have this notion that finally there is a real reason for thinking ahead, that there would be machines like this DynaBook and we can make them inexpensively enough for children. We could try a lot of Seymour Papert's ideas on them.

10:19 Then right after that this idea and a bunch of others from other people got concentrated at Xerox Parc. Here's a cardboard model I made of the that cartoon idea and we decided to build a desktop computer again but one that was kind of like what the DynaBook was going to be. We invented much of the modern technology that you used today.

10:49 So we had object-oriented programming, dynamic animation, the windows user interface, desktop publishing, the ethernet, the laser printer. We invented part of The Internet and so forth. So there's a whole suite of technologies here.

11:07 Looking ahead to just a few years ahead that set of inventions done at XEROX PARC was done by only two dozen people. The reason two dozen people were able to do all that is the technology had changed from discrete transistors to integrated circuits that had enough components on them so that relatively small numbers of people can build computers all by themselves.

11:34 The next revolution along these lines is happening now and is just starting to be seen in the in the marketplace. But, by about 10 years from now not just displays will be made out of conductive plastics, but actually the Entire Computer and these conductive plastic some of them can be made by something like an inkjet printer sitting right on your desk.

12:03 So you imagine now a high school student or college student or computer scientist or somebody anywhere in the world who gets an idea for a computer, both hardware and software, and can make the entire thing just on their desktop.