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

Revision as of 01:19, 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.

12:20 This is going to be an absolute revolution in both the cost of what it takes to make computers but also who will be able to make them. So if we think about what is behind all this it's as Mick Jagger would say, "It's only Math. and Science."

12:43 So essentially what's happening here is instead of requiring 200,000 people to make an Egyptian pyramid out of old material what we basically need are 5 to 15 people who really know how to deal with the both the physical and informational universe and that is sufficient to allow entirely new inventions to be made and spread around.

13:12 So if we look at these three slides together and think about the Third World or the non-developed world what this says is that the development in the non-developed world can primarily take place through education by learning new points of view and new ways of using the points of view. That the the need for huge steel mills or a billion-dollar integrated circuit factories to make computers or in the realm of biology of rather large installations to make fermentations of various kinds of bacteria and stuff, this is going to change to something that's more like a kitchen science and the key to it is going to be the points of view and the kinds of knowledge that people can exert.

14:09 So what we're talking about here is an education revolution. Now most people in the regular world prize IQ. So Leonardo is very justly celebrated for having a high IQ. But, we have to ask what it would be like if you were born with an IQ of 500, but in 10,000 BC. How far would you get? How far did Leonardo get with his huge IQ, borned when he was born? He designed many, many machines, but he couldn't invent a single-engine for any of them that would make them work. He was just born in the wrong time and his IQ wasn't strong enough to surmount the general knowledge of the time. So knowledge tends to trump IQ and always has, but basically there's so much different kinds of knowledge. People have had knowledge of different kinds for hundreds of thousands of years. And so it's not so much the knowledge that is important, but the outlook.

15:19 I'm going to come back to this because the outlook that we have about what we think knowledge is, how we think we can get it, how we trust the knowledge, and how we distrust the knowledge, how we teach the knowledge, and so forth, is actually the key to making progress here.

15:39 In the last couple of years we've seen the start of real computers for children. Thanks primarily to Nicholas Negroponte who was the spearhead behind the one laptop per child XO (OLPC XO). This kind of got companies first to be against the idea, but then to develop versions of their own. Like the Intel Classmate here and there are others appearing on the scene now that Nicholas has a topic of conversation and gotten other people to realize that children are a huge potential market and a huge untapped resource for making the world better.

16:27 Companies like Nokia, who make a million phones a day, more than 400 million phones a year, are another example of a another technology that is actually going to kind of converge with inexpensive communications technologies with displays with enough pixels to allow thoughts about education to seriously be thought about in the next several years.

16:56 So this is something that's happening right now. The OLPC has just started their first real mass build a couple of days ago. And I'm sure that there are some talks about the OLPC at your conference.

17:12 When we look at this idea of children's computers and look at what is easy and what's hard, the easiest thing is actually to make the computer itself.

17:25 Even though it's kind of a monumental task over the last few years it was still done by a few dozen people and perhaps a hundred people at Quantum, the company that's making it.

17:39 So it's not that difficult to do technology today. The system software and so forth is also a fair amount of work, but it's definitely doable

and where things start to get harder here is in thinking about the environments for the children
and really harder to start thinking about how we can teach children non-trivial ideas.

18:03 And they got almost intractable when we start asking questions, "But, who is going to help the child learn these things?

Where is the mentor?
Where are the teachers? Where are the informed parents?"

18:15 And this question right now is somewhat unanswerable in the 1st and 2nd world. In the developed world we don't have enough elementary school teachers who understand

real math and real science.
And we certainly don't have enough well and foreign teachers in the developing world.

18:34 So I believe this is actually the the problem that is going to have to be solved in order for all the rest of the stuff to make sense.

And of course most of the attention so far is being directed at the easy parts
of the problem and the most physical parts of the problem and and so forth.

18:52 The more invisible parts of the problem are just starting to surface now that

these machines are starting to show up in various countries and people are wondering,
"What can we do with them?"