Alan Kay Speaks at ATLAS Institute

thank you all so much for being on this snowy day my

name is Phil Despres an associate director of

the Atlas Institute although today my primary

purpose is timekeeper so

I'll be the one cutting you off a really interesting talk

to make sure that we get to some of your questions well

should we do negotiating

Atlas

is an institute for radical creativity and

invention and when I look around the room I see

some of the faces including John plant the previous

director of Atlas and really this whole front

section people who bought into an

supportiveness

interdisciplinary teaching and research and so thank you all so much

for being here and I'm really

grateful to be part of this community of polymaths

and I think we'll be hearing that word a lot

in this talk and I'm going to turn things over to our

favorite polymath or director micros

I guess

I'm not gonna bother to read your

Alan's bio because it's really long and you can

look it up yourself probably have but

now that Wikipedia page starts out Alan

Kay is an American computer scientist and

a lot of people read that and decided not to publish this talk

but there's much much more he's much much more

that so that's a small part of the story today's

theme is polymaths and the poster

child for that of course is Leonardo da Vinci he was a painter

for sure but also an anatomist a military engineer and

the aeronautical engineer chemist and

in those days you mixed your own pigments okay

he was kind of an important part of art we're hitting

mark to go back into the most recent century

it was a film actress also an inventor and

engineer and worked with frequency

skipping signal processing and and

by the way your collaborator on that military work

was a music composer so that's

the thing of polymaths I like to think about technology

visionaries and virtuosos

as people who have the vision and also

the technical chops to realize it so the

go hand-in-hand it's really hard to have a strong vision if you don't understand

in a deep way what you can't do and it's

interesting to be able to just do stuff

technically without having a vision for now technology

isn't just that computer break you

have in your pocket of your Android phone or your iPhone it's

much much more coding in Python but I think now it's

doing to elaborate on that so I want my idea

for Atlas I've been doing this now almost six years

it is basically to attract a sustained

polymath technical polymath technology

visionaries and virtuosos so of course places

come to mind like Bell Labs or the

Bauhaus or Xerox PARC

you should be hearing something about you

expect that kind of thing out of MIT or

Stanford or Berkeley I expected up see

you both and alakay who

graduated from here in molecular biology and mathematics is

the case in point he's living proof that

it can happen here I like to think if Alice exhibited

back when Allen was an undergraduate student here he'd be part of

this community back then pretty sure of that okay

Joe mentioned I'm the current that was it's

a good director and didn't take the job because I love university

administration or manage my

favorite thing to do I took it to give others

the opportunity that others have given me to pursue their

vision so now MK is one of those people at age

23 or 24 I was part of the MIT logo

group and Alan hired us all to become part

of Atari Cambridge research labs to investigate

and explore computing environments for children

so that was back in the 1980s it's

privilege and great pleasure to introduce Alec

a welcome him back to city Boulder and to the Atlas Institute

thank you thank you

well of course the best part

of the way

this visit started out was to be

able to take that ride over the last hill and

there is shangri-la

nestled up against the foothills and I

was so afraid that it was gonna

be so built out but it wasn't built

out who really looked so much

like it looked 55:6

whatever it was and

I looked at the campus

using the satellite feature of Google

and Wow nobody put a building

in the Norlin library quad

there the old campus

was pretty much preserved the way it was

Mary Ripon theater

put in a real amphitheater it used to be

just terrorists grass back when I

was here so it's been it's been great

to visit and

we can blame mark

for this title

and

he was interested

in this community which

I think everybody has heard of

the exploits of this

community have affected

everybody but they've also been worked on by

many journalists and many

games of telephone so

and I'm not going to tell the history

of this but I thought it'd be interesting to take

the theme of polymaths and take

a look at how it affected

some of the technological inventions especially

the ones that involve human beings and

any

talk that involves science always try and find a

Sidney Harris cartoon this is my favorite

I'll confess and

but then I realize this reminded me of something

in fact remind me of an

advanced calculus class that my old

friend Dave Volker here and I took which

will never forget will we Dave it may

be the best class I ever had certainly the best math class

and so my translation

of this is here's Dave at the blackboard with Professor

McKelvey and this guy was really a friendly

professor he the way he

taught advanced calculus as he made the students just prove every

theorem so we didn't memorize

proofs we just had a slim book that

had the the theorems in there and he would help

each and every one of us at the board prove

it the way we thought so

we had if you had an idea this

guy was a good enough mathematician he could see if you're

going to be on a track and he would instead of showing us

the standard proof he would help us with the proof that

we are trying to develop as one of the greatest experiences I've ever

had and the cool part of the story is that this

guy was a physicist he

came over to the math department every seventh

year on a sabbatical because his hobby was

math and he just

was really one of the greatest teachers we've ever had

yeah but then I found a

great Sidney

Harris cartoon about and now pause

read this group

of polymaths here at a table

Tennyson's still bidding

Crouch whom the rest paid yes but obviously

that doesn't consider an electrical dipole in

spherical molecule you could see it Gershwin Cole Porter

in the restoration poets it all comes back to

Leviticus and

over here she says

in French very amusing but

Socrates and his

let's see ala ala

gari D or a PN

hmm I used to know

alagar is like

but still already it's

now the case that so it's a you

find it everybody everywhere in classical Greek

IDI means

already or

now hora

is where we get the word our from

so it's time so

but it's already time

where it's now time but I've

kept Yin Yin the hell is

a PN ax so I realized

I just flunked my

polymath merit badge

my all perfect linguistics

professor mrs. kasuba would kill

me right now so I had to look

it up a piena means

sleep and so

this the translation here is but

now it's already

time to sleep I've realized oh yeah this is the end of the apology

and what Socrates

is alluding to is time to take

the hemlock but then I realized Oh

Harris is being very funny here because what

she's saying is she's completely bored stiff

there it's now

time to sleep which now may be now time to take the

hemlock this meeting is so boring

and

the other thing is it doesn't show them as being really tired

because the big deal about polymath

really doesn't count unless you're enough

above threshold to be accepted by

a professional as a colleague you don't

have to be great but you have to be above

threshold or else it's just around you

know it's just not and

so all the polymaths I know

who are keeping all of this stuff up are

actually kind of exhausted most of the time

and I came

to Colorado and 63 after the air force

and here's

this advanced calculus in a woods that we had I don't

know do you remember what

our advanced calculus book wasn't it I

think it was woods yeah

David but

I was also a biology major and

I had a minor in

anthropology with the consecration and linguistics

which I obviously did not hold up

very well and another minor in English and

I had to work my way through school so I was a

half-time programmer at NCAR

back when I was down on 30th Street not

up in the Mesa programming

supercomputers I actually spent most

of my time in the theater and

I believe I met my friend Dave

in a pit where he

was playing trumpet right behind my ear

and I noticed

he was playing in tune and

bass players usually are too lazy to

warm up so they play sharp and everybody else sounds flat

you've ever wondered why the beginning of things sounds

weird but Dave was playing in tune I knew he had warmed up

so he and I became fast friends and then I think

we found we're both math majors and I had

been a professional jazz musician so played

occasional gigs and had

a lot of fun over in Mackay playing

the organs the classical music

stuff and I also did a fair amount of painting

while I was here so this is kind of my polymath

credentials and

yeah baby too many and

at

the end of it when I got my degrees and stuff

I was so exhausted I couldn't

stand the idea of going to graduate school neither

of those I didn't want a job that

was the last thing I wanted and so

I was very very depressed and

but then I realized that like

most programmers I really

understand anything about computing I was just

a good programmer and they were just

really two completely different things

and I thought boy if I if I could get into a master's

program for a year I could

avoid graduate school in these

other two things I could avoid getting a real job and

I loved Boulder

and so I

looked in Norlin library for

all the places that had a computer degree in

this is 1966 that were above 4,000

feet in altitude and at

Boulder it had one I would still be here and

but turned out the

University of Utah did have one and it was the only one

and if you ever been to Salt

Lake it's like here except reversed the

Sun comes up over the hills

rather than setting and so forth and

so going there was maybe the luckiest

ever did I knew nothing about what was going on I was

just trying to avoid and to

the polymath thing the interesting thing about all

of these successes is in

what happens thereafter I

use them all every single one

of them and I think

at least to me an important

point is the more things you know the

more possibilities you have for seeing something and seeing

connections so it's really worth

trying to get as many facets

as possible so I showed up

University of Utah

and before I got a desk

I had to learn about sketchpad and I'm

gonna show you a couple of these old things

because to me what was I think

the point of this talk is not what

we did it parks so much but why

we came to do it we came to do it because

of the culture there was already in

existence there that it started in the early 60s

and so

this is on a machine

approximately eight or

nine times the size of this room at least

and it had its own roof

it was the building that it was

in with one guy on it from three o'clock

in the morning to six o'clock in the morning the guy

person who had invented this machine which is a sage

air defense test machine liked

Ivan Sutherland and gave

him time on this incredibly huge

supercomputer and here's what he did

so here's the console

[Music]

and

he's gonna reach up with he

has a light pen in his hand the light pen can

see what the what's on the display and he

actually invented this rubber band technique this is the first time

ver done so what you're seeing here is the first real

computer graphics system ever done by this graduate

student Ivan Sutherland now

I just pointed at the edges and said I want everybody to

be mutually perpendicular and the system did

it for him and you notice it's the first he

has knobs that will zoom in real-time

here he's going to make some dotted lines so first

he makes some guidelines points at them and says

become parallel so it just

figured that out for him and did it and

saying what I'm drawing here be collinear with

the lines underneath

by the way to display

can't even draw lines so he had

to program that display itself I can only put up dots so

all of the graphics you see here he had to do in

his one year so he now he made the guidelines

invisible so you see the

hole and the flange zooms it back out

that wants to make a rivet

and the reason

it's called sketchpad is you don't have to be very careful

because the system will come so now he's using the

cross thing as a guide for this arc and

notice what happens here if he points

to all of these guys and says everybody be

mutually perpendicular you can watch it solve the

problem here to make a symmetric

rivet and that's not the only solution

he

can distort it in a different way and

when he tells it to solve

it'll again do the same

thing it will come up with a symmetric solution

we want something that looks

more like a real rivet I think

you understand that the system did not have

to be told what a rivet was beforehand right you saw him draw it

from scratch so there is a rivet and

it's actually a master drawing of a rivet so now we can

get an instance of that rivet

you can rotate

it and scale it you could see that the

system led to better displays

but he wants to

stick it in the flange there and

I was showing that oh I can get

other rivets these are all drawn from

the master drawing then

he says oops I forgot those cross pieces

doesn't look like a rivet I'll go to the master drawing and

make the cross pieces transparent and

lo and behold when we go there

we see that the rivets of all felt so this is object-oriented programming

for the first time done in real time on

the world's first graphic system pretty cool

so the whole idea of

this demo here now he anything that you make

can be a master and he can get instances

of that and he's drawing on

a virtual drawing surface about a third of a mile on the

side so he can put enormous drawings

on there okay

so in

looking at this stuff I discovered

well Ivan this

guy's a graduate student this was his thesis one

year of work writing in machine code

where he had

to invent everything from scratch

invented modern

interactive computer graphics the first time

everything we do comes from

that the first real use

of objects object-oriented design

masters and instances the

programming of the system you saw was not

programming you're used to because sketchpad

was a problem solver so you told that the results

you wanted and sketchpad figured out how to do it

so most people would like to program this way

sketchpad could solve

these problems and it could solve nonlinear problems here's

a bridge we're

all and it doesn't know about bridges but if you put

hook it together like this

put force on

it and have

a sketchpad show you the stress and strain on

those lines it's showing you

what the steel beams would do because

it's making the Assumption which is true that steel beams are

a bit like Springs and so

this system you could put in an electronic

circuit and would figure out what voltage is

o

these automatic dynamic simulations

and all of these characters

everything these are all drawn in sketch pads this is one

of the few computer system computer graphic systems in

which every diagram was actually

done on the system and it was the first one what

do you think about that it'd be nice to have

right yeah so this was

Newton desk where

at least Galloway Galileo asked and

that same

week I saw a programming

language that could do a few of these things and

I also learned that the ARPA community was going

to do a network called the ARPANET which we just celebrated

the 50th anniversary of this

was just in the planning stage and I've

been in graduate school for about three days

and my reaction this

is a technical term get

used to it because I'm going to use it a few more times

well I could program a computer there

was nothing about sketchpad that

I was mentally prepared for I

didn't there were no it

was almost the only computer graphics round I'd

never seen any of these things before and it was like wait

a minute did I just fall into some alternate

universe here and so

the combination of

all of those things plus by my my bio major

got me to think about a new way of thinking

about programming computers which

is in terms of virtual computers networked

together like on the ARPANET and see here's

the cool thing a computer

a whole computer can simulate anything that any computer

can do so it's the most powerful thing

ever have for a component you can't have anything more powerful

and what that means is is that if you

allow them to communicate together you can make every

system that can ever be done on a computer and

uniformly made out of

recursive organizations

of these things and the whole data

goes away procedures go away

you're dealing with pure behaviors and pure

relationships so that was the first idea I

had there and then a

month later Doug Engelbart showed

up and showed

us this well

I can say I'd like to go to Paris but

I'd liked Oh to

produce they get big I'd like to say one branch only and

let me look just that low and

I see it oh I can say I'd

like to see one line only I can

see but there's another thing I can do

does root lice that I have here

so here I'm afraid I'll need a different pictures

of you so here's what I do with

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

here's the route I seem to have to go to to pick up

all the materials and that's my plan for getting home tonight

but if I want to I can say the library

what am I supposed to pick up there I can just point to

that you know I see overdue books and

sustainment there with that name on it go

back what if I once my supposed to pick up the drugstore hmm

I see everything all right

market can do things

if I want to just say I'd like to interchange the modules

and camp materials bingo

so there's a lot more this is extracted

from the thing called the mother of all demos which happened

in 68 but he was showing most of that and

it involved things we're familiar

with today like hyperlinking but the

first time in an interactive system and many

other parts of it Engelbert is known

generally for being

one of the inventors of the mouse and this

allows me to make a point about these

people from

the past which is generally people

look at the work done in the past as

a not as a cruder

version of what we have in the present like

this is a precursor of what we have in the present and this

is to miss the context that these guys were operating

in it actually makes our present

more important

because we're here then

it might have been and Brett Victor who is kind of

the modern Engelbart had

a great comment when angle

Bart died Brett Victor wrote a great obituary

which is worth while reading and Brett

said well when I read tech writers interviews with Engelbart

I imagine these writers interviewing George Orwell

asking in-depth probing questions about its typewriter

the

mouse is the equivalent of the type but the it's

not the most important thing that Orwell

did although people do love his typewriter

you can get online and see pictures of it and

then Brett says this

is shopping list interpretation which

is all the things we have today these

are precursors that Engelbart did and this is

completely far from

what the actual case is in

fact almost everything at the angle Bart

did except for the quality of the graphics

which improved over time was

actually a richer past for

a cruder present in almost every case

here's an example of that

so angle Bart himself said hey

why are people's so

excited about the mouse that's just the button on the radio

we invented a whole car and

this is the the car is the thing

understand the mouse is easy to understand

so this is how journalism works

and what did it mean that they had meetings with

this system in front

hem well of course they had video conferencing

but is it was it like the video conferencing we had

I see

it over like that leaves a corner up there and I say

now computer do the automatic switching that

will bring in a camera picture from the camera mounted on his

console such as a camera mounted on - I know

that's great now we're connected

audio you can see my work okay

I'm just gonna freeze it there so

on this system no matter what you did so

this is that the operating system level no matter what

you did any number of people could collaborate not

just by video but

when you got on this thing your cursor

up there and if there were more than two people collaborating

the initial your initials would show up on the cursor so

there could be 15 different cursors you

all had access to the stuff so it

was like an open blackboard so

no system today does that Google Docs

only allows one cursor at a time and

the collaboration that we have today

is restricted to apps like Skype and

there you can't even share the material you can only

look at it no operating system today

not Mac us not Windows

not Linux not iOS

none of them allow

in this day and age of the internet

with high bandwidth allow automatic

conferencing it's obvious

you can do it because there are little isolated

cases of it but in fact the people

who built the system today so little understood

what collaboration actually means

that they could not come close to doing it reasonably

whereas Engelbart showed this more

than 50 years ago now when

it was really hard to do the difference was he knew

what should be done and the

people who who exists in the world when it's easier

to do don't know what should be done

so

here's the way they thought about this this

is about augmenting human beings

and the natural

way we think about doing it is to give human beings tools

'okay

people would have tools we have tools

we can hit things with a hammer make

things happen and in doing that

we got feedback

and a little part of our brain starts turning the

color yellow here the hammer yellow

I mean I think about causing other things

to happen by hammering and we might think

about using a nuclear weapon as a hammer we have done

that in this country we

might think of using AI as a hammer people

are thinking about that real hard so

the idea here is that tools

without anything else going on

usually teach us a very impoverished

thing it's

like when you fool around with a piano you're

not going to get what two centuries of developing

keyboard technique you're going to get you're going to get a chops

chops cut sticks culture if you're lucky

because the piano can't really teach you how to play

it it can just teach you a little

bit and the way they looked at

it is Wow the tools are

now a million times more powerful or more than

what cave people did so when a cave person got pissed

off and hit somebody with a rock other people could

jump on it nowadays if somebody gets pissed off they

assault weapon and you can't jump on them or

they might be ahead of a government and have

something much more powerful than an assault weapon and

the idea is that any tool you have that

has power can be used in

any direction and so

part of their idea was you

must not use this stuff

that's vastly beyond what our

hundred thousand year old brains can deal with without

a lot of Education and training and if

you do that

then you can use modern methods and if you do that you

can use modern ways of representing ideas so

these five things made

up what these people thought of

as a person being augmented now

think about your use of the iPhone and the PC

is there anything

connected with the iPhone and the PC that is like this not

even close it's only the simple-minded

idea that we're going to make you a tool for convenience

there's none of this other stuff

sure Facebook is convenient

but nobody

needs to learn about what a legal drug

is of by over supplying people's desire

for social coherence nobody needs to

learn anything about that be perfectly innocent

so this stuff makes my blood curdle

it is so naive and

what's worse is the

Engelbart people thought about it and wrote it up and

so if any computer person chose to look at one of the

towering figures of our past they

would have this concept at least thought by somebody

else and then the idea is if

you have a group that's collaborating it's

made up of these twin

tuples of augmented people

and the group itself has this kind of framework so

this is the way they were thinking this this idea by the way was

developed in 1962 and then built

out to this great demo

so another

holy here

and then

it exactly the same time

as the mouse was invented

the RAND Corporation invented the first good

tablet and here's what that system looked like

well we may

start to edit the flow diagram so he's scrubbing out the

line there flow arrow then move the connector out

way so that we may draw a box and it's we're dragging

came from recognized he wanted a box and made him

one now it's recognizing his printing the printing in

the box is being used as commentary only in this case

the box is slightly too large modern-day

window controls

then draw flow from

connector to the pot recognizes what he wants

attach a decision element to the

box enjoy flow from it to scan

we then erased the flow arrows

attached to the process post new area and move

the box to the new position [Music]

this allows us to draw a new box

then chop off its core

okay so definitely a holy

so what's cool about this today

if you got a flat flowchart app

would let you draw a flowchart

that's pretty dumb if you think about

it because

you're just making an image you

see how it's been working today the marketing

people will not give you anything that wasn't old and

familiar they're just trying to give you the old

stuff in a way that's a little more

convenient but on the computer

on sketch pad it's not just for making

drawings it's for simulating the things that you're

making grail is not just for making a flowchart it's

for creating processes in fact the entire grail

system was written in itself why not write

it's a flow charting system

so

all of those things

got me and my friend Ed Cheadle

here to think of building this machine so

this is a very early desktop personal computer

first object-oriented operating

system and programming language this is a

self-portrait of it on its own display so the displays had

gotten a little bit nicer

and then the

next year I learned about Marshall

McLuhan I'll just tell you one important insight

that McLuhan had

and I'll tell it to you in engineering terms

which he wasn't he

had a terrible time explaining his ideas

because he was a literary critic they didn't know either psychology

or engineering but here's

what he pointed out and again I'm translating that

hey guess what a radio

can't receive a message

unless it has a MA model of the

carrier of that message in the radio itself

you need that to tune

to the station but you also need to demodulate

that carry need to take the carrier out in some

way so that the message that's on the carrier

is recovered and what

he said was I think guess what happens when you learn how to read

what's important about

reading is not even what's in

the books what's important about reading is the

changes your brain has to make in

order to become a reader at all and that

change was the change that is most strongly

correlated with what we call civilization today

there has never been something we call a civilization

that didn't have reading and writing

and it's that hidden

property of what happens to

you when you learn something that is submerged

below the fact that you're abusing the thing for content

but while you're using it for content it

is restructuring you

so that is like a holy cow

and also in 68 was one

of the first actual working flatscreen

displays at the University

of Illinois there and

I also ran into Seymour Papert and

Packard's idea

was

there is something very special about

the computer that makes

what seems to be difficult in abstract

and mathematics that can

make it into a concrete and

manipulable experience even for young children

now as a mathematician

as a computer guy I knew everything that Patrick

was doing except I'd never thought of it in terms of

children he was and

in fact many he was a very

good mathematician many of the things he did allow things

like calculus to be taught in a better way

than you can do in high school to children who are

nine and ten years old am

i this is maybe

the most jaw-dropping experience of the

whole thing and on

the plane back from this visit with pampered I drew

this cartoon and when I got back to Utah

I made this cardboard model

because I believe what Patrick

was doing I realized the flaw

in computing was we're thinking of it as tools for adults

like guns

but in fact Patrick was thinking of it much

more like a book I later

called this thing a Dinah book but

book if it's about literacy if it's about reading

and writing in new ways then

you have to start with children gets harder

and harder Harrod I'm shift to shift in epistemology

and ARPA

was working on both the wired Network

but it was also starting to do wireless and

of course it had to be end user programmable

had a stylus tucked in here

but meanwhile I had

to finish up my thesis so this

o here's your's my reaction

I'd never had ideas like this until

I just happened to walk in at Utah

the context there was so rich so

different that

I just started having ideas in

spite of myself and this is

something we should never lose sight of because it's the best

what it has really have hard having ideas outside

of a context the context provided

by our ARPA and these ideas as

I say there I didn't think they were coming

from me they were just coming

they were just reactions to all these

things that Arthur was doing

well we mentioned Leonardo

so let's suppose you

have twice the IQ Leonardo

but you're born in 20,000 BC

how far you gonna get

it

was actually in the wrong century for

what he wanted to do and no amount of IQ

could transcend the

century he was in so he did

drawings but he couldn't make things whereas

omebody nowhere near the intellect of Leonardo

Henry Ford did it easily

Ford made millions of self-propelled

machines without

any large effort because

born into the right century a century that was

already doing things like this that already had

technologies that allowed Ford to

add to it his thoughts and

why was he born into the right century it's

because this guy Newton completely

changed the way of looking at the world

you know maybe the largest qualitative

jump in history

to what was in the Middle Ages and

the Renaissance which Leonardo existed

in to the kinds of thinking done

in our modern world and

that happened at a very good time because just about

a hundred years later the Industrial Revolution started

the Industrial Revolution wasn't just about engineering

it was informed by science and

a combination of those things was this extremely

important and powerful

so a point of view is worth 80 IQ

points I I think if this is knowledge is silver

but context is gold and

IQ without the other two is basically

a lead weight it's essentially a

pop culture thing IQ without these things is being

clever and outwitting

other people but it's the accumulation

of these things that makes the big

difference and what I was experiencing

at ARPA was that idea so here's

this could be any

curve that you want it you can pick what it is but suppose

it's reading scores in the u.s. that's a typical

yay boo yay

for reading it's

completely meaningless

because most things actually have thresholds and

if most of the children aren't really learning how to

read it doesn't matter whether the reading scores are going up or down and

the biggest flaw people have in thinking about

simple data is not to

establish the thresholds that constitute meaning

so this isn't a very important this is a very

important idea for Poli Moore's polymaths

what you care about is are

you past that threshold of

what is actually needed and we can see

that trying for the top and trying

to improve are both enemies of this you

things that makes you feel good down here and it means

nothing and perfection is

hard even for angels to get to so

what you want is a process

that finds the first blue

area it's the simplest

hing that is qualitatively different from where you are but

once you're there you're

in a different world you're in a blue world

it has blue thoughts you can do blue things

and

if you're working on difficult things you have this problem

you have to withstand society

you have to withstand your parents you

have to withstand your teachers because

what everybody wants is continuous improvement

Americans

especially hate learning curves American

marketing really hates learning curves they won't sell anything

that has a learning curve they wouldn't sell a bike if

it were invented yesterday too

dangerous all those lawsuits too

hard to learn they just wouldn't do it

but often to get past

that barrier you have to go through quite a bit of learning the

arpa community was

willing to pay for that learning so

they didn't just pay for problem solving they

put probably 40% of

their budget into problem finding and

they made the assumption that any problem

that can be articulated from the present is

probably not the problem you want to work on

you have to find a future or

a qualitatively different version

of that problem or you wind up doing something incremental now

here's the one second explanation

of what I've been talking about ARPA

is over here Xerox PARC is here

here's the Internet

all the stuff flowed from

the radar efforts in both UK

and the

US

during World War two especially

building 20 at MIT and there was

a lot of effort at Bletchley Park so

of course I can't explain this but I'm trying

to give you a sense of why things are difficult

and Thornton Wilder had

an old fortune teller in the time of your life say hey

I tell the future nothing easier right just whatever

you want to say hasn't happened yet but

who can tell the past the past has

always detail in it and a lot of it

is too complicated to make up a simple story

and Goethe pointed out boy

it's hard to identify heroes without

a lot of disclaimers because when you have a whole community

doing this stuff the idea is go

back and forth and there are individual heroes

but you have to take what I'm saying here

are the grain of salt this is much much larger than even

a whole University course

so here's Xerox and

so a small

number of us got invited there to pursue

things we're in and I had a real yen

to see about this children's computer

for for children of all ages

and these

are obvious but you can't tell from today's technology

so persons are the most important

children are the most important things so if you lose sight

of that you're just making gadgets and

that means there

needs to be a course called person's 101 and children

101 and here's the crib notes for

your midterm exam so

a person is a mixture of Hamlet

7 plus or minus 2 you

know about our cognitive load limitations system

1 is the animal part of our

brain that is like a neural net it does

correlations we're

cultural animals we can't

exist or even learn outside of a culture and our minds

are not unitary we have at

least 20 definable minds inside

of us and some of them are critical to

so

our minds are like theaters they're really tiny

seven plus or minus

two in most studies recently

that was for memorizing letters

and numbers it's really more like four plus or

minus three before you get overloaded

so the theories we have are tiny why

do I say theaters because we think in terms

of stories and

that can make us feel good but in fact

stories don't have much of a mapping

on to the real world as people found to their surprise when

science finally got invented after two hundred

thousand years of us fooling ourselves with

stories

and our

minds are mostly animals

omething we don't

and if we were born anywhere in the world but

taken to say Paris we're gonna wind up French

if we're taking born

taken somewhere else we're gonna wind up wherever we

go we're set up to learn the culture as

reality wherever it is

so that's efficient in one

way but it is a true source of problems

and this multiple minding thing I'm not

gonna mention 20 but we have a whole mind

just for tactile kinesthetic

like we can we can touch

our fingers behind our back without

looking we know where we are in space

we learn when we do things when

we drag things around when we touch

then we have a mind that is

iconic it's visual it's can see I

can see about a hundred things at once and

pictures are about four times more memorable

than words and what's

fun is if you put a hundred words up on the wall and

you just draw a boxes about them they're twice as memorable

as the words without the boxes because the boxes

I make the words into half pictures

and so it engages the picture part of your

and the

thing that makes us interesting and also

dangerous is the extent to which we can use

our language facilities for

layering ideas on top of

our genetics was never directly set up for so

we're more theatrical than we assume we

treat our beliefs as reality smaller than

we assume we can't take in whole context we're

much more non-human than we assume we hate the idea

that we're not human but we are we

react Everett rather than

thinking we're more

culturally shaped and we want our conclusions are mostly social

this is the disaster most people cannot

do something just because it's a good idea

about 85%

of humanity won't do something unless

they sense their society

around them also believes in the idea

so this is a critical

problem in our modern day

and

we're much more fragmented than we think we're

mostly we think of ourselves as unitary whether rather

than a bunch of minds even to

the extent that we

when we see

a candy bar in an apple and

we have a conflict on the thing we don't think

of this as being two Minds each one wants

something and we only have one body this

happens all the time and we're we're quite used to

it so that

the key here is we can use

these things for positive things

once we are real is why anthropology is a good idea

I think it's probably the only

required course I would put into both

K through 12 and college it's

surprising that in a liberal

arts university they don't make people understand their

own species mm-hmm isn't

that funny yeah so

we're way off so hang on I know

but I'm but I'm using words

so when

we thought about children we thought about

many more people in this but here's Montessori

pointing out you can't teach the 20th century

in the classroom because we're actually set up by

nature to learn from our culture so if you

want children to learn an epistemology you

have to make the school into something

environment this is

Montessori x' idea if you want to learn

French don't go to a classroom to learn to go

to France another thing that

Seymour's said and one

of the big influences here was Jerome Bruner I'll just

mention this that here's his challenge

if you can you

need to teach intellectually honest forms if you're teaching

them to children you're gonna have to invent new

forms that embody the content

you're going to teach children mathematics you

have to figure out the mathematics that their brain can handle and

it has to be real mathematics so

like you probably don't want to teach children

fractional arithmetic

at an early age

it's absolutely a dumb it

doesn't match up well with what they do and

okay so

let's take so this is going to take about eight

or nine minutes so forgive me

so

well in computing you have

to do real things because

you can't prove much so we

needed a Dynabook to experiment with and we couldn't make one

because of displays didn't exist and so we

had this genius Chuck Thacker at Parc who

made an interim diner book

[Music] so

this is the day it started working and

you see on the screen there there's a cookie monster that

was drawn on the screen and in

fact the here's

what this machine could do you can

little bit more powerful than a Mac was this

has done 11 years before the Mac eleven

years

and because

this was an emulation computer it could also do

12 poly Tom Braille real-time

voices and you could just hook

the keys from any keyboard into

the machine and you had the

first real-time synthesizer that was Polly Tom Braille

and it was made for children

we work with hundreds of children they're in

the same spirit as Seymour Papert

and how did we program

this well this idea of little

a network I had

another genius Dan Ingalls and

here's a progression of user interfaces which

will look sort of familiar to you this

is desktop publishing with embedded

graphics and you can see the user interface comes

up fear

and towards the end of

the 70s we built machines with

larger screens and in fact I have a revival

of one actually

so this is the

now I switch over it's designed to use

so this is actually a running version

see if I

can find here we go and it

was done for this first portable machine and

so it calls a note-taker you notice it has

the same recognition thing here

and we're running it on this larger machine

right now

and how do we get it well here's

right there as a disk

pack of hundreds that Xerox through a way of this work

rescued

and on it happened to be a file

[Music]

that had

the system on it and this system

was in the form of a complete network so

it included everything including the

it was like an Internet

where objects were connected together

and because

the whole thing was was contained

all we had to do is write a little emulator for the

machine that it ran on and the whole system started working

and you're looking at it right now using it to give you this

presentation and this

gives us a time machine taking

us back into the past and

the only difference between this system that

I'm showing you today and the past is the

emulator has much more memory so I can show many

more bitmap pictures than we could back then

and here it is so this looks

and by the way this is the system that Steve Jobs saw

in his famous visit so you'll have

something interested see what he saw and

what the Mac did

and didn't do so

[Music]

so among other things

well is the overlapping windows

in this system

you could use the for instance suppose I wanted

to Center I can use the recognizer to

Center it or

so the gesture recognition here's

a painting I did like 45 years ago

and it's

live so I can select some paint here

I can select it a brush here and I can scribble it

up [Music]

the

recognizer and

so forth and

now what am i showing here well this

system had unlimited desktops each

desktop is live so

these are not pages in a presentation

manager all right why would anybody want

that right once you give the presentation

you're dead you cannot interact with

the thing isn't that crazy why did they do that so

here each one of these things is

live and it persists over time and so I can give

a demonstration of anything I want just

by sequencing through these different

desktops you can see where I've been here

here's the slides I just showed here

here's where I am now and here I'm going to

go look

at something again would be nice to have so this is called an active

essay so again

it's a desktop but this is

a 12 year old girl who wrote this article which was published

magazine but she did an active version here

and you can see what she did so here's a

simulation of the computer that she used and

so

making a box called Jo and I

can say Jo turn 45

so this is kind of like logo I can

say Jo

grow

100

right so

I'd like to be able to do this today one

of the things that Frost's me the most is none

of the media systems that you can buy today will allow

you to run active content in it it's all imitations

of past media you can't do this

in Microsoft Word you can't do this

on the net you can't do it in

Wikipedia how crazy it is to go to an article on

programming language in Wikipedia and not being able to try

the language so this is complete blindness

okay so I'll

[Music]

I'll just go past this

and now [Music]

okay

so the last idea here is a little

something about communication and

Licklider who set up all of this stuff wrote

this memo in 1963 to

the members of the intergalactic network

why did he call it that well

they asked him and he said well engineers always

give you the the minimum and I want

network so I'm asking for an integral active one

and he got

it and he had this idea which

was if we make an enormous

network our biggest problem is going to be learning to communicate with

aliens and he meant that once

you get larger than the context you're in you start

losing the commonalities that are needed for communication

so it's like communicating

with aliens and there's this problem

of if you have two different

contexts you could be in trouble

you could both be human and

mane and hooves and a tail this is a joke if you're

a medical person right it's

called over diagnosing it's a zebra

no it's just a horse

here's the conflict between candy

bars and apples and then the question we

had back then was what kind of shared context

can you put together to allow you to communicate with a computer

and what you're doing is negotiating common

areas

and again theater comes to

play here because think about what theater is the

audience doesn't get to interact with the play so

the playwright and the actors have

to supply what would be the note

negotiation

and it's in theater it's called a

magic mirror in the profession because the idea

is to beam the audience's intelligence back out at them

to think about things they haven't thought about for a long

time and same thing with

writing writing has to do the negotiation this

is why writing for most people is difficult because

they're like children children think everybody knows what's

on their mind and so they just say what's on their mind

and that isn't what writing is about

okay so one way

to think about it is all of these communication

things are kind of like pointing because

we're pointing to the thing we hope is common between us

so to get

computers to talk to each other well we had to do that

with the internet and also with

object-oriented languages and

of course we might have to deal with aliens

o for this computers and humans thing

we've got this theater

what should we put on the stage and ours

our solution was let's put what the

computer is thinking on the stage but in a form

humans can deal with so this is what we're the graphical

user interface came from it is

a theater that's explorable

and when

put

the pointer into him into a window

and it comes up to the top you're choosing a context

you're choosing what here's what I'm going

and the computer knows what you're going to talk about

next so you're moving from topic to topic

you want to have all of the things

available and

then these three mentalities here

need to be combined you need

to do something with this because this

is not just memory but dragging

is intimacy you're

to something and moving it around and the reason

the Mac that interface was popular

is because most people who used

it felt some sort of rapport with

it there was a bond that bond comes from

the kinesthetic part of things

so this is Jerome Bruner 101

and then the thing that's left out

in most interfaces is

the fact that there is a new

literacy here because you have a computer and so

any interface that doesn't allow you to program safely at

any age is very poorly designed

it's basically made for people

that the technologists think

of is intellectual cripples

here's a good place to quit

so to do this interface and you

could argue that you know there's a like eight inventions

that needed to be done to get the modern world in computing

and networking the gateway

one was the GUI because

without it you don't get four or five billion

people being able to communicate with the computers

it is the intermediary between them and

here are the disciplines that were needed

to do that design

and the way it worked out was

one there was one person who could do those disciplines

and a bunch of

people who could do

several of them and do them better than the person

that could do all of them right

so the person who could do all of them could talk with everybody

in the team and like

Dan Ingalls there who is a much better programmer

than I was I let the better programmers do the

programming all right so you have this

combination of differences and similarities that

allow you to build extremely powerful teams

and with that thank you very much for inviting me

and I hope to visit again sometime thank you

[Applause]

exactly our

read upon well if you started three minutes late because you

and Mark come on

okay

oh yeah where

do you think the education system is headed with

this well the education he's asking

where does he think the EDD where do I think

the education system is headed in the next few years I'm

presuming you're talking about K through 12 o

higher ed okay well

I

think

the most difficult because

humans are so

imbibed with the

context that they grew up in contexts they

work in they're not aware that they're in a context so

McLuhan had a great quote he said I don't know who discovered

water but it wasn't a fish

because our nervous systems are absolutely

set up to damp out anything that's

constant it's called accommodation and

McLuhan pointed out the number one thing we need to pay attention to

is the stuff that we've damped out

it's the stuff that we

had to learn in order to do

things without like we read without difficulty

so we completely miss what

happened to us when we learned to read so

so my reading

don't know how to criticize higher education in general but

I can certainly do it in particular in that

most people

I meet who have college degrees

or you know you can never get really

educated but there's a threshold idea

and in my opinion

most most undergraduates that

I've taught in the last 30 years or

and most people with college degrees that I've met

aren't passed any threshold that I would call

educated not even close

because they don't know the most

elementary things about their own species and

it seems like the

basic notion of education

is not it's different than training

different than a vocational school it's

about context it's about perspective and you

can think of 10 or 20 things that

need to have much more perspective on then

humans generally do growing up in any particular

culture so I believe that education is flunking

that terribly and

it happened I saw some of it happening

because many universities like my wife

went to Stanford she missed the

year before was last year they did a Western

civilization course at Stanford and

she never that wasn't

part of her Stanford education there was no context

for most of the other stuff she was learning there

are other things that were taught in lieu of Western

civilization but it absolutely doesn't make

sense not to try to prioritize

the impact of knowledge

and so

I think that's worse today I think

the I think the idea that people have

that they should follow their own bliss

is a really good idea but if

try to do it without gathering context they're nuts

because you

know when you're 16 years old or 17 years

old and high school and you decide you're

to decide what you're going to do for the rest of your life that

is the worst mistake you can ever make and

somebody needs to

explain that to the kids and the

reason we have compulsory education is precisely because it

hundred thousand years to discover science

there's nothing obvious about the stuff that's important

and that's why we have schools K

through 12 and we have colleges it's

exactly for the stuff that it's not can't

be learned as an apprentice so

either yes sir yes hi

the

departed Oh where well

that that was around here oh no

I let's see we're we're in Boulder so

as he was I think between Palo

Alto and Mountain View that

Xerox dumped there yeah

that quite a few of that of the work was lost

this revival that

I showed you was a Christmas project that a bunch of

his old timers did just for fun around I

think 2014

be this thing

I would not

be surprised at all it's probably you

know a PhD means PhD

means piled higher and deeper and I'm

sure that pile is piled higher

and deeper now we were very

lucky to get that because it happened to be the only file

of this particular system that was ever recovered

and in fact it was it required

a fair amount of archaeological work to

Eve to figure out what it was we had to look at kind

of the raw stuff on it

and then figure out you

know what was the minimum what could we do

to bring the thing to life fortunately everything in I

mean it was doing its own screen paintings not using anything else

so there's no extra code

in it and by the way that whole system including the

operating system and the development system everything is about 10,000

lines of code if you want to compare that with the

way programming is done today today that would

be probably about a million lines

of code or ten million lines of code or

so it's because we this is

the power of mathematics if you have a mathematical

bent then

you can see that the

what you're doing with computing is a set of relationships

the problem is math doesn't run

well math assumes

basically infinite speed and

but if you can find a compromise between math

that won't run on a computer but it's very compact and something

that's say twice the size of that that

does run that's what you were seeing there you wind

up with code that is maybe a factor of a thousand smaller

than the way typical programming is done

yeah the field has been very in

curious as to how we did all this stuff that

is what is just as they are in curious about Engelbart

and getting curious about ivan sutherland

because our field is basically a pop culture and

a pop culture is all about an individual

saying i'm here too

and so they're not interested

in the past at all they're interested in what

can do and they don't care whether it's better or worse

than the past because that's not what it's about it's

basically proclaiming identity and

you have that in a field that purports to be you

know an engineering or a scientific field watch

out because they will

lack the discipline to establish those thresholds

that will make the system safe and also

they will lose the ability to

know retain the quality of

some of the better ideas from the past that's

why i show this stuff because we just want

people I rub people's noses in it to see

that yeah the displays got better looking but the

software got worse and one

of the ways of thinking about it is if you're gonna reinvent

something you better reinvent

the wheel they used to be frowned on

but right now I take it any time because

what's being reinvented is the flat tire

I've got a true

believer okay

well in biology

there's a place called Genelia labs outside

of Washington DC which is pretty darn

that is

a very Xerox PARC looking place I don't know of a computer

place you know the

quality of the people around there are numerically

more people around today of the quality of the

park and ARPA people

percentage-wise is much worse because

of the pop culture aspect there are millions and millions of

people who probably shouldn't be writing code

but that

disparity also exists in a smaller

way in the in the 60s because

the people who work for IBM were not really

that good and

my what I'm trying to show was Wow

if you don't have this context at the ARPA

thing none of us were any good

I was surprised at the ideas that I had

and all of us when

Park went away we when we have

meetings we all talk about wow we

haven't been nearly as a productive we've

done things but the synergy is gone from

the thing that so the one

way of thinking about the bottom line that I tried to sum this up

is that the quality of the results is most

strongly correlated with the quality of the funders

because if you think about

biology as variation every

generation will have that one in a million or one in ten

million person you

can guarantee it the real question is

doesn't vote through those seeds fall in fertile

soil or not and this is where the funders actually

take the lion the funders who don't

try to control so the big

deal about the ARPA funders was they didn't confuse

the responsibility which they had drawl this money with

the the need for controlling

you can't control an artist

it's like hurting a cat

can't do it you can get a calf to do anything

you want if you present the cat with a situation that

it wants to do you

that is and that's what a good research manager

does they just set up an environment like

look lighter got hundreds of people working

on the following vision the

destiny of computers are

to become interactive intellectual

amplifiers for all humans pervasively

network worldwide that's what he said back in

the early 60s and he never deviated from that and

you didn't know what that meant didn't

know how the networking was going to be done do you know what an intellectual

amplifier what didn't matter because people came out

of the woodwork and Licklider was happy

to take 70% not

fruitful which

he didn't think of his failure but just overhead to

get the 30% that would change the world

right if you think about it was cheap at the

price because cost in today's

it probably cost maybe half a billion dollars to

do this park was maybe a hundred million and

the return has been on the order of 60

about 60 trillion dollars now

on this so the return on investment of

trusting the

researchers and setting up a good process is far far more than

accomplished the only way

not to make millions and billions safely and

most of the millions billions they're making are made from

these unsafe processes that are no longer being

funded having been

funded in this country for like 35 or almost

40 years now yes

you know where

[Music]

well I don't know because

the if you think about that Xerox

was a fluke and Kaler had to get

xerox to sign a an agreement that

they wouldn't mess around with us for five years which

they hated but they did and the

reason is that companies don't get rewarded for doing

edge of the art research there are no tax breaks

there's not even anything like depreciation

research gets charged as just

as an expense and so most

companies would rather use you

know that use capital and do acquisitions after somebody

has done it but they don't realize that their company

court culture gets diluted every time they

acquire so they eventually wind up with

less and less synergy in the in the

company and they they they can't do much so

it's a

so again looking at the one example

we have that worked really well the

government launders

money that it gets through taxes

so it it puts an

intermediary that we that companies

it's like you're spending their money

even though you aren't but they

feel like it and they want you to do what they need rather

than what is actually needed to be done so

government short-circuits that it takes the money away and

it's a regis distribution agency and

the other unfortunate

thing is this only works in a

democratic government when there's

an enormous threat like war

it's completely correlated

with that why because the reasonable people who run things

absolutely do not

want to deal with people like artists and scientists

that's those are the last people

that they want to talk to and it's only like same

thing in the UK they're completely

against boffin's until the

hitler and then all of a sudden they were able to set up Bletchley

Park and do the radar stuff early enough to save the

country but as soon as World

War Two is over they threw out Churchill and they

failed to reward the people who actually did

the technology that won World War two for them and

business

people are that way they're not there to

improve the world so

trying to get this kind of stuff funded

in a business especially

in the public domain where it needs to be

because you need to you know these

large things create industries not just products and

industries can't be done by any

group you have to put the stuff out so this is like

the exact opposite of the hunting and gathering

instincts that most people have this is like agriculture

this is like building and if

you think about the US we are a country that is

built on cooperation but

the next level down every business is competing against

every human is competing against every other human so

this is nuts but we are

we are crazy species

because we feel punished

when we're taken away from people but as soon as we get in a group we

start trying to take advantage of it and

so do monkeys and so do

chimpanzees and so do other primates

this is not a purely is why I say

we're not nearly as human as we think

those conflicting

input you know impulses are actually

something you'll find in most mammals but especially in

primates worth pondering

yes

her own

well so nobody the

number-one thing here is nobody

who does the kinds of things we're

talking about is other than an optimist

and

if you think about it it it doesn't make sense to

be pessimistic you're just

you know might as well be an optimist and just

take more shots to the chin but

overall you'll have more of a chance than if

you're pessimistic you'll dodge too many things so number

compared to this golden

age I've been talking about it really was there's

nothing like it right now

like

the best people the best person I I think Brett

Vickers he's definitely in my top two

or three maybe even of all

time but especially in this day and age he can

hardly get any funding because

working on a thing that's really a 10 year out thing

it's wonderful he's they've built it you

can use it it's a whole different way of

thinking about it's computing as a part

of it will be 15 or 20 years from now

fantastic can't get a dime from

all these Silicon Valley billionaires because they're

not interested in anything they can't turn into a product

and the government is

afraid of being criticized by Congress

so the

NSF has always required

both peer review and propose

in computing proposals that are akin to engineering

proposals which means you have to explain to them

are you going to do something and that's not what research

is research is having an

idea about how you might you

know it's basically about saying yeah

conditions are very good for this kind of thing

give us some money and we'll find out

so that doesn't really exist today

very well universities could do

a much better job so MIT for

a number of years it

had a fund

which was part of its endowment where

they did their own funding of certain professors

who couldn't get normal funding in

peer-review processes one of the most famous was Norbert

Weiner cybernetics guy and

the president of MIT just decided hey

we should set up a position called Institute professor and

will not only pay their salary but will give them

you know today it would be like a half a million a year

to do whatever they wanted put

a couple of students on some idea that's too crazy

to even talk about so you have to do

yeah the other way of looking at it is this enlightened

funding is like the MacArthur Fellow grants

but for groups I've tried to get

the MacArthur people to understand

that so many important

hings are actually done by groups of people and

by just restricting to individual artists

they're they're doing a good thing but they're missing

the point of the whole process of a bunch of arts

that they don't can't recognize and

so far I haven't been able to convince them I've

been on their committees for choosing MacArthur

fellows but it's basically they have this

do and they're proud of it and they

really don't want to hear about you

know how a lot of things need to get done it if

you think about Engelbart

a hundred percent concerned with saving the world he

was one of the most dedicated people I've ever met

and thought about it for a long

time he was on task

on all of the stuff

that he did and he had concluded that what

you have to do is boost the collective IQ of

groups of people working together in order to solve world

problems and that's what is those

designs this is a lofty

ER set of ideas than you'll find from any manufacturer

today any vendor they just don't think

that that way and you can tell

so so that sounds

dismal on the

other hand you're at the right place for

doing stuff because the university

is kind of a bastion it's supposed to be a bastion against

the hordes

coming in to sack Rome

right so you're at a place

problem with the universities is they can't get their act together

as far as these larger groups

things and

it it has to do with the degree process where they wrong especially

in technology they wrongly tried to get

people to do individual PhDs

whereas what you really want what a PhD

really means is a person who does

world-class work and if

they do that in a 10-person group any adviser

worth their salt will say this is a PhD

both of them

PhD and their thesis

might have ten names on it doesn't matter

because if the advisor knows what they're doing they

know what the students are doing you have

to realize that the that the PhD is

saying it's more

like getting an MD it's saying

this person is qualified to

be considered a world-class

intellectual leader in their

field that's what it should mean and they to

do the PhD they have been of

an important part of edge

of the art research so

if universities

could do it and I personally every time I talk

to a university president I say

look you guys are missing the century

that we're living in right now universities

have a unique position to actually

help things out much much more

than they are right now just because they're not

they're not supposed to be businesses

and they

don't have to show a profit and

with the government being hung up the way it is

trying to get university

funds involved in this stuff could be a tremendous

difference compared to the way things are

now yeah I've talked to the unit you

know University of California has four or five universities

in the top ten in computing and

I pointed out to them that this is four

or five in the top ten in computing and

you guys are letting the regents tell you what tenure

is are you kidding just

take it over it's not up to the

Regents what tenure is they don't know anything

about computing define

what tenure means and define it differently than

paper County period so

part of the problem is faculties

are more comfortable than they probably

should be yes sir

well

if you think about say

at least kind of paradigm-shifting

periods in the

context of 20th century capitalism so

you had Bell Labs a lot of

paradigm-shifting people research gap

occurs in the context of a

company that had day-to-day business you

know the telephone yeah of course it was a monopoly and

it was a monopoly and yet

there so that the incredible innovation can happen

in the context of a water

tower with energy yeah I don't think

that's a good one because precisely because

I would believe that argument if

it is sustained after the divestiture

but it didn't it collapsed as soon

as as soon as the baby bells went away

you were

you and your colleagues were

kind of an inflection point to me where you were

within the context well eventually Xerox

their precedence but it came together in

Xerox incredibly into innovative but

then it became the classic textbook

example of clueless manic

businessman they didn't know what

they had they blew it off it

let me let me we're just totally different for Bell

Labs let me put it let me put a little more

context on it so one of the myths about Xerox

is that they failed to profit from

Park in fact they made their entire investment

at park over by about

a factor of 210 so if

you work that out in return on investment that is astounding

they made it from only one of the eight things

we did which is the laser printer that

was the one thing they understood but they paid for Park hundreds

of times overall apart not just the computing

part of our companies that

followed well Microsoft and

Apple there's basically no

innovation they're just redeploying

yeah I mean minor tweets

yeah well but not major innovations like

bailout Xerox and then you think of the successor

companies to those Google Facebook and

it's even more extreme yeah even

less innovative they're just reacting

the paradigm that you you and your colleagues

invented if you said well I didn't invent it I I

inherited it and I was taught it

as a graduate student and yeah

so it seems like Xerox here is a

red herring because of this agreement Taylor got

with Xerox and the fact that the park

people and the ARPA people considered Park

as just ARPA project number

17 the reason park was

set up at all was because of the Mansfield amendment

throttling the funding

to the DoD for our but so is

the secret to creating a

context in which you have real

fundamental innovation that you either need

total government control or now holds

no I mean these are

Apple Microsoft a to the monopoly but they never done

anything really fundamentally well

I think the I think the capitalism

the I first I

think I would leave Bell Labs out just

because IBM

is a much more interesting example because

it was a virtual monopoly also

and you

know back in the 60s when a billion was

a lot of money they spent two and a

half billion dollars a year on Rd of

which four out of five working prototypes

never went to market so

they had enormous resources their

problem was they thought of their R&D as a hedge and

I think that I think

the most important thing is if you compare for

instance of Friedman's notion

of capitalism with Peter Drucker's Friedman's

idea which is in vogue today is

capitalism

in the United States is entirely at

the service of the stockholders

you're trying to increase shareholder value

and that is if Drucker said no

that is a really bad way to think about it

capitalism in America should

be entirely at the service of the customers

that is the way you should look at but today

yes what just one more line

but today

the capitalism has

to be at the service of the planet it

doesn't matter anything smaller than that is completely

below that what is actually needed thing

it doesn't matter what you do with capitalism unless

it's a the blue line there is

at the service of the entire planet because that's what

the system's nature of today is and this

different than the system's nature of a hundred years ago it

just is and you basically have to

go with what's actually what actually is

[Applause]

what a wonderful night program

thank you for a long day and a great

and a long talk thank

you