How to Invent the Future II - CS183F

So I kept on rewriting the title.

Another way of looking at it is instead of trying to move forward from here,

where everything is confusing, and the present looks like reality.

We want to go out to the future and bring it back.

And we talked about some process and methods,

today we're going to talk about a few of the gazillion things.

Of course I didn't get done last week which made this week even more.

And finally, I decided **** it I'm going to do both of these

talks again without an audience to do them to their natural length.

Because the destiny for this is being online and

online people are not confined to 50 minute hours.

I'm sure Sam was all for that, great.

So again, here's my email address.

Now, of all the people who are tuned into this talk and in the classroom,

That means that either or

both of my talk isn't interesting, or you're not interesting, or both.

So try and, at least, disabuse me of the latter.

Okay, to start off with, here's Leonardo, pretty smart guy.

Imagine if you were born with twice Leonardo's IQ.

Think of how easy it would be to get into Stanford.

Maybe you do have twice Leonardo's IQ.

But suppose you were born with twice Leonardo's IQ in 10,000 BC.

Before they burn you at the stake, or whatever they did back then.

Yeah, so here's a guy with nowhere near Leonardo's IQ, Henry Ford.

And whereas Leonardo could not invent a single motor for

any of his vehicles, think about that.

Henry Ford was able to put together processes that allowed him to make

millions and millions of cars for about, sell them for $800 a piece.

And the difference between the two was that Ford was born into the right century,

And so the knowledge that had accumulated in the 19th century made

much more difference than any level of smartness.

And where did that knowledge come from,

it came might as well pick Newton if you're going to pick anybody.

It came because the context was changed from the Middle Ages and

the Renaissance to something completely different in the 17th century.

And Newton made the biggest change of anybody.

And so we can call that change a change in outlook.

We can call it a change in context, world view, point of view, whatever you want.

So when I'm numbering rules for you I decided to go back and start with zero.

So the zeroth rule here, probably the most important one is

to make progress here, let me move this guy off.

Context or point of view is worth 80 IQ points.

If you've got the context of science and math, you're a gazillion of times smarter,

effectively, than the smartest people of antiquity like Archimedes.

A person who learns calculus with an IQ of 110 or

120 can do things that the greatest geniuses of the past can't do.

Okay, so we can sum that up by saying

knowledge is silver, context is gold.

It's a lead weight on you.

Biggest problem with most people who are at your level and

going to the next level is you're always

the smartest people in your classroom or room at home.

But that only means you're the smartest person amongst 30 or a 100.

And if you happened to be in a room that had the 100 smartest people in the world.

And you were the smartest person in that room,

you're still not as smart as the other 99 working together.

So being clever doesn't do it.

And this is the simplest snare is the IQ snare.

Tony Hoare, really great guy, was here at Stanford for

awhile Turing winner, said debugging is harder than programming so

don't use all your cleverness to write the program.

Anybody recognize this?

Let me see hands.

people are so clever writing the program they forget that debugging is harder.

And that's true about anything.

So that's principle number one, we had zero.

And then here's a summary of what I showed you.

And the number 2 one at the top there is that the goodness of the results

correlates most strongly with the goodness of the funders.

This is the simplest way of summing up the past.

because you have to realize the difference in the past wasn't that the people were

smarter back then, we weren't smarter than the smart people today.

Every generation has really smart people.

The difference in whether you get enormous results or

not, is in this context idea and the funders that support it.

One of the ways of thinking about them is,

as opposed to getting gold medals like a bunch of us have gotten in our sixties and

seventies, 40 years after you did the deeds.

Good funders give out the gold models ahead of time.

Knowing that 70% of them are going to turn to lead,

because the funders give it out before you've gotten the results.

So this will be a slide that you can use later on,

it's basically what I said last time.

Now last time we looked at four systems.

Sketchpad, we didn't really look at the Engelbart system, but

We looked at the first really good gesture system, GRAIL.

And we saw that Ivan Sutherland, again,

invented VR a long, long before it ever came to use.

And I really rushed past personal computers.

The first thing that was kind of like a personal computer,

it was kind of cute, was Henry Husky's Bend XG 15 in the mid-50s.

So this was really early.

Harry just left us a few years over the age of 100.

Here's my vote for the first real personal computer called the LINC by Wes Clark.

Wes Clark also did the building size computer that Sketchpad was done on.

So he liked to work both large and small.

Here's one I did with Ed Cheadle.

And an idea I had in 1968,

which struck me really deeply, not because it was a tablet, but

because it was a thing that children needed.

And I'd learned from Seymour Papert what children could actually do with computers.

And that seized me in a romantic fashion.

And we looked at this idea of better and

perfect are the enemy Of what is actually needed.

In other words, you have to draw thresholds in order to know where you

are or else you're just measuring local variations.

You don't know whether they're good or bad.

And the last thing we did on Tuesday was looking at this process of

taking a glimmer of an idea out 30 or more years,

to see if it makes more sense 30 years from now than it seems to now.

Simulate it by making super computers that allow you to do the software.

you've got something that will revolutionize the world.

This is where the trillions rather than billions

comes in because you create an industry.

I didn't get a chance to show you kind of just one of the examples of what PARC did.

So I thought I'd do it today.

And this is a self-portrait, because now I have extracted stuff from a demo.

But this is a system we brought back to life from 1978, so you get a chance.

And this is a self-portrait.

So this is the successor to the Alto called the Dorado.

So it had now bigger than XVGA screen rather than the portrait model.

And this dithering technique was invented at the same time in

the 70s by Bob Floyd and Steinberg, and partly done at PARC.

So this is what a typical image on only a few computers in the world looked like,

back then, one bit per point.

And where do we get this system from?

Well, here's the Xerox dump.

And if you closely there, there's a disk pack, actually we got Xerox through out.

Most of the disk packs of the work that was done at Xerox PARC,

Here it is, few hundred files on there.

One of them happened to be most of a system that we did in 1978.

And it's of partial interest because the next year,

it was the stuff that Steve Jobs got shown doing his famous visit to.

So you have a little flavor here.

And it was relatively easy because the system is called Smalltalk.

Smalltalk-78 is a pure object system, and so it resembles the internet.

This is an internet self-portrait and it's just as a good a self-portrait, Smalltalk.

Because the idea was to have one-to-one

correspondence between the idea of little logical computers.

Which is what we called objects that could send messages around and

make an entire system.

And so it's a little different than from what you think object-oriented programming

is today.

One of the consequences is that there are no actual applications because

you can mix and match objects as you choose.

Here we see something that is vaguely familiar.

I thought I turned that off.

Okay, so this is a typical screen back then, and

it ran on the Alto there, the portable note taker, and the Dorado.

Here's a bitmap painting I did 45 years ago that we found and stuck in here.

See the user interface is with the object itself, and here I'm marking it up.

And it has a character recognizer, gesture recognizer like GRAIL did.

There it's recognizing I want an arrow and making one.

The overlapping windows, the icons.

What would be called Rich Text today.

And you can see the gesture recognizer is being used to tell it how to justify.

And this system is organized in terms of projects.

So each project you can think of in today's terms as a separate desktop,

they persist over time.

Now think about this compared to the user interface today,

where you use an application that doesn't have every feature that you want.

And you start and stop applications, and try and cut and paste between them.

Here what you have is just working spaces, an unlimited desk for

every project that you have.

You can have as many, they persist over time because this is a workflow idea.

We couldn't get Apple to adopt this idea.

And so these are kind of thumbnails of each one of them.

We can go into one of them.

Here's a little thing done by a 13-year old girl,

writing an article for Creative Computing back in 1975.

And so you can see it's sort of like desktop publishing.

But in fact, any object can be used in here.

And so for example, if we look here, she's telling about how she

used the program and how she's typing in there.

She's typing in code, and it's being executed to with the box and turn the box,

and so forth.

So, it'd be nice if Wikipedia had even thought about this, right?

Because imagine, you go to the article on logo, guess what?

Why? It's on a computer.

What didn't they get about computing?

If you look at it closely, you'll see the web design and

the web browser are two of the worst things ever done in computing.

Because they failed to take account of the fact that you're actually on a computer.

Okay, another example here is an animation system.

You notice that ball is not squashing there.

And it would look better if the ball squashed when it hit.

So if this were normal system and it didn't have that feature, we'd be done.

But we can relate objects to each other.

So here we're single stepping to get to that frame that we'd like to change.

We're looking at the interface of this bouncing guy, and

we're seeing, yeah, there's a thing called current frame.

That's what this thing is.

And here's our painting window.

And here's something that allows me to set the picture in there.

And I want to connect the two windows together, so

I use the gesture recognizer to draw a line between them.

It gives me a little place to explain how I'd like to relate them.

And I save all the painter's picture,

wants to be the bouncing animation's current frame.

Okay, everybody get what's going on here?

So I say, okay, go ahead and do that, and

Now we can start the animation going again, but while it's going, I can paint.

Look carefully and you'll see that the thing is being painted while it's running.

Won't you like to be able to do that today?

And just think about, why not?

This is like sketch pad, right?

Except a few years later.

Yeah, this is completely natural.

It's what you get very, very easily if you just have unlimited objects.

So in this Particular thing gives you automatically something much more

powerful in PowerPoint, because all you have to do is sequence

That's what I'm doing here.

I'm just moving from one to another.

So that's an example of what happened at Parc,

and if we go back to the screen of the various inventions there.

We can look at this now I'm answering Sam's question.

Well how much of the alto idea actually made it out of Xerox parc.

Well about half.

We'll see that see what the other half is in a second.

How about the GUI?

Well about 70%, because you notice the GUI didn't

come out as something that has this unlimited desktop idea.

Even today, 30 some odd years after this nobody has put it in there.

But it has to do with people wanting to have application and sell applications.

Even though most applications won't do all the things that you need.

How about desktop publishing about 70% for the same reason.

The way we did programming, only about 10% has come out.

And I won't go into all the differences, but I think you've seen some of them.

Laser printer about 90%.

Postscript 100%, and that's partly because the guys

who did this at Parc formed Adobe, Geschke and Warnock.

And so they sold, in their company,

how they thought you should be able to do printing.

A 100% of the Ethernet, there was no competitor.

About 50% of peer to peer and client server, we'll see why in a second.

Again, there was no competitor for it, there was no.

And so one way of looking at this is, what came out?

Most successfully were the things for

which people already out there didn't think they already knew how to do it.

So everybody knew how to program, and so

the biggest resistance was on how we did programming.

That just didn't make it.

Now here's three things I've mentioned before, because none of them made it.

But one of them was, hey the architecture of the Alto was revolutionary and

it allowed you to run very high level languages very efficiently.

And to make changes on the fly.

And we tried with Intel and Motorola to get them to

adopt these architectures for the chip and zero.

Intel especially at the time, didn't know anything about computing,

didn't know anything about programming and didn't want to learn.

They had to be dragged kicking and screaming even to do CPUs.

Andy Grove for instance was against the first CPU on a chip that Intel did.

The idea of the Dynabook didn't make it out.

when did the iPad decide to put the styles in the keyboard in the iPad?

Why couldn't they do it?

Now here's an interesting idea to think about.

Here we've got the Internet

of machines connected together and if your programming language happens to be

a software Internet like small talk was, then you can map the objects

into the network and you can migrate the objects around.

Each object is self contained, they do messaging.

The messaging is either done internally or it goes out on the Internet.

And so you have a solution for all the different scalings of computing that you

have, whether it's a small device.

>> So why do you say only 10% of the Dynabook, what's so

important about the stylus and keyboard?

>> Well so here's the thing, 2 year old use this and

92 year old use this, and everybody else uses tools for dealing with media.

So Steve decided not to do styluses.

He completely went away.

All he was doing was selling sugar water to babies.

He was not selling something, for instance that any artist can draw on.

And when I first, and he sent me the first iPad for my comments on the thing,

and the first thing I did was to go out and get a capacitive stylus and

raw lines with a rule on I guess it was Autodesk,

one of the Autodesk software that was pretty good.

And I determined that the touch sensitivity on the iPad was

fabulous despite the fact that it's done in a very,

very complex way because it has to find centroids from wide things on it,

but it was done extremely well and I got very linear results on it.

And so it was there to do, but there was no place to put the stylus on the iPad.

And long, long ago, remember I showed you a tablet

system from the mid 60s, 50 years ago.

So we had a perfect chance to decide

by experiment whether a purely stylus driven system was actually enough to do

the work that you want to do and the answer is no.

Similarly with angle bar, you could do every

piece of text entry without using the keyboard but they have the keyboard there.

Because you just can't do it fast enough for

being able to put in large amount of text, you need to have a keyboard.

This is- >> [INAUDIBLE]

here's the thing that Engelbart said.

Well, why do you have to learn your system?

Back then he said, well people are going to use their computers for

6 to 8 hours a day and they laughed at him.

So what you guys are doing, [SOUND] is using your computers for

6 to 8 hours a day and using interfaces that are made for

That if that is the most ridiculous thing you've ever,

it's a bout ridiculous as this building.

>> [LAUGH] >> You think about it as a user interface,

Come in the door and there's a stairway and there's no map.

And where am I, where can I go?

And Jesus, this looks like a dungeon.

>> [LAUGH] >> And remember,

computer-human interface is part of what you're supposed to learn about and

>> [LAUGH] >> You have to have some sense of

And I'm not sure you can do software

without having some sense of design around.

So how could, I won't make any really rude remarks.

>> And just to use up time I don't have,

I should point out that some of this migrating object idea was done at Parc,

a really great follow up was done by a visitor to Parc Jerry.

Who was at UCLA, went back to UCLA, and did a fabulous system,

using Unix as the base, called LOCUS, L-O-C-U-S.

And if you're interested in looking at a future that will

at some point actually happen, you can get that book from MIT Press.

And particularly the first couple of chapters of that book

outline what the issues are for dealing with real scaling on the Internet.

I won't go further than that, so zero.

So the principle 21 reality is a low pass filter.

You have to have enormous ideas in order, so

that people not understanding them will retain something.

You don't want to have the low pass filter give you back a dial tone.

That happens, because most ideas are mediocre down to bad,

even by people who have good ideas.

Those are the ones that you don't want to work on.

Because if you're successful on them, they're still going to get peeled at.

So here's a book, I put this slide up here for Sam, because Sam reads books.

>> [LAUGH] >> You people probably don't.

But this is not a book about Xerox PARC, Sam.

This is a book by an executive at Xerox written in the 60s,

before PARC, about trying to get the Xerox machine adopted.

And this was after Xerox had been the fastest growing, but

one of the companies that turned down the complete rights for

a licensing fee to the Xerox machine was IBM.

That story is in this book.

And IBM's consultant said, well this isn't going to work,

because there's no market for plain paper copying.

Well of course, it wasn't good copier back then.

And so I could write a book, Our Years with Xerox, the Trillions Nobody Wanted.

I didn't have time to make a picture that looks like John Dessauer.

So it doesn't matter, and I'm going to try and explain to you in the time I

have left, why the goodness of an idea is almost irrelevant.

Now, for the reality kit.

So just break the seal, and just open up the,

Thing and this will work best if you put it down on your thing like this, but,

And look at the instructions for

people online, Did you get a reality kit?

Okay, everybody got one?

What happened?

>> [INAUDIBLE] >> Take them, hand them out to.

Anybody else?

Okay, you're killing me guys.

Look at the + with your left eye and then slowly move the thing in.

Keeping focused on the plus until something happens.

Slowly moves, slow.

Who's seeing something?

>> Disappears on the blind spot.

>> Disappears on the blind, is everybody seeing that?

Don't say yes if you're not.

>> [COUGH] >> This is a good thing for everybody,

particularly in computing to do once a day.

Okay, so now let me ask you.

What do you see, where the dot was?

>> [INAUDIBLE] >> You see text?

>> [CROSSTALK]

>> Black.

>> Okay, so here's what's happening here.

So what's happening is inside your eye there is, I wonder if I go to laser.

Over here is where the blood vessels come through.

So we have a very badly designed eye.

If you're arguing with a creationist this is a good argument against God here.

>> [LAUGH] >> Because if there was a God,

he gave squids a great eye and he gave us a bad one.

Our eye happens to have the blood vessels in front of the light detecting cells.

And so our brain has to filter out all of those also.

And over here is where most of your acuity is in an area called the fovea.

And, So when the thing is further away, you get something like this.

And when you move in at some point the dot

gets over where there are no light sensitive cells at all.

And as my friend over here said, somehow the brain

fills it in and we'll look at that in a second.

So principle number 22,

is we have a blind spot in our eyes that our brain makes up stuff to fill in.

It's just making it up.

Think about this, because

what's the other case where your brain makes up stuff that you think is real?

A dream?

Most people think they only dream at night, but

in fact human brains are set up so that we actually dream.

So in the old days we'd throw chalk at you but there is no chalk.

>> [LAUGH] >> Okay.

And a powerful idea about that is number 23 is that we can't

learn to see until we realize and admit that we are blind.

And the biggest problem with most human beings is they

don't understand that they are blind, because they think they can see.

And the powerful idea about that is the 0th one again is it makes

huge difference if ideas are experienced in as many ways as possible.

In other words, perspective point of view is worth 80 IQ points.

this is why math is a danger about thinking.

Okay, let's go to the poker chips now.

Okay, and what you're going to do is hold them up like this, so

ne is about twice as far away as the other.

Like that.

Okay, you'll see something like this, right?

On your retina is actually something like this.

Think about it, if it's twice as far away it's subtending half the angle and

But it doesn't show up as half size, and we can stick these guys on a ruler.

Since these poker chips are now yours, you can take it back and

really, science the **** out of it.

>> [LAUGH] >> Here's what we should see,

that's what's on our retina.

Descartes by the way, got an axis and peel the back of it off to see whether

a biological lenses actually active like glass lenses and they do.

So the stuff that's on your retina gets mapped into

If you think about this in computer terms,

[INAUDIBLE].

In computer terms, the cells in your brain are like the hardware and

And one set of processes are all the ones that have to do with our belief system.

And before we recognize something, it goes through our belief system, and then

it goes into the real-time version of our belief system, which is called The Dream.

our beliefs are, damn it, these things are the same size.

By the way you can do this with oranges, with quarters,

Anything where you know they're the same size, do the same thing and.

So the result of Information from the actual world combined

with your beliefs, you wind up with this.

And anybody here who's an artist who can draw?

Okay, you must know this illusion then, right?

It's called size constancy.

And it's why, One of the things that you learned, I mean, can you actually draw?

>> [INAUDIBLE] >> Yeah.

You can draw, right?

So if you can actually draw, first thing you realize is

you can't see what's going on, and so you start measuring.

Hold your arm rigid, you measure it off, so I can measure.

Sam's head is that high and wow,

it's only half size compared to this guy who's closer to me.

It doesn't look like it to me,

it looks like it's almost the same size because heads are the same.

So the principle 24.

The mind's eye is different than our sensory eye.

And we do things according to the mind's eye.

And most people who have ever lived on this planet

Because they take the world as it seems.

This is why human beings generally cannot think.

So another term for beliefs is a private universe.

We each have one of our very own.

If you've ever argued with somebody you thought was reasonable up to that point,

what's happening is your beliefs are conflicting with their beliefs.

Our waking dreams are private.

I love this phrase, this is a new phrase, Alternate Truths, Kelly Ann Conway.

That's what is going on.

So you can see why being a scientist is tough.

A scientist has to get around all of this crap that our brain is throwing up.

Okay, so a quick easy model is how random this is,

is a little bit of rain water on dirt, dislodges a few crumbs of dirt,

and a little gully happens and the gully is more efficient at routing water,

so things start happening just where things start happening.

Originally, you get something like this, completely random,

And you can make a whole world out of it.

Here's a world that's completely pink,

if you've ever been in the Grand Canyon, it is just almost overwhelming.

If you look up, you have to remember to look up.

There's a little bit of blue sky up above.

And the problem with human beings was we don't look up, we look out.

So, here's an example.

That's pretty washed out, but that's a pink plain, and

our thoughts are like ants crawling over it.

We can run into an obstacle.

We can get around the obstacle, and so forth.

But everything we're doing here is pink, except we don't know it's

pink because we've never been in anything else but pink.

So this is like a fish not knowing it's in water.

Every once in a while, you might have little outlaw thought,

But you've been to school, you're going to Stanford.

You go to church, temple, synagogue, mosque, whatever it is.

Because our beliefs project out.

And when we see something that isn't normal,

normal is actually the same as crazy.

But maybe you're out for a run, you're just waking up in the morning,

you're taking a shower, and all of a sudden, you get a holy ****.

Holy ****.

Blue world that orthogonal to the one I'm in.

Once you're in that blue world, you realize, there's probably a lot of them.

Can you see each one of these as a context?

Can you see that what happened from the renaissance by Newton

to our modern age was going from a pink plane to a blue plane, right?

This is what ARPA did with computing.

It went from mainframes, a completely different way of thinking about things,

to the world we have today despite the fact that nobody had thought of it at all.

It was considered literally crazy by our colleagues in

computing when we were doing it, okay?

So you just leave the compass on there.

It's for you to remember that some people get to this really early.

Einstein was five, he was recovering from having the measles I think.

His father brought him a little compass for him to play with, and

Einstein remembered later in life, he said,

this made the most impression of me of anything in my childhood.

Because the way he looked at it,

there must be something deeply hidden behind things.

He didn't take it as it came,

because he was worrying about how does the needle know where to go.

There's nothing visible about it, and yet it is doing this.

And that changed Einstein's complete way of thinking about things.

Okay, so when a baby is born, when we are born, we're not born into nothing.

Most cultures over the last hundred

plus thousands of years were traditional cultures, hunting and gathering cultures.

And traditional cultures don't know that they are inside a particular outlook.

Traditional cultures think they're in reality.

And so they react incredibly strongly

to other people's versions of reality to the point of war.

this is what our genes give rise to in many people today including in our country

are born into this pretty natural way of looking at things.

We had to invent the idea of outlook, and well, here's another one.

So if you happen to be born here, you can have the same baby and

bring it up here, the baby will grow into being French, French in its outlook,

French in language, and so forth.

What happens when books got invented?

So a guy by the name of Asher Mccluen asked the question, what are books?

What is writing as an environment?

If you thought of writing as being brought up in France,

what would that actually mean to the human race?

Take a look at it if you're interested.

You also ask, what is media as an environment?

So for example, what is this is an environment 24/7?

Not that the kids are being told to shoot people.

But the problem is, they're seeing shooting people as normal.

Because what environments do is to take things and normalize them,

they make them into part of reality and make things thinkable.

They don't say what to do, and of course, media that we have today is

doing exactly the same thing, and most people don't realize.

Okay, so unhook the last flap here.

There's a little Desktop here, tabletop.

So look at the picture there first, and before you start experimenting,

let me make an assertion that the tops of the tables are exactly the same shapes.

I've been doing this hundreds of times and I can't see it,

but if I take my plastic thing and move it over there.

>> [LAUGH] >> If you remember nothing else from this

course, remember that the natural state of humanity is to be crazy.

Because crazy is not having good models in our mind for what's going on out there.

We just draw the line at certain kinds of crazy, but we are actually crazy.

Happens to have been first done here at Stanford, this guy is Roger Sheppard.

And that his book, it's full of these.

Okay so, Good, last couple of,

got a, yeah, I think I'll get through.

So anthropologists over the last 120 years or

so, studied several thousand traditional cultures and

wrote down properties of these cultures that were never absent.

So, if a single culture out of several thousand did not have a trait,

So all of these traits are thought of as human universals.

And, Here's a book.

You know books are actually useful.

This is another good one to read.

I became very friendly with Sam, and I noticed that I could not mention a book to

him that he would not have read the next time I saw him.

That's how you know he's a good guy.

so the basic idea here is genetics drives culture.

Genetics has the precursors, the desires, and culture fills in the parameters.

And once that list was made, people got interested in

things that were not in every culture, and this is a partial list of those.

So agriculture had to be invented.

It was a pretty easy invention but, it was only invented about 12,000 years ago,

out of several hundred thousand years of us being on the planet.

So initially, it was a hard thing for hunting and

Like every animal we have zillions of genes to help us cope with things.

We can deal with hardship like every animal incredibly.

It's really an invention of the 18th century.

And the reason is, is that for almost all of human existence,

people died in the same world that they were born into.

Almost nothing happened.

And so, what you had to do, to get from birth to death was to cope.

It's only been recently that the idea of, no, we could shape the world to be better.

That's a new idea, these are all powerful ideas.

Oral language versus writing and reading,

the differences are profound, stories, superstition, religion, and

magic versus the representation systems of science, News.

Remember news, never introduces a new category, right?

What you hear about is, it's this forest fire, it's that war,

it's this murder, it's this kind deed.

This is why news can happen so quickly.

And that's what our mind craves, what we hate is categories because it can take us

That's why you never hear any news about calculus,

takes a couple of years to learn it, and there aren't enough people.

Fast thinking verses slow thinking.

this is one of the reasons why most programming languages go bad.

Whereas, a modern way of thinking about things is similarities over differences.

It has many things to do also with equal rights and democracy.

Vendetta and revenge.

Those are the favorite movies, and the favorite video games are revenge games.

Personal revenge games, where the system has gone bad, and

somebody has to break the law to put things right.

But in fact, the whole legal system was setup and

we're doing avoid thousand year feuds in Vendettas.

Okay, so we can think of this side, we have things that human beings want.

And simple way of thinking about them is,

every single one of them on this side is illegal drug.

And for people in this class who are trying to make money by being

entrepreneurs, just make a technological amplifier for

any of these things that we crave, genetically.

Look at the things that are there,

hunting and gathering, social, language.

Stories, news, theater, all of those things.

That's your list.

Just get this book, right, Sam?

And, make something that will make people worse, and they'll buy the hell out of it.

Because we don't have any natural, all of these things are in shortage in the world

that human beings have been into except for a couple hundred years ago.

Over here, we have things a human beings need and you can't really see, but

Because they're not particularly genetically prepared for.

They had to be They had to be invented, okay.

So last shot here, 21st century going on into the 22nd century.

Hey, we're not born into France, or traditional society anymore.

We're born into a universe that is unbelievably large.

A planet that most people don't even realize we're on yet.

Not just our social system of a few hundred people that we know, but

millions of social systems, and billions of people.

A technological system that is starting to touch everybody in many,

For instance, modern medicine really dates from only World War II.

That's a long time ago for you folks, but it's within my lifetime.

I was born before World War II.

you simply did not get antibiotics when you had an infection.

Was that soon, doctoring was almost quackery.

Much of scientific medicine has happened in the last 50 or 60 years.

And then we have the system of our mind.

There's not just social, but psychological, cognitive, and so forth.

So we can sum up this world that we're born into in this century

as the systems we live in and the systems we are.

Think about that, the difference between that and

what most people think that they want.

These are the systems we have to learn about and deal with.

And these systems are not separate, I've mentioned them separately but

hey're all intertwined with each other, they're all invisible.

Okay, and I'll just leave you with this last slide.

So we found out about all of these systems.

They were invisible until a few hundred years ago, and

some of them invisible until a few years ago.

And the human tragedy is in two parts.

Part of it is just finding out something in our civilization,

doesn't automatically transmit it to people born into the civilization, right?

The educational system has to be changed in order to reflect this stuff.

And the composite picture here is that part of our brain,

the genetic part of our brain, even overlaid with this stuff,

still has these reactions, and ways of thinking about things or

not thinking about things that go back a hundred thousand years.

So I think with things like television to look at,

things like video games to look at, things like Facebook to look at, if you're

going to go out and make a company that is going to appeal to people, try to do it

without appealing to the parts of their nature, that they're helpless in front of.

Because one of the things that those of us who helped invent the technologies

of today are quite worried about now, is that the technology is so

much easier to invent than it is to change the educational system.

And so what we've got is the informational equivalent of cave

people with nuclear weapons, but now they're informational weapons.

And in many ways, I think these weapons are more dangerous because by

renormalizing human attitudes and human beliefs could very easily bring

down our civilization and put us back into the Stone Age.

The talk on Tuesday, maybe a little thicker today, but the whole impetus

behind the ARPA research and inventions of these things.

And particularly, people like Engelbart was to try

to invent new tools and

new media for humanity to get itself out of its problems.

And Engelbart, for example, said almost everything important

hat has consequence in the adult world is done by adults working together.

And so this is why his system was collaborative from the,

So here's a Mac, some people have Linux, some people have Windows on it.

Here's the interesting thing.

Not a single one of the main operating systems today has built into it

he thing that Englebart showed in 1968, which is the intrinsic

ability to share any content that you're looking at with anybody else,

to the point of allowing them to interact with it and to talk back and forth, right?

So this a thing that is at an operating system level.

It is possible to do, but not a single operating system use today does it.

And so the ability to actually work collaboratively on content is been held

back by notions of operating systems that go back pre-1965.

All three operating systems we have today that are the main ones are old, old ideas.

They don't even get to where Park was,

the notion of how processes can coordinate with each other.

And there are many, many other of these things, because these operating

systems are rather similar to each other, and because they're pervasive.

Unless you use your reality kit, you're going to think that they're normal and,

therefore, that's the way things should be.

Many people, in computing, have a misplaced notion of

Darwinian process, Like most people.

Most people think Darwinian processes optimize.

One of my degrees in molecular biology, and I can tell you,

any biologist would say, they're absolutely not optimized.

The whole point of Darwinian processes is

to fit into some niche in some environment.

And if that environment isn't the right kind of environment, the processes of

evolution is not going to give you something that's very interesting.

That is the way it works.

And as computing gets less and less interesting, its way of accepting and

rejecting things gets more and more mundane.

So this is why some of these early systems, like Sam looks at sketchpads and

said, why aren't they doing it today?

Nobody even thinks of doing Wiziwig on the web, on web media.

I just typed in some answers to Cora, and

I was in a regime that was pre-70s.

I was typing into a little window.

I couldn't see what it was going to look like until I clicked the button.

Come on, this is ****.

nobody is protesting except old fogies like me, because I know it can be better.

You need to find out that it can be better, that is your job.

Your job is not to agree with me, your job is to wake up.

Find ways of criticizing the stuff that seems normal.

That is the only way out of the soup.

You have to go against your genetic impulses to try and

learn the environment around you, it's the most natural thing we have.

But it's not going to help, because the environment is weak.

And if you learn the environment, you're going to be weak.

>> All right, thank you very much.

>> [APPLAUSE]