Alan Kay, 2015: Power of Simplicity

I'm not a vendor

I'm not trying to sell

you something for money but I'm

going to put a few ideas in front of you and

I view my job here

is first to get us to

lunch in a reasonable time

second

to get questions from you some

of these will do at lunch but I'm going

to go against my the people

invited me here and I'm still going to go solicit questions

at any time

because otherwise I

could have just made a video and

we could do some sort of conference

call for the for the questions that's not what I

want and then the the third part is

to put a few ideas in front of you

that might get the questions to be

important for you I

was asked to talk about simplicity

and there was some interesting paradoxes

there but the first I like to

deal with a metaphor about ideas

and the question is our idea is

made out of ponderable matter in which

case ideas

oppose each other they can't be in the same place at

the same time or our idea is

made out of light in which case

we can have any number of ideas in the same place

at the same time we don't have to choose between them

and sometimes even the color changes can

be very suggestible similarly

our ideas things or are they processes so I'm going

to take the right-hand side view

here and put a bunch

of things in front of you some of which

may seem somewhat paradoxical in

fact the likes

curve here this is a curve everybody knows in

this room represents quite a bit

of the last maybe a hundred years but

certainly for most of you the time

that you've been in your

career there's always some exponential

happening and at

any given point in time represented by the

vertical line there there's a likes factor

in corporations it's

not just the competitive pressure

but all the legacy

this is in that's that

need to be tended to people think but

are costing more and more fact

they're costing so much in the realm of software

that corporations have actually been

unwittingly destroying the

very agencies that could help them namely corporations

are telling universities that they

need people who are experts

in programming in this language or that language all

of those languages are completely obsolete but

hey happen to be the ones that your legacy software is written in and

because universities have decided to turn themselves

into businesses they're feeling

the pressure from businesses

because they want to get money from the businesses and so

the businesses are actually undermining their own future

because you're systematically

killing off the people who might actually

come up with much better software solutions number

fifty sixty years ago when I started most

corporate software is written in machine code

somebody had to invent the higher-level languages

that were good for a few years

unfortunately we're still using them ones

basically from the 60s things

have to be reinvented over and over again and the

other thing about the Ickes curve is

the actual complexity part

of the Ickes might be a lot lower

might actually be

a tiny part of the Ickes

and perhaps we could call the the

other part of it from that nice

little thing down there up to where

the Ickes is we could call that complications so

complications are basically noise

bad

technique old technique

human bumbling

inability to get on learning

curves you name it's a whole bunch of factors

and quite a bit of the

stuff in corporations today if

you examine it I think you'll all agree with me is most

of you or CIOs if you've looked actually

at the code and I think the tide is turning with

CIOs because when I first started giving

talks like this to CIO is about eighty percent

hem were from the financial organization they really didn't

know anything about computing and so it's very hard

to explain what computers were possible what what

they could do but now it's it's different

you've looked at the code in your company

you'll realize that wow I've got millions of

millions of lines of code there and I have

more than a sneaking suspicion that a

lot of that code is actually in my way it

doesn't represent the actual bang

per line of code that we'd expect

from a higher-level language so going

back in history anybody

ever seen a diagram like this before

somebody they don't show

them in business school but the other

part of the campus so this is a

this

is what the planets the

paths of the planets travel

over an entire year this was actually

done in the 17th century and I'll show you shortly one

done a little bit earlier and you can see why they're

called planets the planet

is a Greek word meaning wanderer so

these curlicues are actually for instance what the orbit

what mercury does if you look at it every night it

will come into view and it will go this way across the

sky but then all of a sudden it will come back going

in the opposite direction you can see why

hard to do astronomy if you have two moving

things in orbits going at different speeds

and viewing each other at different times of the year

very very hard to understand what's actually going

on and there were some religious beliefs going

all the way back to the Greeks that said God is

a perfect being in the air four would

only use circles to

explain the course of these orbits

and it turns out the

orbits are not circular and

especially if you put the earth in the center instead of the

Sun and so they came up with this idea that

you see here on the

top right which is okay we'll

take a circular orbit and we'll put another circle

so as the planet

goes around in the larger circle it's

also going in the smaller circle and

combining the two circles as you see there will give

us something that has these loops that we see this is

called an epicyclic theory of

orbits and when

Copernicus went over to putting the Sun

in the center he also believed that God

was perfect and so he decided they would be circular orbit so

comparing whatever you've heard in school was wrong

Copernicus's scheme only made things

slightly more simple but in fact it still had

this mess and

you can put more emphasize

just sound like anything you're familiar with

you hang on to that old theory no

matter what it is and you start putting fixes in just

like software let's not rewrite it

oh no let's not find a better way of rewriting this

awful oh no let's not do that let's just patch it

natural human tendency that's what they

did in astronomy back then this

is before science got invented for real

Tycho was extremely

meticulous and

Kepler the site

who worked with him decided to believe his measurements

this is for Mars and

Kepler decided well

I sort of believe in God but let's try something else

so the first thing he tried were ovals

because they would fit the actual orbits

better and not quite enough then finally got right he

said what about ellipses and he had thought about ellipses

because as the next thing after circles in it

he didn't try ellipses for years you know why because

he figured that the people before him who were

really smart had already tried ellipses and found

them wanting no

they were really smart but they were too

dumb to get off their circles that they loved

so much so when Kepler plugged ellipses

in lo and behold everything

cleared up

even comets were explained

bingo what's

the expense of getting

simplicity and I'm going

to go over this a few more times because it's it's

not the only way of getting simplicity but boy one

of the things that's worked the best the last three or four hundred years

is you get simplicity by

finding a slightly more sophisticated building block

to build your theories out of its

when you go for a simple building block that anybody

understand through common sense that is when you start screwing

yourself right and left because

it just might not be able to ramify through the degrees of freedom

and scaling you have to go through and

it's this inability to fix

the building blocks that is one of the largest problems

that computing has today in large organizations

people just won't do it

okay

why won't we do it well one

things is that our brains were set up for

dealing with about a hundred people at a time living

by our wits hunting and gathering and

dying in the same

were born into for hundreds of thousands of years

there's no concept of progress

in our genes we

just don't have it but like all animals

we have an enormous set of genetic

apparatus to make us good copers

anything happens

to us we can find a way of being resilient about

and adapting to it we're copers and adapters

and so when we come up against difficulties

our tendency is to

cope with these difficulties

it's like working for a company go into a company and

the company seems

sort of screwed up maybe

you can quit you

can cope but your chances of actually

changing the company are very low because nobody will listen to reason

right that is not what

the company is there for they are there

for their a task this

engelbart the inventor of the mouse pointed out years

ago that companies are devoted to their area a task which

is what they think they were about most companies

do not have a very good be process which is supposed

to look

at the a tasks and make them more efficient but

almost no companies have a see process

which questions the tasks are our

goals still reasonable our processes still reasonable

that's the last thing it gets question

because Wow how do you do will change if

we're going to change our basic process in the midst of

hammering on us for quarterly earnings so

this is a huge huge problem and

yet it can be done it's just really one

really sees it so here's an old

model from the 19th century of

memory which

actually in the 21st century

has come back as a pretty good one as a metaphor

anyway so the idea is that rain comes

down on the ground and there's a little regularities

randomly there and at some point

those regularities will be a little more

responsive to the rain and a little channel

will form the channel acts as an amplifier and so

that channel got started it starts

funneling lots more water through it other

water is draining into it and all of a sudden it starts cutting deeper

and you

get these gullies and

you get down into these gullies you have to

remember to look up because everything down there in this gully is

kind of pink you

can think that the world is pink and in fact

if you get into a real gully one of my favorites is

Grand Canyon by the

way that's only a hundred million years of erosion to get

the Grand Canyon it's relatively recent get

into one of these things and the

enormity of what you see outwards

Dwarfs what you

can see if you look up if you've ever been on one of these

things you're just in a different world it's

a pink world you

don't think about climbing out of it you think

about moving along in it and

so I'm gonna take that gully

world and flatten it out here's our

pink world and let's take human thought as being

like an ant and that ant

can move all over this two-dimensional

world our world to us is basically two-dimensional

maybe it's fear to

larger beings but for us it's basically flat

and we can move all over it we can make

ncounter obstacle fools we

can solve those problems and get around them so

in this two-dimensional world here we have all the

paraphernalia of living and thinking

and if we grow up in that world we

don't know it's pink right

because that's all there is that

is the background color it's the thing

we are least interested in because it's the most constant thing

but every once in a while

might have a little

blue thought could

be waking up in the morning taking a shower but

then

we grew up in this world we went to church

we have parents going to school

pink

pink is what the reality is but

every once

in a while you get a cop out

at kerpow is out of

that world it's actually an escape

from that world and the

old days when people had one of these they would start a

new religion because

if you've how many people have had a Kirpal

of any kind like

the technical word for kerpow

is holy how many people have had it come

on how many people have had a holy holy

where does that where does it

from so the subjective sense we have

is we didn't have that thought

something put that thought

into our head it just happened so

of course you don't have science

and you're not wired to check out

the kerpow seems to come from the

heavens okay so

we dip into another world

this world let's call it a blue world blue

plane world and there are three things

here this explains

why we have trouble making progress if

we treat our beliefs as

reality than

how sane is blue

the answer is well it's not sane

sanity is relative to the things

we believe are true so

the first thing is you've immediately turned yourself

into a crackpot for a few nanoseconds that's

one of the fists that comes down and squashes you back out into

the pink well I don't want to be crazy

second one is

when you're trying to explain this idea to somebody else

they really have to go through a similar process this

is probably the most difficult thing

about an age of invention like the one that we live in the

inventors actually invention is actually

relatively easy with the right kind of funding

so the problem

getting

something is essentially

pulling other people into a blue world given

that the blue world isn't a complete

isn't really completely nutty and

the third idea is that the blue plane is also a gully

so they have a half life to

each one of these things

salvation 20

years later it's got

its the albatross around your neck right

and so anytime a company does something

successful and you can talk to

about it they really think it's like they invented

something really important no

in fact they just found a heuristic that's working for

a while and if they forget to re-examine that heuristic

they're going to be in the same plight once once again

so this is a real

picture it's not the sign

says do not touch any of these wires

and it's important to realize that

every single one of these wires was

a solution to a perceived problem

there's no other reason why was done it was done over

a period of time

this is related to this idea no

anybody can make a doghouse can make it

out of almost anything matchsticks even you can

make it out of cardboard you can make it out of just

about anything maybe toothpicks you

might have to take some care nothing

to it but let's try and just

scale that doghouse by a factor of 100

so now it's about 150

feet high it's tiny

compared to the Super Dome but that doghouse will just fall

in on itself completely has

no structural integrity and

the reason is that when

you double a solid the

mass goes up by a factor of eight and the

strength in simple

materials like wood and beams and stuff has

to do with the area it's like the strength and our muscles this

is why Jim Nast's are small they're small

because they can have relatively

large muscles they have short muscle arms and they

weigh quite a bit less that's why a grasshopper can

jump a hundred times its own length and we can't

they have the same kind of muscle fibers as

we do and so the scaling thing

takes what is a very nice idea for a

dog and one you can have in two seconds and hit it together

into something that you really do not want

to carry into any kind of larger scales

because there there's no connection to the

scaling and if we come back to what

we can do with out

special knowledge we wind up with

pyramid it's the only big thing you can build without

knowing how to build which is just a big garbage

dump and plastered over with limestone so it looks good

but if you think about it camp

it has no room inside so

superdome you have to do that other thing you have to

go back to a different conception of what the materials

are was you're actually tensile structures

and then you can build enormous

domed structures that scale

very very well so if we come back to

this tangle I just

put software in here it could be anything

the result of incremental problem-solving

so

this research community I came out of Vance

Research Projects Agency in the 60s and then Xerox

PARC which was an outgrowth of it

basically it was a bunch of

small number of people who have big ideas

who did not have big resources

they didn't want to give up their ideas and

so they were faced with this dilemma is that they could

not handle they wanted

network that would go over the entire world it was called the intergalactic

Network back before it was called the Internet and

they could not use

any technique that

Bell Telephone 80 used

because didn't scale

just completely out of the scope and

finally in the

60s one of the the organizing

insights

was hey computers are virtualizes that's

what Universal turning machine means what

that means is forget about wires

you don't need no stinking wires

what we need to do is

to understand how to organize systems as virtual

entities and we can render some

and we'll render some of them in software but

in fact everything winds up being something like a single

communications

line with an arbitrary number of entities

on everyone can talk to everyone else

and all of a sudden you've thrown away

all the things that Bell Telephone had and every

piece of the way most offer was done and replaced

it with a simple messaging system all

of a sudden few people could do amazing

things so

this is an example I'll

bring this up again a couple of times but

basically need to solve the context need to solve the Grand

Canyon problem most people

are rewarded in school for solving problems when was the last

time your child or you were rewarded for

finding a problem

you found a new problem we've got too many already

hi

where's in fact finding

problem is is the big deal and people

fight you every step of the way they'll

fight your kids in school every step of the way if they're a

problem find your type don't let the teachers hurt

them

most problems are bogus because they come out of

current context we're trying to get beyond the current context so forget

about problem solving it's just a bad heuristic

it's the last thing you do and so

you get these leaps so

here's a leap out of the context of the

20th century mid 20th century which

is a gear kind of thing everything is closely articulated

the interfaces are very tightly

bound etc etc the

problem is you can only make a thing

with about a thousand gears in it before it seizes up you

get the tolerance is good enough that sound

like software

just can't do it but when you go to biology

we have a hundred trillion cells

in our body each

every body in here has about 100 trillion cells ok

I'm going to ask the audience a question you

haven't asked me one yet but

the question I'll ask is who

knows how many of these hundred trillion cells in

our body have our DNA in them

okay

predominant answers all of them anybody

else got an opinion

so it turns out only 10% of them

only ten

of those hundred trillion cells have our DNA the

other ninety trillion nine tenths

of the cells in our body are slide

and that

slime has

people have been counting the species of

microorganisms you know bacteria e.coli

s one of them that should have been a clue Iko

coli has its own DNA which

is very different from ours

so late last count I went

on the internet the other night the sea was getting

close to 25 thousand different species of

microorganisms most of which we have no idea what

they're doing inside of us and they're

about 1 mm the size of our regular cells so the

90 trillion cells of slime is about

a basketball-sized of stuff all

over us everywhere that'll

make you feel better about lunch

but the

point is nobody's come close to building anything

with a hundred trillion parts or a trillion parts

without we

don't the only things we know that actually work with that many

parts are biological things something

to think about and that gave us

researchers back then a kind

of a unified vision everything

this is a self-portrait of the Internet after

we built it but this is the image

hey everything is like this this

is a biological model weak we can't scale

and have central control big

problem with companies

they start off like families with a head of the

family try and get bigger is why monarchies

are tough right no

way you have to find a

way of distributing control and distributing responsibility

in an ecological way this is

not thing things that human beings like to think about people

are uncomfortable who's running the show people

say well the answer is the Internet does

not have any Center and it's grown by almost ten

orders of magnitude now without ever breaking your

software breaks all the time the internet has

never broken it's replaced

all of its atoms and all its bits at least twice since

it started in 1969 it has never been

taken down for maintenance think about

that your software could be like that the

software we did at Xerox PARC was like that your

software could be just running eternally

and so everything

at the expense of going

to something more complicated than a data structure or

some wires everything can

be built out of a single kind of entity that

has functionality inside it provides services

on the outside and there is something

like a cell boundary on it it's worthwhile

thinking about that

so if we come to Park

here a couple of things we did personal

computer this is basically in the 70s bitmap

screens the GUI WYSIWYG

and desktop publishing what we like to call real

loop now since the term object-oriented got taken

from us by C++ and Java

laser printer PostScript

Ethernet pierre-pierre

and client-server and about half of the internet

we had our own internet so these are about nine and a

half inventions and how are

they done and who did them well

25 researchers did all of them

25

think about it

cost about 12 million

dollars a year in today's money every

single company in this room every single 500

fortune company these are fingernail clippings on

your IT budgets you waste

more than this every other week and

espite that there's not a single company in America

that until

recently that has even taken the venture of doing

a process like this you have to ask

yourself why it's a question

you really wouldn't need to understand because we're not talking

about money here return 30

plus trillion dollars in counting actually around 35 trillion at

last count what

was the problem and

was not the

problem of Xerox not making any money this is a

story made up by companies to avoid having

to contemplate doing a long term Research Center this is

an urban legend just absolutely untrue in fact

Xerox paid for all of Park more

than 200 times over with the laser printer

alone isn't that the

most obvious thing how many billions have been a big

bottom with Xerox is they only wanted to make billions

and that's the problem with most companies

because when you're doing this kind of

you're actually in the trillion dollar range and

no company has ever been able to step up to the plate

and just one

other point because I'll get to it in a second

again is that of all of these inventions

we had to have all of them you

had to do all of them but the one that

reached this stuff out to everybody

was probably the GUI because it

is the meeting ground between

people who don't know computers speak and what

the computer can do so

it is the thing that allowed this to go out to multiple

billions of people down

ok so now you guys

are mostly CIO so I don't ask you this question but

what I mean CEO I

always ask them are you

be in business in ten years and prospering what

do you think they say

they look kind of like that

you know I real I was

searching for a face then I realized wait a minute Cheney Cheney

has got the perfect face

for this guy

and my next question is well what

your ten year plan and the reaction I get is that

right

think about it the

idea of a ten year plan that people are serious

about is just it's

fake companies just don't

have it they don't set themselves up to

be able to deal with this thing which

is really just to find hope that they're going to be in business in

ten years they have no idea so

let me ask you a question just

think for a second where were you

ten years ago ten years ago

it was 2005 country

was going through some real problems

back then and

then realize how Fargo

does 2005 scene well it doesn't seem that far ago

but it was ten years ago so ten years ago today

was ten years in the future think of what we could have done

if we didn't think ten years was big

we could have thought all kinds

of things in 2005 and pulled them off by now

but because ten years seems impossibly

long in business terms most of these things never even

get talked about way too far off we're

worrying about next quarter

so if we plot out an invention

process like Xerox PARC

let's imagine we can come up with a 10-year vision

and

basically everything we did at Xerox PARC was thought

of as a five-year horizon when we did something

it turns out five-year horizons are necessary

in order to get done earlier

so in a five-year Rison most

come up out in the first three years if you set a three year

horizon you're not going to get them

because death just isn't the way people work that

five-year horizon allows people to do the right thing

the first year if

narrow it in too much they will not do the right thing than

the first year and same

thing innovation taking an idea

out into the marketplace five-year

horizon there's a transfer process

most of the when I was at Apple most of

the innovation processes for big things we did

took about three years but were organized

kind of like this and so

get when everything's going well the wind is right the

Creek hasn't risen you get about

a seven-year thing out of this ten year framework

that you have to set up well that's kind of interesting

so suppose we

had done this we go back seven

years now this is 2008 that was just next door

and what

happens well same thing can

your vision all that stuff I showed before seven

years bingo today is the day

that the seven-year thing

came out and if you just study how this stuff works from

things that are basically new not simple

increments like new web apps but

things that are new seven years is

about the fastest you can do it you can almost always do it in

under ten so that means a

small amount of money but

allocated over a time that could be longer

than most CEOs stay around is

actually this is the problem

in government it's hard to carry out long

range policies when the politics are changing all

the time now the problem with this

in America is there's no business reward system

here because the costs for this have to be expense

right Reuben it's like the

Reuben is

a good guy here nobody has been more

delightfully clever at helping these

good processes along than Reuben in my experience

but the cards are stacked against

companies because

every dollar you take out of this thing is

a dollar that could improve the bottom line for this quarter

reporting and that is wrong

change that law you've got every other law changed

look at the laws on depreciation

crying out loud those

are ridiculous but they're in business's favor you

have to have something that

contrasts favorably rather

than the huge disparity between this where you've

got the right process going but it's

hard to pay for it with an idea that is

not so good which is to

acquire every time you want something right

acquiring acquisitions you can do with different money but

you start killing your corporate culture

right you have that problem but

yet it's much more favorable because of the kind of

you're allowed to use for it so this is crazy and

until that happens

the universities are the only place that are

going to save you that is how this stuff got here ARPA

funded universities because

if I BM couldn't do it they

were spending billions literally billions of dollars

in research but it was a long kind of process

so okay

so this

is these are just a few slides from

a talk I

gave at Disney when I was there 15 years ago which is

all the different ways

new ways companies have invented to kill that

goose so one of them as

well let's just eat it forget

about those eggs or this

is a good one our latest innovation

is a goose that lays eggs of solid gold that's a distraction from our

core and we have no budget for goose related expenses

on that note we'll need the feathers and liver for another project

only one

gold egg every 12 or I

want gold coins this

is a Disney one I want gold coins rather than golden eggs

or I want platinum eggs

no you can

buy platon with the gold from these eggs

make the goose a manager

give the goose a deadline

require the goose to explain to

you how they're going to make the next egg

every one of

these this is as this is just at the level

ridiculousness that's going on they're missing the point

that nobody who does

these kind of worries has ever laid a golden egg

it's not their business to

deal what their business is is to count those

golden eggs after they get laid okay

so I'm going

to going to wind up

yeah I'm gonna wind up here

just give me an example of a

process that we use all the

time back in the 60s and the 70s and we still use today and

there enough I

always look at the reflection from the

heads in the room so

if there's a lot of reflection it means there's white hairs

and no hairs

and what

that means is there are a fair number of people who still remember who

ring Wayne Gretzky was right greatest

hockey player who ever lived and

yet a couple of neat

ones one was you miss 100% of

don't take asking

player in the world the only way like 106

the pounds he was tiny compared to the rest of these

but his best one was was the good hockey players

go to where the puck is and great hockey players

go to where the puck is going to be and he didn't

mean tracking the puck he

meant get to that place in the rink where somebody

can pass you the puck that you can shoot a goal he

was better at anybody at knowing where that place

would be and his teammates would feed him in bingo and

so the thirty year Wayne

Gretzky game is to have a glimmer of an idea take

it out thirty years where there

is no possibility of

incremental II

think worrying about how am I going to get from where I am now to this

idea right that is the the idea killer of all

time how is this incremental to the present

and the answer is forget it

don't worry about now the president

is the least interesting time to live in

so little glimmer

of an idea I had and the sentence would be it would

be ridiculous if we didn't have so

I had a little idea about children we

were thinking about personal computing in the 60s and I

started thinking about well what about a computer

for children personal computers are going

to be the next greatest invention after the printing press

we have to do something for children and you don't want

children to lean over a desk

we want them to be outside and etcetera

etcetera so I thought it'd

be nice to have a little tablet and in

this scenario they

are actually learning about orbital dynamics at

age 12 from having written a little

version of space war themselves and

the two computers are communicating by wireless

so that was a fairly you know just turned

out ARPA was fooling around not just with the internet

in those days but called the

ARPANET then but with wireless versions

of it and so

if you take it out 30 years

the puck is going to be there

thirty years and Moore's law

is going to go like that she been well

covered and

predicted in 1965 out to 1995

answers yeah goddamnit no question

1995 there is no way we are not going to have a

tablet computer no way it's just

happen we don't even have to worry about right now what

because what we have to do is to figure out what

it should be

once you start thinking about it then

the next interesting part of it is bring

back a more concrete version so

out there you can do pie-in-the-sky what about 10

or 15 years out

what can we do then and the answer is yeah we can do one

then what would that be like well we don't know

have all these problems including the user interface

problem no we've never had something like this for

the general public now here's the cool

thing about Moore's Law which still exists today and you're

seeing it in Hana and

that is you can buy your way into the future so

Hana could

have appeared 15 years earlier if people

have realized that

it isn't completely inevitable Hana

is Moore's law applied to discs

namely you don't need them and

we have to do all of this

software stuff now so we want

to get there earlier at higher expense because we're going

to save more money this is where the simplicity comes from pay

more it's like a fram oil filter commercial

by those five

dollar things frequently and you don't wind

up with the big expenses later on and so by

just spending money you can take something

that's going to be a couple of thousand bucks

ten to fifteen years you know out in the

late 80s you can bring it back into the 70s

for twenty thirty thousand dollars

so that's what we did that's where the

Xerox thing that looks like the Mac

prototype this laptop

because we couldn't build that

display in 1971

something that would do everything else so

that's where Mac type personal computers

came from and the we had a genius by

the name of Chuck

Thacker who

was able to actually build this machine

in a little over three months and I

another genius working for me by the name of Dan Ingalls who

could take some of my object-oriented ideas

interface ideas and actually make a system on

this prototype laptop

that happened to be a couple of cubic feet big

and I was kind of in there

doing this I

wrote the first interpreter for the first object-oriented

language as part of this thing

there and

we made 2,000

of these now here's the two things you get

by paying this money sounds like a lot I mean zahrk's

went batshit twenty-two thousand dollars

and you want to make two thousand of them

we said now this is nothing it's

nothing they have to be all networked together

and all this stuff but you can do two things everybody

has a supercomputer what

does that mean it means we can do zillions of experiments

without having to optimize we can do 10 15 20

user interface experiments today

so by the way these don't cut it

you've got all your people working on

things but these are the machines of the past so

you cannot do a new user interface on this

right because you haven't given them the super

computers you're trying to get

next stage user

interface out of last year's machines and

the other thing you can do is if you do optimize then

future apps and we made quite a few of them the most famous

one is Microsoft Word which was actually made in 1974

and that

very system was the one that ran in the

okay

so that's

how you get the the puck into the goal and

this particular process is

needed because before you can deal with the present you have to

with the future then you can bring back into the

present that blue plane version of the

future rather than trying to increment off the

off the pink plane

okay last slide give

you something to think about here is this idea

of thresholds so

how many people have seen curves that look like these

progress against

time right everywhere

reading scores

test scores people love these

yay

oh no yay

oh no

it's

bad because our nervous system is only set

up for relative change and

in fact there's cause for cheering

if that's the threshold but in fact for reading

threshold is this

this is all oh no

doesn't matter whether it goes up or not

because there are many many things

that where you have to get to the

version of the thing before you're doing it at all in

the 21st century it doesn't have help

to read just a little bit you have to be

fluent at it so this is a huge

problem and once you draw the threshold

in there immediately converts this

thing that looked wonderful into a huge qualitative gap

and the gap is widening and

we have two

concepts that are enemies of

what we need to do perfect and better

right so

better is a way of getting

fake success we had

improvement see

it all the time it's the ultimate quarterly

report we had improvements here and

perfect is tough

to get in this world so

both of those are really bad so

what you want is what's actually needed and

the exquisite skill here

which I'm going to use these two geniuses

Thakur and Engels to

it I'm going to call that the sweet spot the

way you make progress here is you pick the thing

that is just over that threshold that is

qualitatively better than

all the rest of the crap you can do you can spend billions

turning around and

once you do that you widen

up you give yourself a little blue plane

to operate in and for a while everything

you do in there is

something that is actually going

to be meaningful and will not

just bring lots of money I mean money you get automatically

out of doing this stuff even reasonably

well but the best thing you get out of this

stuff is a way of enabling people to think about

he situation that they're in better and not be overwhelmed