Alan Kay Presentation at HP Tech Con (2003)

ladies and gentlemen please welcome dick

Lampman senior vice president of research and directors of HP labs

earning I hope you all had a great day

yesterday for me it was pretty exciting to see the full power of HP's technology

team all in one place something we haven't been able to do for a long time

and as you heard yesterday something that we're gonna make a regular event so

it's great day so I have the pleasure today of introducing Alan Kay

you heard that very briefly yesterday but Alan's a difficult guy to introduce

to be honest he's certainly well known for his ideas on personal computing the

intimate laptop computer the now ubiquitous overlapping Windows interface

which I hope I don't see running out there right now and and of course modern object-oriented

programming as Shane master'd mentioned

yesterday he is one of the founders it was one of the founders of Xerox PARC earlier he was a member of the

University Utah ARPA team that developed the original 3d

computer graphics he has a very eclectic

background he was the chief scientist at Atari a fellow at Apple Computer

then a VP of R&D at Walt Disney Company and we're delighted now that he is a

senior fellow and a member of our technical staff at HP Labs at the same

time he's continuing as the president and co-founder of viewpoint viewpoints

Research Institute it is an institute that is dedicated to improving general

education and also understanding complex systems and especially using new

inventions in interactive constructive computing to do this Allen is and has

always been a disruptive thinker and today we asked him to talk about

creativity and the title of his talk is the difference in creativity between

children and adults and when I heard the title I thought to

myself I guess at the end of the talk I'll have to decide which group I'd rather be in so I'll leave that

challenge to you too anyway with that I am pleased to

introduce Alan Kay thank you thanks very

much first I'd like to say it's just an absolute pleasure and a privilege to be

part of hewlett-packard I've admired the

company over the years almost came here in the early 80s after Xerox PARC and

I'm really glad to be here now this

particular title and and talk came out of a couple of remarks I made it the HP

Berkeley citrus meeting where I was describing a one of those encounters

with children that gives you a sense of

the difference between the way adults and children look at the world and this

happened in in Toronto I thought I'd give you a little sense of what that was

was actually like so we're up in Toronto it's an eighth grade classroom wonderful

teacher and that day visiting was also a

group of fifth graders who have been

marked as learning disabled learning disabilities who had also been trying

the sweet stuff and so the question I

got asked by the by the eighth grade teacher was he said well we've been

exploring random notion of randomness

and stuff and one of the ways we did this was to make one of these little squeak cars kind of like this

so make a little little object here put

some tires on it

and when I get done I have a little thing that's both a graphics object and

something that's programmable so I can make it a little bit smaller here I can

call it a car I can look inside of it I

can drag out some stuff to make a little script here so if card forward by five car turn by

five and if I just say do that over and

over again I get a little circle these

things are sort of secretly logo turtles with costumes so I can put a pin down

see the circle drawn and then the

teacher said when we couldn't figure out how to do is although we could change

the color of the of the pan so for

instance we could click on this and we

can make the pen trails green here there

wasn't seem to be a way of selecting colors using random and he had this

notion and in fact it's true in the underlying language that one of the ways

of thinking about color is a kind of a vector space of primaries and you should

be able to assign random to each one of those and generate a lot of different

colors and we've forgotten to put that in the kids system so when they did the

the random stuff they did it like this they would get a random number tile and

so that's random 180 so it's turning all

over the place and this one I have learned that I'd better turn it off

before I toss in here so I'll change

this random 180 to random 80 and started

going again it it's what they wanted to do is to do this but to have different colors so I

said okay here's here's one way to do it you can make little get little ellipses

out and you can change their color and put them into a little holder and change

the color like this let me make this a

lighter gray here and we can put random

on the what the cursor does and then we can pick the colors out while I was

going through this a 10 year old from the learning-disabled class came up and

said oh I know a much better way to do this and he said look you can just pull

a copy of that palette right out of

there like this and you can start

stretching it in here so if I do

something like this he says I've got a

little thing of all the colors there and I can just copy this car here using the

green button and now I've got two cars and all I have to do is to take the

color that's under this car color under

this car and see if you move this car around that value changes and so if I

just drop this into the script here like this and I make them both go

and I looked at and I said holy shit

it's kind of a perfect illustration of the teacher only wanted to do it one way

and that way wasn't available so he couldn't do it so I reverted back to my

pre object data structure common-sense way and made a little data structure

that doesn't do the full job whereas the kid just took the system directly and

the irony of the thing to me was that I

had actually made everything in this system D constructible so the kid could

take it apart but I'd forgotten because this this color palette that I got from

here looked like a thing to me and I

forgot well of course it's it's just made out of parts here I can I can pull

out anything that I want but the kid just went took it as it came went with

what it could do and immediately saw that the problem was actually the same

in both things that this car was walking

randomly around all you needed to do is have a copy of that car walking handling

me around over here on top of the colors and you're done so that's the difference

between children and adults is that we tend to think in patterns even when we

were trying not to and the kids don't have that many patterns yet and so

they're much more able to deal with with the world that's put in front of them so

here's another example of a beautiful little solution completely solved by

children these two girls the class was given the the challenge to figure out a

robot car that could go down the center of the road and so they decided to make

a road that was blue and it had curbs that were yellow and green and after

much talking amongst themselves they decided it was actually a very simple

problem only make the car go forward when you see the middle of the road the

sensor on the car turn one way when you see a curb and

turn the other way so to them goes just three cases and if you notice the car

will actually stop and turn when it comes to a particularly sharp turn there

and when questioned the girl said and of course it will work even if we don't

draw the road very well because the plus four and the minus four cancel out so

that these things are just can run separately and this car will always stay

on the road and will stop as soon as it gets off the road like there there's

another example of the kinds of things that children can do and in fact in many

different ways six-year-olds have the most ability in

many many different areas sometimes even

in absolute terms here's a quick example of first graders with a teacher who not

only loved children but also was kind of an intuitive mathematician so this is

one of the few instances ever in the last 30 years of working with children

we're going to an elementary school and find a teacher who actually has a real

sense of mathematics this is about four months into their first grade she has

them take different shaped blocks and to

make entities of the same shape each

size larger so here's the one with Diamonds trapezoids are quite a

challenge so you have to turn them around and then what she did was to have

the children write down off separately

what it is they did by making a little construction project out of cardboard

and then writing down a table so this child Lauren said well the first one had

one block in it and then I have to add three more and it had four total blocks

and then I had to add five and it had nine total and I had to add seven so

they wrote these things down and they could see that this one differs just by

two here all the way along

and then they compared them and they discovered something really wonderful

and that is that every single growth rule was exactly the same and this is a

great crowd to show this example too because of surely you recognize the

second-order differential equation or if you're an old old computer jock like me

it's a two-stage digital differential analyzer this is the kind of thing that

Babbage made the difference engine to compute that computes all the squares of

the numbers driven by this constant difference of two here also a model of

acceleration and this is also an example

of the kind of things that children can generate and the way they form

abstractions which is not by bundling them up the way we do into a term but by

thinking of them as a bunch of cases that go together now what happens to us

as we get older as we start forming this goldfish bowl made out of an invisible

fluid that we can't see anymore so McLuhan statement I don't know who

discovered water but it wasn't a fish he really meant we were the fish and this

pink fluid in here is all the things

that we've internalized to the point that we can't remember that we did it

anymore and these are these invisible things are the things that rule our

lives much more than almost anything and kids learn this very early so up to

around the age of seven children are at

their best and after most imaginative with featureless blocks blocks that have

nothing on them and you could take a little square block oblong block and

suggest to the child boy this looks like a really wonderful truck and they'll

play with it as a truck and then you can say no it also looks kind of like like a

little baby and they'll look at it and

start cradling it because they're basically their powers of imagine

Asian are able to be projected on the world around them and then by around the

age of seven and actually it's going earlier people who've been studying this see a huge influence of television but

it's also partly biological to go away

from that kind of external imposition of

imagination which characterizes the young child to taking in images and

forms from the outside and conventional izing them till they start wanting much

much more detail in their toys in

various various ways and they give you

an example of how strong this is this is

a famous video done it NSF that went

went to a Harvard graduation right after the seniors toss their tassels and ask

them a couple of simple questions about the seasons and about the phases of the

Moon so you can see what the Harvard graduates think about this to test how a

lifetime of Education affects our understanding of science we ask these

recent graduates some simple questions in astronomy consider for example that

the causes of the seasons is a topic taught in every standard curriculum ok I think the seasons happens because as the

earth travels around the Sun it gets nearer to the Sun which produces warmer

weather and gets farther away which produces colder weather and then hence the seasons how hot it is or how cold it

is in any given time of the year has to do with the the closeness of the earth

to the Sun during the seasonal the earth goes around the Sun and and it

gets hotter when we get closer to the Sun and it gets colder when we get further away from the Sun these graduates like many of us think of the

Earth's orbit as a highly exaggerated ellipse even though the Earth's orbit is

very nearly circular with distance producing virtually no effect on the

seasons we carry with us the strong incorrect belief that changing distance

is responsible for the seasons I took physics and planetary motion and

relativity I've never really had a

scientific background whatsoever and I and I got through school without having

it I've gotten very far without having it I had quite a bit of science in high

school yeah through physics want first

year in two years of chemistry regardless of their science education 21

of the 23 randomly selected students faculty and alumni of Harvard University

revealed misconceptions when asked to explain either the seasons or the phases

of the Moon when it's further away from the Sun then it gets colder the earth

position interferes with the reflection of the Sun against the moon so I think

you can see that the main curriculum at Harvard is confidence 101

[Laughter]

and if you if you know about what the

color of the Harvard ph.d robe is you can see whether this Harvard professor

got his ph.d so I kept on waiting on

this video for NSF to ask the most logical next questions but they never

did they had a different idea of what to do with the video so a couple of weeks

later I and was giving a class at talk

at UCLA and the audience were mostly

graduating seniors and I asked a bunch of them to come out on the law and after

the talk and went through exactly the same questions and I got roughly the

same result about 95% of these UCLA

graduate graduating seniors had serious misconceptions about one or both of

these ideas but then I got to ask the obvious next question so to the ones who

thought proximity of the earth to the Sun had something to do with the seasons

I said well tell me this when it's summer up here in the northern

hemisphere do you know what season it is in the southern hemisphere and every

single one of them did of course they didn't know why but what was interesting

that there was about a thirty after they had said well it's winter then there's a

30-second pause while I slowly realized that what they had just said

contradicted their proximity theory and it's very important to realize here

cognitively that those two ideas were

indexed by the same terms they both had seasons in them and yet what happened

was that the students could not retrieve anything that they knew as part of their

thinking process so they just fell back on their common sense and it's warmer

when you're nearer the stove and so forth and for the students who are like this guy who thought that the earth had

something to do with the phases of the Moon I asked them have you ever seen the

Sun and the moon in the sky at the same time and they all had and I said well is

the moon sometimes in phase and yeah it's

often in phase unless they're the opposite ends of the horizon the moon is

always in phase and then again a 30-second pause while I realize there is no pseudopod sticking out from the earth

you know they could see both of them up there so this is something they'd seen

dozens and dozens of times but it was again stored in another little

compartment that you could illicit it through questioning but it wasn't part

of their thinking process so this what we're seeing here is actually a normal

completely normal kind of behavior and it's funny because technical and

scientific people always laugh when they see the students doing that but what they don't realize is that they do it

themselves in a different area because this is one of the key notes the

keys to think thinking about human thinking Mircea Eliade is basically a

mat an anthropologist who's interested in belief systems it's written many

interesting books as a particularly interesting anecdote in this book called

the myth of the eternal return and this

was in the 30s he and a bunch of other anthropologists were going through

Eastern Europe writing down and recording folk songs and stories and so

forth and they came to a village that had a particularly beautiful song about

a young bride and a handsome groom who are on their way to their wedding and

the fairies swooped down jealously and took the groom away and the wedding

never happened and it was such a beautiful song that they questioned the

villagers more about it and they said well how long ago did it happen Oh a

long time ago well how long it going they said Oh about 50 years ago and they

questioned them more and discovered that the bride-to-be was still living so they

went to talk to her she said no no that song we were walking along the side of a

hill and he tripped on a root fell down the hill and broke his neck

and you know it was very sad but that's what happened so they went back to the

villagers and said well she said he tripped on a root and they said no no

the fairies came down and so basically

almost everything we know and think

about even when we're trying to do better are in the form of stories the

stories are usually better than what happened in the sense of their tidiness

the stories are hermetic so if you see a movie that you like last week that's

very very different and even contradictory to the movie you saw today

and liked there's no feeling of dissonance at all because it's the

purpose of these stories to be compartmentalized and hole in themselves

and so we have this compartmentalization system that is also very very case based

so nothing resembling what we would call

modern thinking is actually built into our nervous systems so one way of

thinking about this stuff is if we take

the pink stuff in the goldfish bowl and flatten it out we have Arthur kessler's

model of thinking which is kind of an ant crawling along a plane and again

it's blissfully unaware that the plane is pink and the ant can have the

illusion of progress so I can point

itself at a goal and try to get to it and it can problem solve and get around

the goal but everything that's doing is is actually pink but if you ant like us

maybe taking a shower out for a run getting up in the morning a little

unguarded thing a little blue thought might poke up but

we've spent years with our parents

school our culture going to church of

various kinds learning the pink and it's

good reason for it this is one of these cases where the first order theory is a

good one and it's opposite from the second order theory which is also a good one

first order theory is if you're a subsistence Society don't try to make

too many experiments you can't afford to lose and so our basic approach to things

is to be relatively conservative and to improve slowly on the fringes but every

once in a while in spite of all of this you get a full-fledged blue idea it's an

outlaw idea it's outside the confines of common sense and so how many people here

have had one of those ideas betcha everybody has had a weird idea now the

problem with these weird ideas like all ideas is almost all of them are mediocre

down to bad even the blue ones now often

when people had a blue idea in the past they'd go out and start a religion

because if you've had one of these blue ideas you know it seems to come from the

heavens you weren't really thinking about this and all of a sudden you have

this weird thought so one of the most important things that Benny Landa

pointed out yesterday is you have to be very careful with these blue ideas

because they seem to be manifestly true and you have to make sure that the blue

ideas above some special kind of threshold before because it's going to

take a lot of work to first work it out it's going to take a lot more work to

convince anybody that's a reasonable idea and this is because for the really

unusual ideas it takes almost as much creative effort to understand and learn

as it did to originally invent it and this is what what is tough because when

we have one of these ideas we work it out and it works out beautifully at some

point we forget what happened before we

have that idea what we were like because we're now a new kind of person because of this idea and we cannot believe that

other people can't understand it because it's so manifestly true and here's the

demo so how do we get in the way of this

as I talked about two things already

case based reasoning and compartmentalization and the third one

which is very related to this is called instrumental reasoning built into all

human nervous systems is the tendency to get really interested in our current

goals and to judge new ideas and new

tools solely by their ability to deal with our current goals so there's a few

percentage of people who are much better at transforming themselves in the

presence of a new idea in the presence of a new tool they change themselves

they don't try and change the idea and the tool into them but this is very rare

and so one way of thinking about this is that instrumental reasoning prevents

this little blue hop over the fence of your goal structure even to a new pink

idea something that's part of the conventional way of doing things but we

can't get to it because we're focused on this and this accounts in many many

parts for why the last the commercialization of the PC has been so

boring exceptions are interesting but

generally speaking most business people are very goal-oriented they're very

instrumental they look at new ideas and

new technology as and judge it as to whether it is

similar to what they're doing but a little bit better and the people who

have had a exquisite rhythm we're just staying a couple of epsilon ahead of the

slow pace of business learning have been tremendously successful people like

Engelbart who actually understood in one fell swoop in the 60s one large part of

what computers were really good for and how they should be used by people who

are working have not to this day been understood or adopted so that's a little

discouraging and in fact there's a few more discouraging things to add here

another one that we will recognize in our own technical lives as well as

elsewhere as when the sub goals become the goals so you usually start off doing

something that has a grand purpose and after two or three years of solving sub

goals you can't remember what the grand purpose is anymore so originally trains

railroads were set up to deal with Trant

transportation but by the 30s the railroad companies only invested in

improving railroads and they completely missed the idea of the other dimension

this is code of a perfect analog to the pink plane blue plane and what's even

better is many many years after this was almost a fait accompli

Fred Smith's professors that I believe

Harvard gave him a D or an F on his

essay explaining why a company like FedEx would be a really great idea

fortunately he didn't listen to them and was able to work out why this is a

really much better way of doing many many forms of Transportation so we see

this happening to us all the time in our technical field we start doing some

grand thing and then three years later we're still working on the compiler

we've all done it another really

important invisible thing that we completely ignore is the importance of

the ambient environment so here's a

somewhat recognizable work area and

cubicles do have their place it's a

certain form of efficiency here but Mike

when I was trying to figure out what's what should I put in here I was thinking

about well gee uh an alfresco bistro in

Paris the outdoors if you buy a cup of

coffee they'll let you stay there all day perfect place to get stuff done but

I thought that this garden and lily pond

that Monet built himself at Giovanni would be a pretty good thing we just

don't think and that this thing does not cost a lot of money it's basically water

and plants set up in a way that reminded

him everyday of the difference between art and problem-solving art includes

problem solving the problem solving very often doesn't include art there's the

famous error thirty-three from Xerox PARC that like catch-22 area 33 is

putting somebody else's project in your critical path could even be your friends

many acrimonious things have happened from that often it's a vendor you decide

well I'm going to do X Y & Z but I need son to cooperate or Microsoft to

cooperate you could be in deep stew so

generally speaking if you can roll your own this is the second order thing if you can roll your own tools and get away

with it you're much much better off because then you have control of your own destiny

then finally the last way of avoiding this is just

being a reasonable adult responsible

immune to frivolous side paths non

distractible and so forth now of course we can reverse all of

those here's an interesting sort of last

idea here is that people who have gotten

through this and for one reason or another if they're a paradigm shifter

type thinkers they tended to do their work before they were thirty quick was a

little bit older than that Watson was quite a bit younger than that

Newton was about twenty-six and so was Einstein in our field John McCarthy did

his paradigm shift when he was quite young and but if you're a systems person this is a really comforting thought for

those of us who have gray and are here often your best work is done later and

this is because systems have so many

things that you have to learn about and think about and have experience with so

Monet himself did some of his best work when he was in his late 70s and 80s and

so did Bach in his late in his late 50s

and early 60s Bertrand Russell and our

field our newest HP fellow David Reed who's one of the to his repast systems

people I know is in his 50s now and I think thinking about systems in a deeper

way than ever and he's been great since he was a in graduate school now what can

we do it was it get older to deal with

this and I think that there are many things that are possible the simplest

and last idea I leave with you is that

thinking of design as the center of what you're doing rather than science

technology engineering or math I think is a better metaphor because design

involves people it involves aesthetics

it's possible to get even adults really

in touch with their six-year-old by getting them to work on a very tough

design project that's out of their field and one that is serious to them this one

is a city design project and we found that this works extremely well for

children as they start building their pink goldfish bowl and for adults who

have already built their pink goldfish bowl is to get them design a large

complex system that people have to live in so the the difference between

children and adults is the children are

more open but have less knowledge to work with adults have more knowledge to

work with but it's our double-edged sword the more knowledge we have the more of a tendency we have to use it so

what I try to do and not always successfully as you can tell from the

story is try and learn as much as possible and then try to forget it and

only be able to smell the perfume of that knowledge so if you can

successfully forget what you know except for the perfume then you have a chance

of doing a little bit more of what a six-year-old does so easily

thank you [Applause]

nobody told me what I should do next but I think getting off the stage is a good idea

[Music]