Honorary Doctorate Speech at Kyoto University

so thank you very much I

don't  understand

Japanese so it was very easy  to

sit through the introduction

as

I  mentioned a little while ago during the

  ceremony this

day is a day in  remembrance

of our friend Minko  kambayashi

who just

a few days from now

  five years ago died

suddenly of a  cerebral hemorrhage and

shocked all

of  us who knew him and loved him and

I

gave  the title of this talk before

I prepared  it and when I started

actually turned into a somewhat  different talk

so hopefully you'll

like  the talk i'm going to give rather

than  the one I'm not going to give

and our

  friend kambayashi San was a

man who  improved

the present and looked into

the  future and tried to help it grow and

besides

his great interest in children  he was Dean

of informatics here and a  computer

scientist for for many years  and

one of the things that we wonder  about in computing

is does computer  science

itself have a future and

what I  mean by that is not whether

computing  has a future because it is obviously

  inserted itself into every part of

the  lives of ever

more people on the on the  planet

but whether the

forward-looking

  study and understanding and

invent  of computing

that's another story  because

in fact compared

to much of the  work that was going on in the 60s

and  70s when people were actively trying to

  find out what a computer science could

  mean much less of that kind

of inquiry  is going on today and

by this I mean  little science

word in computer

science  come to mean something like

the other  real sciences or

will it be like the  science and library science or

social  science which means

a gathering of  knowledge but not in

the principled way  that physics and chemistry

and biology  have

been able to revolutionize our  understanding of

phenomena by using very  different

techniques than simply the  gathering of knowledge and

similarly

we  have a term called software engineering

  which was also an aspiration

in the late  60s and

the aspiration was to be

a  discipline like that which

caused the  empire state building

to be built in  less than a year including

the  demolishing of

the original site less  than

a year demolish build the empire  state building and

start occupying it  done by

a little less than 3,000 people  I

don't think there is any large-scale

venture we could do in computing today  that

could organize 3,000 people to do  something

as involved

in complex an  artifact as the

Empire State Building so  both these cases the

Science in Computer

Sciences and aspiration and the  engineering and software

engineering is  an aspiration and the question is

  whether these aspirations can be turned  into something

or whether what we have  right

now will be deemed

good enough and  I don't think it I don't think it

is  good enough so here's a one way to

think  about one or two of

the problems a

  400-page book is about twenty thousand

  lines of some language and

the foot of  books is about

fifteen books and about

  three hundred thousand lines in some

language and the Empire State Building  is about

twenty two thousand books high  or about

440 million lines in some  language

and seems like a lot

but  consider that just

Microsoft Vista and  the microsoft

office together are

about  260 million lines

of code that's about  thirteen thousand books

nobody has ever  read those books I

don't think anybody  at Microsoft

could tell you exactly what  that code does

could tell you how to fix  it could tell

you how to improve it and

so we take two extremes

looking at these  figures one extreme

says well that's the  size that's the actual

complexity of the  functionality delivered

here that

in  functionality by the way required me

to  reboot my computer before

giving this  talk because it couldn't adjust the  software

on it couldn't adjust to the  projector in

such a way to allow the  application to display

the full screen  correctly so

in those two hundred sixty  million lines of code at least that

  feature is not in there yet

so that will  probably require an

  a million lines of code or

the other  extreme is that

this 260 million

lines  of code is grossly

bloated

that very

little that contributes to any kind of  functionality whatsoever

and it's really  kind of a mess

n I'm not really just  picking on

Microsoft because a very  large worldwide

company I call it lfp  for

large financial product company

  their suite of products

comes to about  350 million

lines of code or about  17,000

books and their user interface  has a

grand total of one hundred and  forty five thousand

different screens  they use

that term screens because i  think they are still

living back in the  days of the IBM 3270 where

that term was  actually invented so

I doubt seriously  whether the functionality

actually  delivered is in any way

commensurate  with the amount of code that

people have  to deal with and of course that code is  not

organized nearly as nicely as a book  that

actually looks more like like this  looks like kind of like a garbage

dump  that's kind of what it is and

it's the  kind of thing that would be condemned

if  anybody could ever look at it but

if you  look at a garbage dump through

a window  about this big a little

part of it only  looks slightly messy

if you could look  at the entire garbage

dump of code I  think we would be horrified

that's not  really a dumb

because people have to  live

with this people usually don't live  on a dump so

perhaps this is a city  after

a great disaster where people

are  still forced to live

and part of this I think comes

from the  small horizons that

our brains naturally

  have our brains

are set up to worry  about what's going to happen

the next  few minutes and next few hours and we

can remember fairly vividly the things  that happened a

few minutes ago and a  few years ago

but everything else is  kind of blurry and

because nothing

much  happened 100,000 years ago

the evolution

  didn't make our brains

to be in tune  with the idea of progress as

our brains  are made for coping not for

progression  and so if there is a change it's a  little

change one way or the other or a  complete disaster but

the idea of making  things remarkably better

in some way is  not in our common

sense reasoning the  problem is we live

in a time where this  little window of

a few years behind 1970

  and a few years ahead of 1970 it

actually part of a progression looks  kind of like this

partly caused by  Moore's Law

and partly caused by the  Industrial

Revolution and a number of  other factors

and the problem

is is that  when you look at a small

exponential curve that can look linear  and our

brains love linear things and so

  we actually have to focus our will on

  change

  to try and understand whether

this  change is actually really a linear  change

like our brains wanted to or  whether it's one of these horrible

so

  again because our our brains are so

  limited whenever we have

to deal with  very large things

we're just overwhelmed  by them and we start

turning large  things into religions

so instead of  thinking about the

content of 10,000  books we start believing

it so 200  million lines of

code is too large for  us and most

people have never read a  thousand

books so 20

million lines of  something is a lot and

if somebody were  to present

us with a hundred books worth  of something that's a lot

10 books

we  can get through 10 books is maybe what

we're supposed to read in a in a year at  college

so that's one thousandth the 200

  million lines there and one book is

omething we could probably handle  twenty

thousand lines of something we  could handle if you could imagine a  large

software system

that could be  expressed in twenty thousand

lines of  something that

would actually be  something like a Moore's law for  software

right now we have an inverse  Moore's law

for software because as the

  positive Moore's law for software for

  hardware is chugging along we have the  interesting

property that but much of  the applications

we use on this machine  anyway actually

take longer now to load  than they did 20 years ago

so what it  means is is that

no matter

how much the

  silicon factories in the world are

  improving the speed and

capacity the  software people are actually taking

that  speed in capacity away

now of course this might be necessary  I've

met many people who think this is a  necessary thing

that actually what we  have today is the best

of all possible  worlds so we'll we'll

see whether that's  really true now the other

problem is  that 20,000 things

can be too much so  here are 20,000

wires this is a real  picture and on a staged

picture I'll not  tell you where it this

picture was taken  but the

person who started this off did  it very innocently

one place had to be  connected to another place and

person got a wire and connected it up  and another

place had to be connected to  another place and so

that person or  another person got a wire and connected  it

up and pretty much pretty soon they  had this

and this is kind of the way  most software grows

simple

little things  can be handled but if

those things don't  scale you wind up with this and

the

couple of years I've been asked  embarrassing questions by

my wife who is  a writer and a

an artist and here

is a  actual screen

shot of her cinema sighs  display

at her home and

I just  segregated the software

questions about so as one kind of  software on

the Left can sort of see  what it is and there's

another kind of  software on the right and her question

  is well in these apps here

on the Left  like Microsoft Word and

photoshop and so  forth I can

she says I can see and do  WYSIWYG authoring so

the stuff is right  there and I

can make a change in it and  it shows me the change and it's

fairly  easy to work with but

right all the stuff that has to do with  the web well

it isn't WYSIWYG and so

I  have to go into special editing modes I  have to

use the wiki I have to edit  through a keyhole I have

to do many  different kinds of

things well it's  embarrassing enough for

her to ask me  about that

  what's even more embarrassing is the  stuff

she likes was invented in the 70s  the

stuff she didn't like was invented  in the 1990s

about 20 years later so

in  fact a large percentage of

software a lot of people used today  because it's connected

to the web is  actually inferior

to stuff that was done  before and for

no good reason whatsoever

there was nothing about the

web that  prevents

it from being WYSIWYG and easy  to use

it was the people's attitudes

who  did the web browsers that prevented this  not

anything technical and so

we call  lists reinventing the flat tire

in most  sciences

your cautioned against  reinventing the wheel

because you're  supposed to have read

about what people  have done before and

but it happens but

  it's really bad when the reinvention of

  stuff is worse than the original stuff  because

people have paid attention to  what's what's

been going on and so

basically we could say the present

  doesn't compute we're in a

situation  where the hardware capacity

allows a lot  of stuff that

doesn't scale very well to  barely survived

but in fact it survives

  at the expense of being able to improve

  it make changes understand

forth so this is what we want to look at  in this

little talk today

when way of  looking at this is when a new

idea  appears like the printing press there

  are two separate ways of looking at this  new

idea one is as news news

is  incremental to what you already know and  so

when the people saw the Gutenberg

  Bible their reaction

was oh this is I  understand this

this is doing much more

cheaply a much  more quickly what the monks did

by hand  so this is an improvement to

what I  already know and in fact the Catholic  Church

did not think to suppress the  printing press because

it seemed to be  working

for them who's making more

  Bibles but along with news if

the idea  has some

potency there's also new and

what was knew about the printing press  was going

to be in about a hundred years  or so was

the invention of science and  the invention of new ways

of governance  so Kings were on their

way out and the  power of the Catholic Church

was on its  way out and nobody realized it because  they

didn't think about what was knew  about the printing press and

usually  when something new comes along there's

a  change in outlook it's not just

something incremental there's a  different way of looking at things and

  in this case the outlook shifted from a

  world that believed things to

a world in  which people started learning

how to  argue about things how

to be suspicious  of things rather than believing

things  and the

problem with ideas is

that our  brains are set up for News News

is  simple news

is incremental it can be  told very quickly we've

been doing it  for a hundred thousand years but new

  might require you learn something

for  five years before you can truly  appreciate

the new idea sonu

is not very  popular most things

that are new are  converted into news or done away with

  entirely they're modified

in some form  that tries to

kill off what's new and  just use it as something

that's a mere  improvement rather than a change

  everybody likes change if

you talk to  them everybody likes

change except for  the change part so

people are talking  about change all the time but the

the  actual ability

face of a new I  is very difficult for

most people in our  favor

Canadian Marshall McLuhan said

  this about goldfish I don't know who  discovered

water but it wasn't a fish  but he meant we are the fish

and the  water the fish is swimming in is

our  beliefs most

of our beliefs we can't see  we can't even remember that

we have them  because we treat our beliefs as reality

  rather than

arbitrary things that

we  just happen to learn because we grew

up  one place and not another I McLuhan

was  very good at pointing out the

difference  between news and new

so one of the  things he pointed out about news is

that  the present for most people is only seen

  in terms of the past it's

interpreted by  what people already

know and it's  thought of as reality

well it seems  reasonable I mean that's

all we bring  isn't it into each present

moment is the  sum

total of what we have been how can  we deal with

the President and nettie in  any other way

one of his great lines was

he said until I believe it I can't even  see it

another thing

McLuhan said is  that you

shouldn't try

to worry about  whether something is true or false

or  good

or bad when you first encounter it  because

if you do you're bringing your

  past to make that judgment instead

of  worrying about things are good or bad  true

or false you should simply try and

find out what is going on and he meant  try to look

at the present as it is

so  this is a new idea for humans

because  most humans are brought up in a culture  and

they think of new as

something that  is damaging

to their reality

rather than  thinking of their reality

as a  construct an ax and a perspective

and  McLuhan pointed

out that artists and  scientists can see some

of the present  for itself and they do this in different  ways

and because they can see the  present a little bit they

can also see a  little bit of the future that

is  basically what we have to do in

our  field and also for our children

now why  is this difficult

it has to do with the  makeup of human

genetics across the  planet

we can learn new behaviors

but  part of our behaviors come out of what

  we are as human beings for instance if  you look at

human beings across the  planet and give

them present them with a  new tool or a new idea

about ninety-five  percent of them will

evaluate that new  tool or idea as to

whether it  contributes to

their current goals so  most people are already working

things they have plans they have goals  and

they stick to those plans and goals  very strongly and

if the new tool or new  idea doesn't contribute

to those plans  or goals they will reject

it but about  five percent of its look

at it in a  different way five percent of

human  beings might change their current plans  and goals

in the presence of a new idea  so it's one in

20 now if we look at  human beings in

a different way  eighty-five percent of

us do most things

because

other people deemed them and  important doesn't

call outer directed  the

goals that are chosen the rewards  that are gotten

our gotten by living in  a society makes sense because

we're  social animals about fifteen percent

of  us have more inner rewards

or less  affected by what

other people think and  if you combine these two

ways of looking  at things you got a picture that looks a

  bit like this where only one percent

of  us is inter directed

and interested in  ideas and tools and

the other extreme  is that eighty percent

of us is outer  directed and

very conservative

holding on to our goals and very  instrumental in our thinking

these are  the two

dominant reasons why new ideas  have a hard

time penetrating and the  newer an idea

is the more unusual it is  the

more difficult it is because the  eighty percent of us

actually doesn't  think about the ideas so

much as looks  for consensus and so

a typical time even

  for trivial ideas to reach

consensus for  the eighty percent is about

thirty years  and more complicated

ideas may take 50  years or

even longer so for this group

  change has to be more or less almost  agreed

on by everybody before the change  happens

and then four

percent of us  think a lot of engineers

are in this  group are interested in

ideas and tools  and want

to work on problems the society  deems important and

about fourteen  percent of us is very

dangerous if you  think

about what it means to be inter

  directed and very stubborn in your own

  pursuit of goals this group

makes a lot  of politicians and

managers and so forth

  so they this is a tough group to

with so this is a very simple way of  looking

at human beings but it

gives a  lot of explanation as to why though

is relatively simple to come up with  brand new ideas

that are very powerful  it is very very difficult

to disseminate  those ideas

so we go back to 1970 and  take

a look about what was news back  then it was mainframes

the spinning tape  drives

big computers owned by companies  sort

of factory models of computing

and  a strong belief that

you should always  get hardware and your operating

programming language and your tools and  your user

interface from a vendor they  should

not try to make your own and many  of these

ideas are still very prevalent  today

for instance cloud computing and

  dealing with vendors covers the space  very

well and

then right at the same  time about

two dozen people from a  community of several hundred

at xerox  parc were doing

things that were  completely at odds with the news

so  personal computing

distributed networks

making

your own tools doing everything

  that was new and the

focus was not on  factory computing but

on but on end  users so

these are if you will this is  the eighty percent versus

the one  percent and the

outlook of

the

this  group is

a little too complicated to try  and sum

up in a talk so I just picked  one

one part of the outlook that I think

  is kind of a good way of thinking

about  the way this research

community thought  and that is it was a no

centers outlook  that

is no discernible center no

  hierarchy and

because this group was  also responsible for

inventing the  internet

simple way of thinking about  this is that everything

is kind of like  the internet so

the network's themselves  were distributed

whether it was a  ethernet or an Internet

inside the  computers there was no operating

system  there was what you might think of

internet all the way down it's kind of  interesting to think about a

machine  like this in

which if you calculate it

out it has about the capacity and the  entire  computing

power of the entire Internet  in the

80s Moore's

law and so you'd  expect if you looked inside

here you'd  find something that had thousands

of  virtual machines and dozens

of physical  processors acting

very much like your  own local internet

in fact being a cash  for

the process he's running on the  internet that's kind

of the way we  thought of it back then but instead

what  you find is something from the 60s  called an

operating system that  essentially stovepipes

most things in a  very very bad

way makes it very  difficult

to integrate things whereas  it's very easy to integrate

on the  internet

and of course if you have a  distributed

physical

or virtual object  system sending

messages around you don't  need a programming language

because  you're already sending

in a programming language and that  context

is simply putting some sort of  reasonable syntax on

the messages now  just think if the

people who many years  later did HTTP

realize what they were  doing they

could have come up with some  conventions for using HTTP

which would  have made it the programming language of

  the entire internet that would be  incredibly

useful instead of the ad hoc  set

of know 20,000

wires or the garbage  dump that

we have today but they didn't  realize

what it was that they were doing  and

of course people talk a lot about  mash mash

ups but in fact that was

the  way things were done back in the 70s

because that's what you get when you  have objects

that integrate through a  user interface

so and the

inner the user  interface does not care where

is that's actually generating these  things it's a

way of presenting a whole  bunch of things that

same  I'm in

some relationship and these  relationships

can be driven by by

making  relationships between them and

so what  we would call an application would

  actually be just a set of useful objects  working

together with no stovepiping  like we have today

then finally the idea  was let's not

have any mainframes let's  just make zillions

of personal computers  and

these personal computers themselves  had

virtual processors so the original  Alto at

xerox parc had 16 virtual  processors

so the whole thing was done  without

centers from top to bottom the

  hardware and the software and of course  some

of these ideas came out into the  80s

and we use them today but what's  interesting is

what ideas did come out

which were mainly the ones that had no  competitors like

the ethernet there just  wasn't anything that competed with it  and

to a much smaller extent the user  interface

but in fact as

programming techniques and the  architectural techniques

almost none of  it came out what

we got is what we had  in

the early 60s and pretty much what we  have today

and underneath this is this

  glorious thing called the internet which  now has

several billion knows has never  broken has

never had to be stopped in  order to be fixed all of those

things  that could be possible with the software

  systems of today but because of the way  they're made

simply aren't have never

happened and it'll be very hard to make  happen in the future

so one of the

ways  you get rid of 20,000 something's is

by  finding an abstraction that

will deal  with what what this

thing is doing what  this thing is doing is simply getting

messages to go from one place to another  and

the being able to string a wire from

one place to another means that at some  point you have to

being able to send a message from any  one node to another

node and by the way  that's just what the

  ethernet and the internet do but

they  did it by virtualizing what

used to be  switches into a message

passing  situation and so

instead of having an  increment that doesn't scale

you can  almost always make something

that scales  very very well by completely

  virtualizing the computer you have into

  some new kind of computer that's kind of  the message

of this talk so

when  computers came about

they had features  let's

make more of them the

message of  personal computing was the it's the end  user

that's the important part of this  because

a human is going to wind up  using them and therefore

the hard part  of the design problem has to do

with how  you deal with the end user

one of my  favorite

people on the planet is  Jeanette wing

she is

great computer  scientist theoretical

computer scientist  the Dean of computer science

at CMU and  she's currently the funder of most

he computer science funding in the  United States and

you can see she has a  very unique way

of teaching because she  is a black belt in

karate and I  understand the

students in her class  really listen when

she talks and her

  definition about computing

is it's the  automation of abstractions which i think  is a pretty

good sentence

but we have

to  think about that for a second because

  what if you were born in

10,000 BC with  an IQ of 500

or what if you were born  Leonardo

in the 15th century

leonardo  was smarter than anybody in this room  but

he couldn't invent a single motor  for

any of his vehicles that he wanted  so

even though he was smarter than most  of the people who have ever

lived on the  planet he wasn't smart enough he

to be  born into a different century

here's a  guy who wasn't nearly as smart as

  Leonardo Henry Ford but

he was born at  the right time when there is knowledge

  that came out of science and

the  improvements in engineering to

start  inventing internal

combustion engines  which had been invented a few years

  before in Germany and all of a sudden  that

plus the Industrial Revolution  allowed

Henry Ford to make vehicles that  Leonardo

could only dream of by the  millions so

knowledge generally Trump's  IQ

if you know a lot it helps

mart but if you're smart and you don't  know a lot it

doesn't help much and  finally

what's more important than  knowledge is

outlook I realized when I  was explaining

this talk this morning  that I should have put Isaac Newton

in  there because it was Newton more than  any

other single person that made Henry  Ford possible

by completely changing

outlook on what the physical universe  was like as

far as European civilization

  was concerned what outlook does

is to  give you a stronger way

of looking at  things by

changing your point of view  and that point of view informs

every  part of it it tells you what kind of  knowledge to

get and it also makes you

  appear to be much smarter so

a person  with relatively normal IQ plus

the  calculus is smarter than our committee  Archimedes

was in ancient Greece

so I  like to say knowledge is silver but

  outlook is gold I dare

say that in most  schools in the United

States most  universities and most graduate schools

  attempt to teach knowledge

rather than  outlook and yet

we live in a world that  has been changing out from

under US and  its outlook that we need to deal

with  that and by contrast to these two IQ

is  just a big lump of lead

  it's one of the worst things in

field that we have clever people in it  because

like Leonardo none of us is  clever

enough to deal with the scaling  problems that that we're dealing

with so  we need to be less clever and be

look at things from better points of  view so

if we go back to Jeanette here  what we really

want to say is computing  is the automation of abstractions

in  powerful outlooks we

must find those  also now

if we go back to reinventing  the flat tire question

what's in the  browser

well JavaScript it's a  programming

language the do em

and other  graphics not very good

but what's  interesting is the two of these together

  is

more powerful

computationally than  the alto was it park in the 70s

and the  alto could do all of these things

user  interface and the development

system and  desktop publishing all of that stuff  WYSIWYG

in about 10,000 lines of code

  it's not a

lot of code this

code was  virtualized and so if

we go back to the  browser again we

could say well why  don't we just do it Xerox

PARC let's  let's forget about JavaScript and

just  use JavaScript as an alto it's actually  faster than

an alto but let's not let

  JavaScript seep into the better

  architecture we need to do

our WYSIWYG

  environment inside a browser so

going to draw a line there and we're  going to say okay this

is machine code  here it's not

the way we want a program  but we can make something out of it

so  we get the guy who did this at

xerox  parc originally dan ingles and on

top of  that we put a real architecture

known to be able to build these kinds of  environments and lo

and behold if you go  to

lively

colonel  type lively colonel into

google and do  it in Safari especially you'll

get to  see an entire WYSIWYG environment

done  completely in the browser without any  downloadable

executables this has always  been possible

and I believe it is a

  black mark against our field that even

though it has always been possible  almost nobody who's working

with this  modern software realizes

it's impossible  or realizes how to do it this

don't think we quite have a real field  now

I believe we're in danger of losing  computer science completely

so one way  of looking at it is

the simple way of  looking at computers is they

can be  programmed and people

are incrementing  this by making systems using

programs  that are kind of like the computer that  are programming

language their programming  with

but in fact the computer is more  interesting

than that it can be  programmed to be like any mechanism

you  want including a completely different

kind of computer completely different  kind of programming language and

that's  what we should be doing I believe

most  of the sludge most of the bloat has

to  do with trying

to make very very large  structures out of

just bricks rather  than trying to invent arches

so

  inventing abstraction here is something

  that we have to be very careful with we  don't

want to take the news the

abstractions that come to mind when you  think of

aggregating blick bricks you  get piles

and walls and what we need are

  these non-obvious structures that

give  us enormous ability to scale

without  having

to use lots of material

and in  fact abstractions that

have great power  tend to be able to go on t-shirts

so  Maxwell's

equations it's not it's not a  complete test

but generally speaking if

you have a good idea you should be able  to invent the mathematics

express that idea  so Maxwell's

equations works pretty well  equals mc-squared

works pretty well you

can put the American Constitution on a  t-shirt and

you can put the

programming language and maybe still the  greatest of all

time

something like a system psychology in  that