Alan Kay Keynote at NATF 2013 Part 1

now I'd like to welcome

our last guest  keynote speaker of the day dr.

Alan Kay  Ellen is the president

and founder of  viewpoints Research Institute here's

of the pioneers of object orientated  programming personal

computing and  graphical user interface design

dr. K's  contributions

have been acknowledged  with the Charles stark draper pryce on  the National

Academy of Engineering the  am turing award

from the association of  computer machinery and the

kyoto prize  for inamori foundation here's

an adjunct  professor of computer science at

UCLA a  visiting professor at Kyoto University

  and an advisor to the one laptop per

child for more about Alan you can read  full bio on

the website but for now  welcome Alan thank

you

sorry i was  asking

to pointed questions

but just  take me a second to get set

up here

so  one of the things i noticed i was asked

to give a talk on sustainability because  it's in the

the title of this conference

and I've been here for most of the day  and I haven't heard

a single talk on  sustainability it wasn't

the word wasn't  mentioned I listened very carefully the

  last panel and Nicholas didn't mention

  it and so

I but

I'm going to give a talk  on sustainability

the few things I've learned in my  culture and at

some some point

the  sustainability idea just never

the top of the list you ever noticed  that

it's something

that is actually a  serious

problem but a very different  problem from

something that can be fixed  with

Tecna I will do that in a sec you  know thank you

just trying to get organized here before

  I fall apart cuz I

I actually thought I  was going to have a second

to do this  beforehand

but instead I just kept  talking and

yeah okay all

right now

they they said you have to talk on  sustainability

I thought boy I just

  don't know anything about it

except what  I've read and

when I started thinking  about a little bit more I thought

I  could at least say something about human

being sustaining our ability to think  about things

and maybe look at that a  little bit and

so just to start off with

  with something simple I'll start

off  with something that's not a human being

  and it was discovered maybe

70 years ago  or so that

if you take

a frog's natural  food which are in

this case our flies  and paralyze

them but keep them alive  paralyze

them with a little chloroform  you can drop

this food all the way all  around the

fly and it will just  absolutely not eat them it will fact

  starve to death in the presence

of its  food which is still alive

but not moving  if

you take this very same fly and you  toss

a little rectangles

of cardboard  like that one there

the frog will snake  out its tongue and eat every single

one  of them until it is full to bursting and

  all attempts

to train frogs differently  have failed

this

was studied rather  closely

in the 40s and in the 50s and

  was discovered that you

probably know  that the our retina

is actually  contiguous with our

brain it's not a  separate organ that's actually

part of  our brain and it does some

thinking and  it turns out a frog's

I'd does a lot of  thinking it actually does the  decision-making

as to whether it should  go after food

or not for efficiency's  sake it doesn't wanna because

only run  few hundred feet per second and

so all  of the thinking all of

the sensing all  of the visual processing is done in the  retina

of the frogs I and then bingo  okay well

of course we aren't rocks so  why am I even bringing

up this example  but

you know when I was thinking about

  sustainability I

remember that the  original Pogo cartoon

from a zillion  years ago I see people who

are in the  age range that I am people

are in the  age range i am reflect a lot of light

  either from white hair or no hair

and  people from that era

will remember this

is one of the most memorable lines  any cartoonist

ever came up with but you  may not remember that

it was in this  cartoon which

shows an enormous pile of  garbage around and so

this is an  actually a reaction of this cartoonist

  Walt Kelly in the 50s about what

he and  people in the 50s thought was

a serious  problem already of course that problem  is

compounded itself a trillion fold by

  now and the

when I started when I was  thinking about this talk

I thought well  you just really there just isn't much to  say about

sustainability from the  technological

standpoint you can  actually compute it

all out some very  smart people have

if you haven't read  amerie lovins

book called reinventing  fire it's

one of the best books I've  read in the last 20 years

or so he's the  head of the Rocky Mountain Institute  he's

a physicist he's been

at this for  40 years or so and this is a magnum opus  of

a book which takes every

part of the  energy spectrum and

looks at it

from the  standpoint of what if you could get

the  usual selfish motives

of human beings  and business people in particular

  motivated to actually do

  a the right thing for the wrong

reason  namely show them how they can increase  profits

by actually dealing more  sensibly

with energy problems and so  this is the result of

maybe fifteen to  twenty years worth of work of the

Rocky  Mountain Institute it's a masterpiece

  and I think everybody

will find it  really interesting

originally I was  going to talk about that then thinking

might be more interesting to talk about  why nobody pays any attention

to this

so

  this is always a problem this is

one of  my favorite shots because

every

once in  a while they get Spock to do this  because

Mary's supposed to be beyond  cool

being an alien creature and  non-human

but he had a human part and

  his human part was generally

reflected  by enormous emotions

when they were  finally boiled over and

okay here's if  if we had

more time it's

always  instructor to spend 20

minutes or so  just delving into what's

wrong with our  own brains yes and this won't

work thank  you so much for reading it though so

this is the thing that would be handed  out however

if you have something it has  text in front

of you make that the the

  dot and the plus about the width of your  eyes

so you know maybe two

three inches you can try it right now  it's not going

to bother me if you do it  and the

trick of it is is to keep the  thing on the desk

and you just move

into  it holding focus and

then what you'll  see is something like this

and

I'll show you why the dot goes away  when

you move in about 9 inches away for

  most people see

it somebody do it and  but

here's what's cool

there's no blank  spot

that dot went away but

there's  still some text their

text that you  couldn't see when

the spot was there so

that's what's interesting about the  blind spot experiment

and here's the way  it works in fact we were just talking  about eyes

a couple of seconds ago and

so if anybody

here is looking for  arguments in favor of evolution

here's  one if

you want to exhibit a  well-designed biological

I you can't  look at us you

have to look at the squid  squids have

cephalopods in general have  fantastic

eyes but if you look at our I

  somehow the blood vessels are actually

  in front of the cells

that detect light  rather than behind them

as own squid and  so

we're when we see something with our  eyewear actually the

image is actually  occluded all

over the place by all these  blood vessels

why can't we see the blood  vessels well because

we're filtering  them out thus

losing acuity and the  place

where the blood vessels

come from  the outside into the eye has no

light  sensitive cells at all so

if you can get  an image there like the dot then

you  can't see it there's

nothing there to  sense it and

this other part here which  you can't

see very well on the projector  is about

two and a half two

by three  degrees wide which is about the size of  a normal

english word

and it is where almost all of the

of your eye isn't this is why the eye  moves this is what

i was asking that guy  about because he's trying to track

yeah  well why is the eye moving at all we've

  got a retina that we

could image the  entire thing and the problem is is that  virtually

all of the acuity in the eye  is in there

and we are almost legally  blind right outside

of it and we are  legally blind just shortly

outside of it  so almost all of our peripheral vision

  is legally blind so

Northrop Grumman no  I'm sorry

McDonnell Douglas did a  head-mounted display years

ago in which  they tracked your eyeball hasn't

moved  and they put a million pixels which is

  easy to do today right in the fovea and  the

result is instead of seeing an

x vga  display like we usually see it

what you  see is no pixels at all because

there's  about a million sensors

in there and you  can give

the illusion of a

perfect but  but I'm digressing

so here's what  happened

as you move in you're  concentrating

on the plus at some point  you get close enough so

that the angle  places the dot over

where the blood  vessels come in and it goes away

so the  disappearance is easily

explained but  the problem is where did that other text  come

from that's a trickier thing

to  understand and here's the way it works  our

brain is a bit like a pachinko

  machine that's fun because

there's lots  of pachinko machines in Japan you ever

seen them that's you know the ball goes  in and it goes all

over the place and  it's very fun makes lots of noise and

so  it's sort of a vertical jukebox

a  vertical pinball

so we've got a brain and

a sensor  something comes in it gets

the visual  thing there are about 30 different

  places where the image is

split up and  sent for

various kinds of processing  some of it gets

to our consciousness but

  if you excise the part

of us that  recognizes that we're seeing images we

  think we're blind but actually but the  other parts

of the brain are still  seeing the image and you can

do things  without being consciously aware that  you're the

parts of your brain are  seeing things and

then

there are some so  we can think of this is kind

of a  hardware map and

then there's kind of  software

and database thing

which I'm  going to call the

ghost and the ghost

is  all the things that you believe in

all  the things that allow you to

navigate  around the world that

allow

decide something as reasonable and  unreasonable

some of these are our  built-in

by your genes

some of them are  learn in your

culture but you learn them  because things are built

in and your  genes and

so this big pink manifestation

of things you just think of as our  beliefs and

we're not aware of this  because our

nervous system is set up to  look for differences

and the most  important thing

about us as human beings  is not what we think

we're seeing but  all the stuff that has been

suppressed  in order to look at what's

different in  other words we're interested in

news  rather than what

and then there's the dream which is  what's

happening right now this dream is  about

maybe

an eighth of a second to a  third of a second

lagging behind our  experience why it's hard

to hit a  baseball anybody who's

anybody here  tried to hit a fastball

when do you  start swinging

yeah yep you

have to  really kind of make a commitment to what

it is maybe you can see a little hole in  it that

indicates it's a curve or a  slider but

basically

because it takes a  while for things to go through this  pachinko

machine you can't wait same

  thing when you're a musician you just  don't

ever follow anybody else when  you're a musician you have to

play what  happens is when multiple musicians

are  playing together they adjust themselves

  but if you wait to

make a decision about  what's going on you're too late

right so  you're basically casting ahead

trying to get your synchronization ahead  and so

what this is the thing that's  hard for people to accept

but just as we  have

dreams at night which are entirely  manifested

with our eyes closed some

them could be very realistic it's that  mechanism that

allows us to deal with  what's going on right now in

other words  we're not seeing what's there we're

seeing our interpretation of what's  there

and a lot of these are in terms

tories as we'll see in a second or two  and

we have the great misfortune

as a  species to call this dream reality

now  what if it were a reality

we would have  very little to argue with anybody

about  and especially between cultures  religions

couldn't be further away from  reality

and enormous

numbers of lives have been  lost over thousands of years by

people  deciding what they have is reality and

  what everybody else has is bullshit

the  truth is we all that pink

stuff in our  brain is technical word for

it is  bullshit that is what we have between

  our ears and getting it out

front in a  way that we can deal we

can't get rid of  it but we least have to

acknowledge it  so

here's a fun one another

one you can  do well take

two oranges to apples to  quarters

if you want to be precise you  can

put them on a mirror on a ruler

so  one is exactly twice as far away than  the other

by geometry and

by what  Descartes did

was actually took an ox I  from

a dead ox and peeled off

the sclera  on the back of

the eye so he could have  the ox I

look at things like a camera  and he

would see the upside down images  the oxide

because he was interested in  whether first oxide

worked the way ours  did because they had similar

structure  he was also interested in to as to  whether

Biological lenses work the way  glass

lenses did in the early

17th  century and yes and yes and

the  interesting thing is that people noticed  is

that wow I can prove by geometry  what's

going to go on the on the retina  and I can see it

that twice

as far away  quarter is half the size on the retina  but

what do we see when we do this

well  we got the same process

half the size  and the retina the pachinko

machine go  up to the dream the

dream knows these  quarters are the same size noses

the  oranges are the same size right

knows  the apples are the same size

  and here's what you actually see

I mean  this is the ghost did the dream you

see  the farther way quarter

is about 80% the  size of the

nearer one instead of half  the size and

that is because your  beliefs

in reality are

trumping what's  actually coming into

your eye this is  why it's so difficult to learn

paint should be able to do it right it's  right there

but in fact i order to paint  you have to defeat

all of these  mechanisms including

some deeper ones in  order to get at what the primary

sense  data this is also why science was

  invented so late if you think about this  as

a larger metaphor for everything it

  says that until you actually get

the  realization that what's between our ears  is

bullshit you can never invent science  because you

never even pay your like the  Frog with the Flies you never pay  attention

to what's actually around

you  you only pay attention so McLuhan

great line is usually said until I  believe it I

can't see it that's  definitely true of

the Frog and it is  actually much more true of us

than any  of us would like to admit

and

one last one I just

love these this  is Roger Shepard at Stanford and

here's  what's cool about this

the

shape the  exact shape

and size of the two  tabletops is exactly

the same and if

you  look at it hard to believe right

this  one looks kind of long and

skinny this  one looks kind of fat and

again if we  had more time we'd actually do this with  physical

things so you couldn't claim I  was cheating but

and so

I take a top off  bingo

still can't see

it right I've done  this a thousand times it's

one of my  favorite things to show an audience you

can watch it over and over again and it  doesn't matter

you cannot learn how to  see

this is why it's hard to draw in  perspective ok

I'll hollow it out so  we'll just have an outline

here so now  you can see

bingo

now

this is what so  and how do I know this is

because I made the second table from the  first I

didn't

make two tables i took i  made this one and

then I took this shape  from it

and rotated it and made this

that's why it fits so well because they  are exactly

the same and you can do it  over and over again with

your hands  tough beans

so these are just simple  things and

why do I want to get you to  accept for the rest of

the the talk is  just provisionally the idea is that hey

  the world isn't what it seems

it just  isn't

and what puck bent here is

it's  not that we're just

easily fooled it's  part of us to want

to be fooled it's  part of being a human being this is why

  we like stories my wife has a writer and

  one of her favorite books

about writing  is has a title

telling lies for fun and  profit

Talmud

we see things not as they are but  as we

are I give anything to know what  happened

to the person who said that  right because

if you take it to its  ultimate conclusion it's

deadly for most  dogmatic

religions bingo

and here's  McLuhan again okay

so right Francis

  Bacon sum this up

in 1610 by saying  we've got four

things that are killing  us that we idolize

intrinsic to humans  one

is what's genetically wrong with us

  what things we make up inside

of our  head because

this thing is computing all  the time and the

simple difference  between paranoia and what

we call normal  which is slight paranoia is

the what we  call paranoid

delusions are simply a  person

who is putting much more credence  on their internal deductions

than on  evidence and there are

all gradations  for this

marketplace

what's wrong with language the

way  language abstracts

things and

the what  he calls the

theater which we might call  academia today

fact

Jonathan Smith the  guy who wrote Gulliver's

Travels was the  Dean of

University in Dublin and he

  called his professors the confederacy