Alan Kay Talk at MobilFest 2007
0:00 Thanks very much for inviting me to MobileFest. Today i am going to try and say a few words about some of the mobility ideas originally came from, how they affect children and maybe a little bit about how the future is going to turn out.
What I would like to do is first to look at perhaps the most important mobile tech. to ever been invented. And we can think of this tech. as wanting to encompass the entire organization of human knowledge. We want it to be solid state and mobile of course. We want extremely hi-res and high contract, ambient lightnenig display to be used anywhere in the world. Really easy to use basic interface from getting from one place to another in it. It's got to have a wide range of the kinds of knowledge it can hold. It needs have unlimited battery life. And we want it to be bio-degradable so it won't pollute the planet.
And of course what I'm talking about here is basica organization of knowledge which is called, "The Book". So this tech. has already been invented. It has change basic human civilization in many ways. 1:26 And is very difficult to do better than the book using computer tech. today. We can do some of the things the book can do, better. We can do some of the things a book can do, more cheaply. But, it is hard to do everything that a book can do.
1:45 So it's a good thing to think about as we compare what are new technologies are going to do.
When the book was invented people thought about the future of printing. About the best they can think of, in the 19th century when the Industrial Revolution came in, that they will be able to go from a hand wheeled printing press to something run by steam and then by electricity to really make inexpensive books and lots of different kinds of books.
2:20 But, in fact what has actually happened to the surprise of most publishers and most makers of printing presses is electronic technologies came along and completely changed the dynamics so we didn't have something that is a slightly cheaper version of a big electrically or steam-driven web printing. But, what we have is something that people can carry around with them and do printing on their desktops and so the future here was quite unexpected. And in many ways still is. Many publishers are still grappling with something that they were told was going to happen 30 years ago but they didn't believe it.
3:04 Much of the same as happened with content so the Catholic Church does not try to stamp out the printing press in the 15th century because it was being used to print Bibles and that seemed to be okay. But, within 50 years printers started making much smaller books that people can carry around. Much less expensive books. And these books we're not about religious subjects but about ideas of all kinds. Many from the Greeks and the Romans.
3:45 And about a hundred years later the huge change in thought from the Bible happened with Galileo and then with Newton. And a 100 years after than we had huge changes in the way governments and social organization was thought of.
3:58 So whatever people thought the printing press was in the mid-fifteenth century it turned out to be something completely different. And most of us today think this was a good thing. I think it's a good thing. But, it certainly changed almost everything about the way the 15th century thought and did things.
