Alan Kay: Normal Considered Harmful (2009)

this is a kind of a fortress set

kind of the professor against the  students

but the cable is short so

I  have to duck back there periodically

  thank

you all for coming out I believe  I'm the second prize

in the raffle

this

  this talk is

is about some of the ways I

think about our field it's not  particularly technical

it asks a lot of  questions

it's an attempt to be critical

  without being a rant and

it won't

be  successful unless I can get you

to  interact periodically there'll

be a  couple of opportunities early in the

  talk and the title of the talk

deals  with two

properties of frogs

one of them  is

that their nervous systems like all  nervous systems

are mainly interested in  differences

but unlike

us they are able

  to habituate very rapidly and

so it is  amazingly true

that if you put a frog in  a pot of water and heat

it up very  slowly they will not get out

because the  the difference

is that their nervous  system are detecting are

too small over  the unit of time that their nervous  systems work

on and they

will just stay  there until they cook and

of course we  aren't like that

and the

other  interesting property of flies which i  think is

one of the most amazing

  properties and it was first

discovered  in a landmark

paper called what the  frog's eye tells the frog's brain

and  you may or may not know that the

retina  in your eye is acts

  part of your brain is actually extended

  out from your brain and your eye  actually

does a little bit of thinking  right

in the eye for efficiency reasons

  for frogs their eyes

do a lot of  thinking thinking

that actually triggers  behavior and

so

one of the most  interesting things about a frog

this if  you take its natural food which your  flies

paralyze them with a little  chloroform

but peep them alive and put  them

in front of a frog it will starve  itself to death

because its conception  of a fly is

not that if you

take oblong  shaped pieces of cardboard

and throw  them at the Frog it

will eat them until  it's stuffed because

it's built

in  pattern for food is an

oblong thing  that's moving and

there's no limit to  the amount of cardboards

that a frog  will try to try to eat

so one of the  ways of

looking at this is that the  frogs both

of these conceptions of  normal that the frog

has are quite  harmful for it

under certain conditions  so it considers

normal food to be oblong  things that move

and it considers a

non  change in temperature as

far as it can  detect it to be quite safe for itself

so this is the famous Pogo cartoon

this

true of so many things about us  humans

trace back some problem

and very  often the

trace is back not to physical  nature but to human nature

and I think  this is the

problem in many fields a  little

bit later we'll talk about how  the biologists have

dealt with some of  the same problems that we have in  computing

so

first so here's our first  opportunity for interaction

who's that first guy Newton

who's the  second guy

Darwin and

the third guy the  most famous face

on the planet

who's  that first guy

who's the second guy

nope  who's

the third guy

who's the fourth guy

  and who's

the fifth guy pardon

nope so  first

guys John McCarthy

  never heard of him

so

these guys are all magic

people in  our field so

John did many of the most  seminal things to

this day in the

field  of reasoning and programming

languages  second guy is Ivan Sutherland

he only  invented computer graphics and

in a way more interesting than most  computer graphics

today probably if

you  had to pick the most powerful

  groundbreaking distance

from zero thesis

that has ever been done in our field  it's his thesis and if

you don't know  what he looks like  then

I'm sure you don't haven't read  that thesis and

Engelbart so

what did  angle Bart do okay

what else did he do

kay so when

I was giving talks in 2004  this is the question

I asked every  audience at every University

everybody  had heard of angle Bart in the mouse but

  most people don't realize that

Engelbart  was the prime

conceived of what we call  personal computing today and

the prime  conceived er of what

we think of as  hyper

linking ideas together over a  network with

collaboration between  people and the prime conceived

ER of  what collaborative work would be like  and

by the way he built all of this with  his research group in the

60s and it was  demo to 3000

people in 1968 41

years ago  so an interesting thing here

is to just  ponder the

fact that even though you've  heard of

Engelbart's name if you

had  taken the trouble to type e ngle ba

RT  into google within the first three

hits  some of them you will be doing it right  now you'll

find the bootstrap Institute  which have the

75 seminal papers that he  and his group wrote

and you'll also find  the videos

of that what

mother of all demo  in 1968

and yet in fact

the internet and  personal computing were invented just so  you could

do that and so now ponder

fact that you do know the name of a  famous person in

our field from the past  and yet you didn't have the curiosity

or  the energy to do that simple little  typing

job so if this were physics you

  would all be dismissed from the field

  because physicists would not tolerate

somebody being in physics and not  knowing

quite intimately what the  pioneers

and developers of physics  including Newton

and Einstein and so  forth actually did it's

not an optional  idea but in computing

seems to think  that it is so part

of my thing to get  you

to ponder is I don't think computing  is a real field

it acts like a pop  culture it

deals in fads  and it

doesn't even know its own roots  and worse

than that it does not know  about the really good things that

done in the past for instance  Engelbart's conception

if you were to  look at it you would see far exceeds  what

Tim berners-lee was thinking about  and

his demo far exceeds what you

can  even do on the Met and the web today and

  why can't we do it today because the

  people who set up the web did not know

about Engelbert and did not take the  trouble to see if

anybody had been  thinking about this so this is the mark

  of a pop culture this guy is the world's

  greatest computer designer

designer  among other things of the Burroughs be  5,000

and that machine implemented in

  hardware what we would call a byte coded

interpreter for a higher-level language  today today

we can only do it in  software because Intel and Motorola  don't

know this is a good idea  the bharden

knew it was a good idea in  1961 and designed

and built with borrows  a computer that

could do that and a lot  more so

you can't be in computing and  not know what Barton did and

not know  who he was and this guy

  was part

of the for funders

at ARPA that  funded the fundamental

research in the  60s and he was also the

guy who set up  Xerox PARC his name is Bob Taylor and

as  they used to say in the old days

no  bucks no Buck Rogers so

part of the  reason the past

actually was quite a bit  more successful

in the present is  because the funding was done

better and  people who knew how to run research

  groups like Bob Taylor you

had to do it  so I knew you

were going to give that  response because

okay how about this  picture

parted

yeah so both of you

were  right so iliac one

was a johniac

the von  neumann princeton

computer and was built  here at the university

of illinois and  they actually got done before

the  Princeton people did so there are  several of these

machines built all of  the same plans and the Princeton

people  are a little bit late

about that I

just  love this computer

so

this is one of the  first supercomputers to ever be done  happen

to be done right on this campus  called iliac 2

and it had the

register  pipelining

idea even before the IBM  stretch did

so this was a really serious  computing

machine done on this campus by  the professors and

the students kick ass

how about

this

play-doh what was played  up

yeah

then

it wasn't exactly the first  graphical interface

but so this is a  system that was built

by dom Bitzer and  colleagues

here at the university of  illinois is one of the largest

funded  computer-aided

education projects in  history

there are a lot of people worked  on this and

give you the scope of it  2000 terminals

connected to large  control

data mainframes and

the

  flatscreen displays on these terminals

were actually invented here at the  universe of Illinois so they could

make  flat screen display terminals and why  did dom

Bitzer want to do it because he  wanted to back project colored

slides  they wanted to have something that could

  do multimedia education so when you use  one

of these terminals in the top of  these things

was a Kodak slide carousel  and

so when you went to learn something  you get a slide

carousel that would have  the high resolution images that were  going to be part

of it put it in there  and then you had a 512 by 512

plasma  panel display this

is the first flat  panel display in the world

that was  actually practical done right here at

he University of Illinois and with  cooperation from Owens

Corning

shouldn't  this makes you proud to be in

University of Illinois computer science  department right you

should be because  this

place is one of the leaders of the  world but

guess what you

guys haven't  done a supercomputer for a long time

you  haven't done a project like this for a  long time

you're using vendors computers

  and vendors software and guess what you  can't

invent the future by using vendor  stuff it's all

looks back in the past  the best of it and most

of it is  exactly the wrong way of looking at the

  future so Illinois like

most places like  UCLA where I'm on the faculty

  most of the major universities

country have given up the future in  favor

of something else most places in

this country when it was really hard to  design and

build computers built around  yes

well no I don't

think so because this  assumes that there's something good

  about what you can buy from vendors and

  I think

when that's the case it's  worthwhile buying

from them but in fact  the

vendors are struggling like mad  themselves because

Moore's law marches  on and they

don't know the first thing  about doing parallel computing for

example somebody needed to be doing that  a university

is the right place to do it  so not

enough has been done and

most of the great inventions come out of  a kind of a

something as more like a  university culture and by

the way there  is a technology called fuel programmable

gate arrays in which regular students  like

you and me can sit down and make

a  thousand processor

supercomputer by

  writing not a lot of pages of code  because

the state of FPGA is of in the  last year

and a half or so has gone  through a knee of

the curve and is now a  serious contender for

allowing people to  do huge multi processing

projects by  themselves if you're interested

we can  talk about that a little bit later

so

me years ago my wife who's a writer  and an

actress and an artist and so

she  had one of these huge Mac cinema

displays on her desk and she showed me  this

display and

was kind of

odd over  here

she had all the applications

that  she used that were WYSIWYG she

really  liked them and here all the app the

stuff that she does on the web and none  of it was WYSIWYG

at that time and

so

she said in these apps I can see and

  do full WYSIWYG opera authoring and

the  web browser has all these modes and

I  have to type through a keyhole and I  have to

wait to see whether what I did  was ok and all these

stuff and and why  is that she

asked me and I said well  it's

because the stuff you like was  invented in

the 70s and the stuff you  don't like was invented 20 years later

  what do you think

about that how

could  that happen it's not that

people don't  make mistakes

but you like mistakes to  go away

yes

yes and it's

quite  interesting

of course where was this

  invented

web browser was done

by  University of Illinois students a little  bit after

that age of people that made  playdough terminals

and supercomputers

o in 1993

  here's mosaic and

one of the interesting  things about mosaic

was was it remotely  is nice at what angle

Bart had done in  68 and it was full

course they didn't know anything about  it Tim

berners-lee who did do the web

at  CERN was quite chagrined

when it was  pointed out to him just

the sweep of  Engelbart's ideas he was very

upset that  they did what they

did the way they did  it and even

more interesting

five years  six years before the web

was HyperCard  at Apple which

is the perfect model if  you think those of you are familiar with  HyperCard

it's the perfect model for  what a web browser should actually

be it  had full WYSIWYG editing

  right in the thing

and anybody who  understand this at

all would have  realized oh yeah this is the perfect  thing

it already has hyperlinking in it  there's an editing model

it's been  tested on four million users we know it  works

  nope a bunch of hackers

got together and

one of the ways to think about

this is  Engle Bart invented the wheel and Bill

Atkinson with HyperCard invented a  better wheel

that's really great and

and  unfortunately

I can't even give the web  browser

the flat tire award and

or even  the square wheel

because you can imagine  improving both of those to

good but you know when you invent a  broken wheel

there is it isn't

obvious  what the wheel is or

it doesn't even  work at all flat tire you can you

can  run it at the expense of the tire

figure out what the tire should be in a  square wheel you

can run it and figure  out it should be rounder but a broken

wheel won't work  and so attempts to

fix a broken wheel  produce more variations

of a broken  wheel and we've

had 16 years of them

ok  so

let's a man here you are today

let's  suppose you're at a computer

science  those you had an undergraduate degree in  computing

from back then and

you're  faced with this idea

that yeah there's  this internet that's going all

over the  world and

it's going to be not just

consumption mechanism for stuff that's  already there but

everybody is going to  be an author and a publisher and

so how  would you solve that problem

an idea  what

would your approach be to it  knowing what you know today or

even what  you would have known back

this

is a complicated problem right  there six billion

people in the world  there now a couple

of billion nodes in  the internet there

is zillion everybody  wants to do something yes

the

is how much work do you want it you want  to solve this problem really

well but  how

much work do you want how much do  you think your browser should actually

  know in order to solve this problem  really

well because

think of everybody  has a different interest in the

web  there's many

kinds of media you don't  even know what kind

of media is going to  be invented and for any given kind of  media

there  like video there are dozens of different

  codecs and just think of the what

problem is so how would you approach  this problem

yes

well but

suppose they want to write  machine code because they know how

to do  something really really fast

like

suppose somebody wants to implement  their own codec

yeah

but you're you're  partly partly there but

I'm talking  about letting people

exercise their  creativity and

sometimes they're going  to need the

most every resource on the  machine to be

used but

of course we  can't allow them to take

over the  machine so what would you do

yeah

so it's closer it's

almost a good  idea after 16

years including see Google  has some real interest

in this because  Google

did v8 because they couldn't

  stand to have the normal conception of a  slow

JavaScript and they're

doing the  thing that you just mentioned because

  they realize that

people who have ideas  also

so ok

so

this is an interesting  thing

so

it really should be like an  operating system kernel right

the

  operating system kernel controls address

  spaces that can confine computations  completely

therefore you can actually  allow

any binaries to come down and be  used you can

completely control what  goes in and what goes

out and all of a  sudden

your browser is simply something  that allows

bitmaps canvases that you  give to

these things to write on to be  displayed so

this it's there's nothing  you have to do because

you don't want  it's like the

the the good

idea in UNIX  was hey

we don't want a big operating  system we want

the tiniest kernel we can  have and then we want to use

address  spaces in order to protect everybody  from everybody

else so this is this is  operating

system 101 this is well known

  all the way back in 1965 and 1966

it

should be the first thing that occurs to  anybody so I figured somebody

young so

  this occurred everybody in the 60s and  70s knew

this is the way to do it we're  all surprised it wasn't done

this way  but I figured somebody in

the current  generation would have figured this out

  and so I went looking on the net using

  Google looking for downloadable binaries  and

stuff like that  and I

found this grad student in Cornell

  in 1997 Oh far Erlich

son who is from  Iceland wrote

this paper in this paper  if you just type in

the title of that  paper you'll find it's an HTML document

  that he put on and on the net in

1997  and his problem by

the way was hey I  want to run a Kodak I want

Kodak and I don't want to have a system  bin worried about

whether it's an  executable or not so it's this thing  should be like

an operating system so of  course I

wrote an email to him he's at  the

University of Iceland now but on  leave to Microsoft up

in Mountain View  and had

a long correspondence with him  on the

pathway of these ideas and

he  started a company that Google

acquired  and

is using a couple of the ideas but  interestingly not

all of the ideas in  this paper

which actually solved the  problem very nicely so

this is an  interesting thing where it

wasn't that  somebody didn't understand what

he problem was and what the right  solution was it's that

the larger mass  was

quite happy to plunge into a de  facto standard

even though most of the  original people to

use the web we're  computer scientists they didn't protest  that

this was a very bad way non  scalable

way of doing it  they just plunged in and sixteen

years  later Google is and other companies are

struggling to actually use the internet  the way it was intended to be

that's  pretty interesting to me

now another  story is

35 years ago the

kind of  personal computing we think of today was

  done at Xerox PARC in 1973

and

much

of the paraphernalia we have today  was done in about ten

thousand lines of  code Smalltalk code

written for this  purpose and

so another

question you  could ask is well jeez

the browser is a  terrible

design but it does have  JavaScript in it and

it turns out  JavaScript even though it's slow

today's standards it's faster than an  Alto was back

in 1973 so hey why doesn't  somebody

just do a whole personal  computing system in Java

  like everything Windows

interface the  overlapping

idea is two and a half D  graphics like every

damn thing in it and

so basically what you're doing is just  drawing a line and saying

this stuff is  crap but

it runs and I

should be able to  write 10,000

lines of code so

the basic  idea take the rubble that's the browser

  make an arch out of it get

the guy who  did the job originally at Xerox PARC

Dan  Ingalls to do

make

stronger classes in JavaScript make  a better

graphics system make the

widgets and stuff to make an application  development system and

and an  interactive

development environment and  if you want

to try this out I

don't have  time to do

it but this is what it looks  like running completely in a

browser  took about five people six months to

do  could have been done any time but

nobody  knew how to do it has

who had done it before in the past  because nobody

knows how to do a system  like that in

ten thousand lines all

right so this is a craft that was lost  because

people have been used to just  building on the stuff that's

there so when this new thing came along  it wasn't anybody

around who was working  on it that could just say okay

we want  to have something like the WYSIWYG

interface and authoring tools and  everything else that we enjoy

on the our  regular personal computers and we want

o be able to do all of the stuff in the  browser so

this

is called the lively  kernel it was done while dan

was at Sun  you can look that up so

here's another  way of looking at this is if

you take  the

minimum bar I would say the general  practice

today is below that minimum and

  take a qualitatively better bar

I'd say  that the best that was

done by the ARPA  park community like the Internet and the

thernet and personal computing and  stuff like that was better I

think the

  best knowledge of today is better

than  that it's not that everything

is back  slid absolutely not it's

not that the  people are

not as good as they used to  be I'm convinced

that there are more  people of high

ability available today  than there were 40

years ago there's not  a complaint about the people

but I'm  complaining about the outlook

of the  that

produces such poor results

now the  problem is that the real bar today

is  above the best of what

ime ago and it's above the best  knowledge today this

is the problem this  is why companies

are writing millions of  lines of hard to deal

with code because  the ability

to scale is potentially

  there yet you have a

question okay the  ability to scale is potentially there

but the knowledge of how to do the  scaling is not

there by anybody so the

real way of looking at this is we need  something like that

today  and we

have to think figure out  something that's a little bit above the

best knowledge today that has a  stair-step built

into it to get up to  where we are also

things are just going  to get worse than

they are now so this  is a very very difficult

problem it's  been fomenting for years I

you are aware of it in one way or  another I'm just

I'm pointing it out not  so that you believe

it but just so you think about it  yourself

so

back to a couple of ideas so

  here's the printing press appearing in  1450

and whenever

a new idea appears you  get two things

you get news

news is  stuff that's incremental

to what we  already know this

is why you can tell a  news in five minutes

hey a train just  crashed we

all know what that means so  the

reason we want to know is we're  excited by changes like that

but we  don't have to have it explained

to us  there's no epistemological hurdle

we  have to go through to understand that  and

so the original idea for

printing press was to do what monks do  but do it cheaper

and there are a couple  of other side

things but when ideas

are  really interesting is also do

  and knew is

by definition not like

what  we already know so

there's no news about  new there's

nothing you can tell  somebody in five minutes about

what new  is and

new

for the printing press was a

  huge change in Outlook for our planet

  and one of the changes was

believing to arguing in a new and  special way and

it took 150

years to go  from the Gutenberg Bible to Galileo

two  hundred

years to go to Newton and three

hundred plus years to go to the American  Constitution

but one was the driving  force for

the these other things now  interestingly

about 50 years after the  printing press there

were people who  were writing in Europe like Erasmus

indicated that they understood  completely what the printing press

about and what was going to happen from  it but

the larger mass of humanity took

  150 to 300 years to actually gradually

  change their thinking around to start  thinking that

way

ok Leonardo had a high  IQ but

he couldn't invent a

single  engine for any of his vehicles so

if he  had an IQ of 500 and you were born in  10,000

BC you're not going to do a lot  you

can outwit everybody before they  burn

so Henry

Ford was not nearly as smart as

Leonardo but he was born in a better  century so

he revolutionized  transportation

so knowledge almost  always Trump's

IQ and

the

with knowledge is most of us know a lot  but it's

not it's not good knowledge

  might even never have been good  knowledge

but sometimes it was good  knowledge and now it's bad knowledge

so  knowledge is this double-edged

sword  very powerful when

we have it right and  the thing that gets it right for us is

  when somebody is able

to change the  outlook the fancy word

is  epistemological stance the way we  actually

look at things and Newton was  one of these people

so he changed what  knowledge actually meant and

he changed  what engineers

and more practical people  could do and so

the line there is point  of view is worth ad

IQ points you go

from a weak way of looking at something  to a strong way of looking

at something  that's like getting an extra brain and  Newton

is a perfect example because  before Newton the

smartest people in the  world couldn't do things that a high

  school calculus student can easily

do so  calculus is like getting

an extra brain  and it makes you much

much more able  than a genius

who doesn't have it

so these outlook changing things are  really critical

so I think of knowledge  of

silver outlook as gold and IQ as a  lead weight

I believe one

of the biggest  problems with computing is in

a sense we  have too many smart people

it attracts  cleverness and

you can do clever hacks

but the clever hacks don't

scale well  and it's very hard to build a

into software it just stays around  forever and

so what what's actually  happening

is kind of something like  building a large garbage dump

that makes  it the odor of which makes it

very hard  to think about other things so

if we  take news

or normal we can think

we can  solve problems avoid obstacles

beg every  once in while we

have an outlaw thought  but

we went to school we went to church  we

have parents we live in a world of

  normal and for most human

beings the  world of normal trumps any weird

new  kind of idea

try having one when you're  going

out for tenure

think of all the  different reviewers who

already have an  idea of what computer science should be  about

it's crazy

and people start  winding up gaming the system and

doing  lots and lots of little papers that mean  nothing at

all in order to get

the  approval of these reviewers whose

ideas  about computing might be completely

off  but every once in a while

maybe

in an  unguarded moment like taking a shower

getting up in the morning or something  you

get a Kirpal

not that this kerpow is  true most

ideas are mediocre down to bad

  but at least you've got a new Kirpal

and  these career paths

are the things that  need to be tested out science needs

as much as art because you have to get  ideas from somewhere

so when you have to  be in a state to

get these cows and then  you have to have the tools to be

able to  discard the Kirpal if it turns out to be

  a really stupid idea after all

  so think about this is

if the pink plane  there is reality

then what do people  think the blue plane is

like insanity  you

are insane

and learning

something that your brain isn't well set  up for could

require almost as much  creativity as inventing

place because you have to invent it  inside your

head and so

you can say that  normal is the

greatest enemy with regard  to creating

the new in the way of  getting around this

is you have to  understand normal not as reality but

  just the construct and a

way to do that  for example is just travel to a lot of  different

countries and you'll find a

thousand different ways of thinking the  world is real

all of which are just  stories inside of people's heads that's

  what we are to normal

is just a  construct in to the extent that you can  see normal

as a construct in yourself  you have freed yourself

from the  constraints of thinking that this is the  way the

world is because it isn't this  is the way we are

so

changing people's minds is hard  because of this

so I'm going to give you  just two simple dimensions

so this is  the whole

human race just

5% of us are  intrinsically interested

in ideas 95%

of  us are interested

in new ideas and tools  just

so far as they contribute to our  current goals

so once we have a goal we  tend to be fastened

on it you can  imagine why so

mething new  we

immediately evaluated in terms of our  existing goal structure it

doesn't fit  into our existing goal structure forget

  about it 5% of us

though are get  interested in whether

this is an  interesting idea or tool intrinsically  so

let's take a different dimension

this  is one that has been

well studied about  85% of us generally

do things for the  approval of others who

are social beings  after all

people use

the Internet  very much for confirming

disconfirming what they should be  thinking about by finding

out what their  friends think about so

this is  completely normal to human beings about

  15% of us

have many of our motivations  be internal

so if we do something that  we like we

don't really care what other  people think and

to the extent that  these two dimensions

are independent you  get

something like this and

so 1% of us

  love

things for their merits and we

  don't care what people think

you can  imagine what do those people

do with  their time and the

other extreme is  eighty percent of us are

instrumental  and

our goals

are primarily determined  by whether other

people approve of them  so

think about what these one-percenters  actually

do and think about

what happens  to those ideas

when they try and get  society to change

and then

the other  extremes are outer

ideas and tools and a  very

dangerous group of people who are  inner and instrumental

there are a lot  of managers and politicians

in this  group

dictators of countries and so  forth

okay

here's another analogy it was an  old one and

has been shown to be a good  one that when it

rains it's somewhat  random as to where

a little gully starts

  but the gullies have the property

of  being self optimizing once

you get one  started they are more efficient at

getting water through them and so they  erode faster

and so pretty soon

you've  got something human

memory is rather  like this

basically once we get  comfortable about something

  we are extremely homeostatic

about it we  love our gullies

and they take a long  time so

a little bit like the Frog in  the pot occasionally

our gullies will do  us in because

we can get awfully  comfortable and then get surprised

by  something like AIDS which takes a long  time to

really show up and

we humans have a hard

time forgetting  things we don't have the men in black  stick

for when we have a bad idea

or  learn something that isn't actually not  good

for us we can't erase it and so

have this interesting this is something  that's been noticed in

programmers there  very large percentage of programmers

  think like their first programming  language for

the rest of their life no  matter what programming language they

learn afterwards if you look at their  code it looks like that you

what first language they had because  that was the first

time they got fluent  those were their paradigms for thinking

  about problems so

human beings are  actually quite anti learning

and

in fact  most of these things are

built into our  genes

for example we are a coping  species

not a product not a species that  likes to progress we're

basically social  we all have language

so more than three  thousand cultures have been

studied by  anthropologists and every single one of

them has about 300 things in common and  so

the determination is that these  things are not things

that were invented  but are actually

built into the genes a  very human  so

once you've and by

the way if you  look at these things you can realize if  you want

to make a lot of money build an  amplifier for any of

these using  technology and you'll win

see why so

you  know when television came out the

movie  people didn't think it was going to sell  but

they didn't realize it was a fantasy  amplifier that was going to go in  everybody's

home of course it's going to  win

but they couldn't understand it for  what

it was and

you can take a look at things that have  not been found

in every culture and a  couple of the interesting

ones are at  the top

progress as it was called

18th century is an invention  it's an idea was

first articulated not  so many hundreds

of years ago because  back then was the first time when people  realized

that the world that their  children are going to die and

to be different than the world that they  were going to die in and

so the people  who wrote the American Constitution even  suggested

that there'd be a new  Constitutional Convention every 50

because things are going to change  fortunately they didn't

carry that out  they were unusual

compared to our  current puppet politicians and

the  things in

blue they're the non  universals are harder to learn the

ones  in the pink because they're not as

trongly built into us they all had to  be invented and

so an accurate picture  of

us is that we're pretty much

cave  people with briefcases and

there's  actually a group of people who study us

  as cave people with briefcases called  behavioral

economists so

if you've  looked at so one of the books is called  nudge

by Richard Taylor another great  book is called

predictably irrational by  Dan Ariely

these are people who study us  as we

are and why we actually make  decisions even against

our best  interests and

most of these decisions  are made because of

things that are  built into us and this

would be a  humorous picture except that the cave

guy with the briefcase has an ICBM in  his briefcase

and a lot of other things  that are

too easy to invent for  technology and the

wrong kinds of things  for K people with briefcases to

be  carrying around

so

a lot of what's going on today in  technology

in general not just in  computing is basically for

marketing  reasons we automate the pleistocene

so  if you look at what

is being sold and  used on computers there's almost nothing

that wouldn't be completely recognizable  to a cave kid

right

there's hardly any  new media on computers

it's all  imitations of old media and most

has to do a storytelling of one kind or  another

very

little a little bit has to  do with those powerful

ideas in blue  okay

here's another thing I think you're  all familiar with that in

a short period  of time change appears linear

but

often  that's just because you're looking

at an  exponential curve at two finer grain

so  these are big surprises for many

people  so

for example with silicon

in round 65  we had Moore's

law and that

allowed us  to have a very different look at

what  was going to happen and we use the

Gretzky theory of hockey anybody know  what that is

yes that's

right so they  asked him why are you so much

than everybody else and he said well  everybody just goes where

the puck is I  go where it's going to be so

this is a  good idea because it takes time

to  invent things so if you invent things

for where the puck is you're going to be  behind by the time you

get done so

what  you'd like to do is to know

what that  technology is going to be out there

and  the wonderful thing about computers

is  you can get that

by just spending money

that's all

it is that's the easiest  thing for Americans to do we just love

  money and we make tons of it

so for  example that's what the University

of  Illinois did when they did iliac 2 they

  wanted to get five or ten years in the  future in

computing so they built this  supercomputer neuter enabled

probe into the future and it cost  millions of dollars so

what if they

built something that was not as a  compute supercomputer

at that time all  they'd learn is obsolete stuff

there was  not going to be usable later

so a park

  we looked at about

12 years or so to the  late 80s and

said we want a computer in  1973

that will compute like the  computers are going to compute somewhere

  between 1985 and 1990

those cost

$22,000  for us to make we had to invent them

build them we built about 2,000 of them  and

so 22,000

in those days was worth  about 80,000 today right

so it costs  80,000 bucks to have a 1989

Mac but if  you had in 1973

just think of what you  could do

that can convened all the stuff  that the 1989

Mac was going to run 1989

Mac would have to wind up being like  what you did

because nobody else would  have the time to

invent this takes years  to invent good things

so when I come to  a university

and I see students using  current day laptops it

drives me crazy

ou're in the past  you're

not even in today and

just think  about the scope of the stuff

that's  already been done you need a lot more  leverage

the way to get leverage is to  get a ton

of computer power and write  very simple

non-optimized languages

that  run very very quickly

and you should be  able to do them every couple of days

  to get power you should be able to just

hrow them away use them like Kleenex  because

it's rather easy to write things  like that if you don't have

and the way you don't have to optimize  is make hardware that

runs a hundred  times faster than what you've got today

  so unless you do that you can

only do  incremental stuff today

so a lot of the  incremental ISM today

is the lure of a

  cheap computer when it's actually

  standing a lot of people's way okay

  and so

I think the last set of ideas  here is about

problem solving and one

my best friends who died just a couple  of years ago it's

one of the great  problem solvers in

fact was awarded the  mechanical

engineer of the century award  in the 20th century  it's

one of greatest awards any engineer

  can do it this guy was completely

magic  about solving problems

so BAM powered  flight is

an idea that's been around for  a long time and

so Henry Kramer's idea

  was well I'm going to offer a large

  prize like $100,000

but people

tried to  win this prize for 40

years and couldn't  do it

Paul

MacCready his

brother-in-law  wound up with

$100,000 debt and Paul

  being a nice guy he decided to assume it  to

make his wife happy all of a sudden  Paul was a hundred

thousand and dead and  he was driving across the Arizona

desert  with his family one day

and he had been  the world sail a sail

plane champion a  number of times it was a fantastic pilot

  this is driving along looking at a hawk

  circling in the sky across the Arizona  desert

and he suddenly realized that he  had seen the

exchange rate of the  British pound that morning

in the paper  the current exchange rate the

40,000  pound Kramer prize was

worth exactly a  hundred thousand American dollars

so he  started thinking boy if I could win that

prize I could play off my  brother-in-law's death so

he started  thinking about how could you actually do  man-powered

flight

he said the problem  is

we don't understand what the problem  is really good people

have been failing  for 40 years so this must be hard

so his  idea was forget

about man-powered flight  first

thing we have to do is to try and  understand what the problem

is you look  to see what does why aren't

these people  doing this so what happened is people  were building very

elaborate complex  designs

for man-powered flight and they  would take it up and they'd

have a crash  it would take them a year to rebuild the  thing

so they're getting like one flight  every 8 to 14

months and Paul said well  we need

to we need to be able to do 12  crashes a day

so his first design was  this

contraption here that was literally  made out

of baling wire and some plastic  tarps

and some aluminum struts

and stuff  but you could fix it in a

few minutes so  in just a few months

he had flown more  had more flights and more crashes

all the rest of the people in this prize  put together

they started

getting an  idea of what the problem actually was

and

less than six months after Paul took

that drive across the Arizona desert  with his family they

won the Cramer  prize it was easy

just easy

and

much more impressive than that

  was the second Kramer prize which

is  flying from London to across

the English  Channel and he won that a year later

one  of the most thrilling videos you

ever see is called the gossamer  albatross you

can order it every child  should see it

it's one of the great  romantic videos

of our time it's done  beautifully

but so this was a

mile-and-a-half  on land and this was 22

miles over water

and when asked about it

  Paul said well everybody else was

trying  to make an airplane

he

said we were  trying to do a human

powered flight so

he didn't start off with an airplane as  the idea and

started off with the fact  that we had a third of a horsepower

at  max to

run this thing and we had to do  this and that and the

other thing we had  to find out what that meant and that  wound up

extremely different than all of the  other things and

bingo let's

take a look  at one

way of looking at this

so here's  the effort and

we can think of reward  going

up that way and there's

kind of a  threshold there

so here's what tenure committees

and NSF  loves

they love problems you can do and

you know what they don't care whether  the problems are worthwhile or not

  because Congress doesn't give a damn and  can't

understand the difference between  any and Congress oversees NSF

I'm on I  can say this because I'm on to several  of

the NSF advisory committees but  basically if

you want to get an NSF  grant you

don't write it for science you  write it as an engineering project here  is

how we're going to do it here's where  we're going to be successful this is

why  almost nothing funded by NSF over the  last twenty

years has been interesting  just hasn't been and

these big  inventions that we use today we're not  funded

by NSF at all they were funded by  our PI

so

the first thing we have to get  rid of is this

idea of looking for the  keys under the lamppost

which is not  where we've lost them

all right

  so

you can think of there being a curved

  something like this that you put effort

  in if you're lucky

it might have a peak  like that and

the McCready principle is  spend

a lot of time finding

that tiny  little place there

it's just above the  threshold

of being interesting but

way above the threshold of being  interesting so

you're looking for the  minimum

thing that you can do that's  qualitatively

better and most

good  problem solvers are incredible at this  they have

a homing instinct McCready  would spend a

long time thinking about  where he should put 80% of his

effort  before he did a darn thing and he

never  had a failure and he solved an enormous

number of problems in his lifetime just  because he worried about

this because  this is where you learn about

what you  need to know to do the real deal

and

as soon as you get to that doable  thing you've

actually changed this curve  and you

brought the thing you wanted to  do into

range and all of a sudden you've  got

to break through so most of these  things are kind of two

stages effects  the hardest thing is to get the

funders  to pay for that first stage because

it's  not cosmic so one of the reasons

AI  research has not done very well the last  25

years or so is because the new are

  Pro DARPA is not interested in funding  actual

progress towards AI they're only  interested

in funding the robot  combatant of the

future something that  nobody knows how

to do but they can sell  that to Congress

and nobody can

so

here's a couple of punchlines Susan

  Sontag I love this one

all understanding  begins with our not accepting

the world  as it appears this

is the hardest one  this is where

you have to do with this  exercise I do

it every day literally not  getting

normal considered harmful  because

of course we have a zillion  mechanisms we don't want

to have to  think every time you take a step right

so you can cripple yourself by  questioning everything

that you do yet  so you but on the other hand every

once  in a while you know take

fifteen minutes  and instead of doing meditation on a  flower

which is also a good thing  meditate

on all the assumptions you're  making about the

world that you're just  taking for granted for efficiency

  reasons and try and think of which ones

where the world would be very different  if you made different assumptions

the

  reason even people who are good at this  stuff

have to do it is because we all  have the same brains

our brains are  defective nature didn't

make those  brains for doing great inventions it

made those great brains for survival and  coping

so we have to get around our  brain

science of course is one of the  great ways of getting around human  brains that's

what it was designed to do  but individually

we have to get around  what's wrong with our brains

so it's  best if we think of ourselves as

actually being unsane and that we're  dynamically

trying to be stable with  respect to all

that stuff out there Red  Queen said to

Alex to Alice  try to understand three

impossible  things before breakfast

we have a blind  spot in our

eye which if I had many

audiences I do this with I get prove  this to the audience

by having them do  the experiment where

a dot this big on  the paper will

before your eyes and be filled in by  your brain

by material gathered from the  surrounding stuff

because there's big  area in our retina that just doesn't  have

any  optical

neurons and

it's

the realization  that we have that blind spot in our  brain is

filling in that helps us be  saner

and I guess the one

to leave you  with is this idea that if you realize  you're in

the pink plane then you have a  chance of escaping

it but if you think  the pink plane is all there is there

will be no thought of escape because how  can you escape all

that there is thank  you very much

- any questions

comments yes

well I you

know it's

so you get old they  give you

gold medals and the proper  response to

getting a gold medal is to  thank the funders because

they just gave  you gold back before

you turn the gold  medal so a good funder

who is willing to  back

something without trying to  rationalize

it as well as the scientist  is going

to do is the most critical

  thing in our field because it

takes  money like I said in

the old way that  Buck Rogers was this guy who lived in

25th century so the old saying was no  bucks no Buck

Rogers and so what changed

in the 70s the thing that forces the arc  spark to come into

existence was the  great ARPA funding of the

60s was put  out of business by Congress because of  the Vietnam

War it was no longer  possible to

do that stuff in  universities funded that way so

Taylor  decided to take one more shot

at this  and convinced Xerox to fund about

two  dozen of us to finish

dream of personal computing and  pervasive

networks so that's the way  that worked and

the funding has not been  good since

1980 there's a lot

of money  out there but the money is tied to

the  perceptions of the funders as to whether  you're doing something

worthwhile or not  and that is missing the point

  the real way ARPA did it was to

say hey  we're willing to tolerate 60%

failure if  everybody is working on

really important  stuff because that 40% is going to

  change the world so this is a baseball  model

we're not going to fire you if you  don't bat a thousand

now if you bat

368  like Ty Cobb did that's good

so that's  the way they did it and back

in the Cold  War Congress didn't over over C

ARPA the  way they do now is the Vietnam

changed every  and not

for the better their so that's  the simplest explanation and

what but  once this thing winds down

getting all of these factors that I was  showing it's our tendency

comfortable  it's

our tendency to say hey if

I can  buy a compiler I'm

not going to make one  even though that compiler might

back some thinking I need to do about  programming languages because

compiler I get I'm only going to compile  the thing kinds of

willing to compile it already has a  conception of

what it's trying to do and  that's going to

tie me to past  conceptions and I might have a good

idea  so Park literally built

every bit in  every atom of

all of its computing  machinery

build all the hardware and all  the software and it wasn't

you know it  was a lot of work but we realized

it was we thought it would be a better  trade off if we could pull