Alan Kay at IRC Conference (1991)

[Music]

Thank You Lora I'd like to extend a special welcome to all of our colleagues

from Lille and also our special guests

from Indiana guests from Apple as we

look forward next with the IRC conference to me it's very exciting and

say interesting in which we are as we

think about what we have done with information technology the best is in

front of us and last week we had a meeting where worldwide si came together

the eighties and talked to accomplishing

the issues we'd address and we look forward to the and looked at the

challenges that face us and as mr. Wood

was summarizing mr. wood as chairman of the company was summarizing the issues

that face us in the 90s one of the key

things that he focused on was using information technology and innovative

ways to really give us competitive advantage and I think that's an exciting

challenge for a lot of us in the room as we think about the things that are going

on right now and while as you will see tomorrow when we have a segment called

show business we're colleagues in the company will share what they're doing

with information technology we have so much more ahead of us in terms of the

way we can work in cloud collaborate together and you use these phenomenal

tools to really change transform

business for us to be successful in the

90s as we look at our vision for enterprise mm transformation as you

heard Laura comment on some of the key phrases and our visions extending

ability promoting global collaboration natural

access people that's our dream and we

think that all of you are going to play a significant making with an Eli Lilly

and Company I'm very pleased to our

guest speaker just small dr. Alan Kay

Alan was a has been a leader in terms of

computer technology thinking about the future where it's going to lead and he's

already aided in many important things that we're using day by day earned his

electrical engineering his people here science the University and Xerox Palo

Alto Research Center where they worked on some very unique and exciting

concepts these those we see today in the

Macintosh that many of us use he then went to Atari where he was the vice

president and chief scientist for that company and has subsequently joined Apple where

he's an Apple fellow he's one of the key people who dream about the future and

what's going to happen and as we look forward to his comments on the third

computer revolution I'm sure he's going to provide us some exciting kinds of

inputs so please join with me in welcoming Alan Kay

[Applause] [Music]

[Applause]

well thanks you for inviting me here it's wonderful to discover there's

actually a non-stop playing between Los Angeles and Indianapolis which I took

advantage of when we think about the

future people think about it flows out

of the past in a way that seems real

there's a progression of events that we can understand it been since the future

became a concept back around the time of the Greeks when Heraclitus this is kinda

change that's something we often say today that was a new back then because

for most of humanity in fact for most of the people even in the world today

they live and die pretty much the same

world not a lot of change for half of

the Earth's population now something happened of 90 years

that made everything different McLuhan said about the twenty that it was in

which change changed and this read

concentrate definition page is something we haven't been able to cope with yeah

it's something that is much more like trying to predict a thunderstorm

something that obeys the laws of physics

does come out of the past and the present somehow but it's nonetheless

very surprising when it happened I remember what systems programmer of

Anton ash Viereck research in the 60s we

were doing these most fear weather

stations on the supercomputer I want

urologists like today and to migrate and

looked out the window and I said what

are you doing that for you know dollars the weather why can't they shit he said

Alan you the atmosphere is so that if

you go out and plow a field that would

be enough to set up and be the start of

a storm and even a single oak tree being

in one place and not another can set off the instability and I was just looking

outside to see if any clouds were forming from any of these in the patient

models we were using use ninth out data for the entire northern hemisphere

so all these pauses the thunderstorm

trees and plowed fields didn't show up in this simulation that's sort of where

we are that the the future we'd most like in this century is the like the

thunderstorm because I guess people are

against in fact many of the things that it's by storm I have a collection of

made over the years one of the minutes

from 95 board meeting Union the

Telegraph comes in which they sigh Civ

Lee turned divestment elephant and six

in my mine minutes is one of the board

members in person would ever through such a contrived and there's actually

for it because they had recently come up with a printing number telegrams they

white paper and pasted on it came by and

they they come up with a printing they

now could have a of every business action who much read that way because

they can keep track like the reasoning for electronic I've every turn

his action so people soon to something

better but the fact they did the great

prediction was by lord help who was the

minister head of the Ministry of War great but in nineteen he said the

heavier-than-air aircraft will never fly I was pretty good because that was for

sure these are the kind of predictions

the government people wait until the

thing has really happen and then predict against it so to get a handle on this

stuff and particularly with regard to information which has did four hundred

years of what has happened with book we

have two ways that don't have to do with

extreme in the 70s when we were trying

to do personal computing people kept on saying well we can do that on the mainframe this problem was that they

couldn't imagine computing outside of the computing that they were actually

doing this we see quite a bit when Edison invented the movie camera in 1895

there was about a 20 year lag between the invention of the camera and

somebody's decision to first move it the camera was thought and in fact the there

were ads back then that said everybody

has a third row front senator seat and

the back out come to Cincinnati the idea

is the camera is a stand-in for the perfect place to sit in the audience and what it was doing was Vance surveys

and nobody questioned that because

thought of as being a replacement from the theater he went to see it in things

that were like theaters until DW Griffith came along and realized well

you could move the camera you could do tracking shots you can do montages you

could do quick cutting you could do could do all film language to the 20

years that you could actually with the

mainframe and the advent of computing

word an idea is that when a new media

makes its initial content from the old media and this comforts people to a

certain extent and then this comes along

because the thing that's really for emerges some years later and then

everything changes that has happened many many times in history so what I'd

like to do is to talk about the revolution so the first revolution is

not the invention of the computer because that was a revolution in

information representation and processing so it's in this same level of

the invention of the printing press but to talk about the revolutions within

computer dome itself and just to give

you an idea of how this started in a

kind of innocuous way let's take a trip back into the past for a bit and see you

know lights down for this and

here's a it could be in those office in

Lily's today not everybody not only has

the mouse and not everybody Lily looks at a 19 inch high-resolution

black-on-white television screen but some people do and for those people fact

for all of the people interested realize it sure 19 those pictures 24 years old

there's does Venter of the mouse and I

think of as the font desktop computing

what we call personal computing and here's what his system was able to do in

part and what I'm going to show you now is a demonstration in front of 3,000

people and a 22 years ago

so I can say I'd like to go to the Provost but I'd like to produce they get

big I'd like to say one brand look just

that low when I see it oh I can say I'd like to see one line

only I can see it but there's another

thing I can do so here I'm afraid I'll

need a different pictures of you so here's my dream with a picture drawing

capability or so slight laugh if I start from New York and here's the route I

seem to have to go to to pick up all the materials and that's my plan for getting

home tonight my supposed to pick up

there I can just point to that you know I see overdue books in all well there

was a statement that name go back you wanna fight once more to pick up the

drugstore I see everything all right can do things

if I want to change the products so that

was 22 years ago and since it's been so

long we can confidently predict that something like this will be in most people's offices by the year 2000 so

here's an example inking about non-traditional uses of computers around

1962 and it was part of a larger effort

that said batch processing stinks there

must be a way to have a closer relationship with the computer and as

Jack Licklider said to have the computer

it kind of a complementary partner doesn't have to be like a human but it

wants to be a complement and amplifier to the kinds of things that we're trying

to do an angle Bart's project was one of the responses to this and he had to

invent a lot of basic technology the first existing hypertext system there's

another tape that I don't have with me that shows face-to-face conferencing

through this system all done and back in the 60s and my response to this was to

design this machine this is the first personal computer I did this is around

19 was a desktop machine for very special

desks namely those made out of steel so

weight about 350 pounds had a fan 747 so

it's full of those little black boxes that hold the silicon in the machines

which you have about 50 and your IBM PC or Mac they're about 700 in this machine

because the integrated circuit was just coming in the integrated circuit is the

forcing function for this kind of technology we've taken some of the ideas

like Engelbart had which were implemented on a time-sharing system and

discover quickly that when you act direct which in it's almost impossible

to do it on time sharing because you can't guarantee these cycles that each

user needs when the user needs them to

have these famous lags that you get from from time sharing at a reduction in the

kinds of expectations you have from the system and really don't have something

like interaction you have something as a little more like negotiation you do

something and then you wait to see if I'm going to do support and so forth so

this is personal computer with first cuter years earlier but was the first

one that that had the name personal computer and it was very much tool like

to physical like levers and wheels there

are also things you would and math all

of them I think of gesture the M word is

manipulation because even if it was being abstract is actually a concrete

way of dealing with the abstract take all the abstractions make them into

concrete little symbols and all of a sudden they're out here okay after the

movement so all of these ways were all their extensions of the Box get their

way now while this was going going on

some people were working on a very different way of dealing with the computer and pull with it this is done

it RAND Corporation economists the

economists are which if you lay them end to end in the world to conclusion they

said people we have to do something

computer none of us know how to type so

here's what the rand people did the

connector paddled away so that we may draw a box in its place next one well

now it's recognizing his handwriting the printing in the box is commentary on

case the box is slightly too large so we

may change its size modern-day windows literally Android

that's an element to the box and drive flow from it to scan we then erase the

floor area and move the box to a new

position to draw a new box well I had a

chance to system for half an hour in 1968 and it felt completely different

from the Engelbart system Engelbart

system felt a little bit like you're doing a dangerous experiment and radioactive chemistry where there's some

feeder ladder and hoping nothing would go wrong and in in this system it felt

like you're sinking your hands right through the glass of the display and touching the information structures

directly this system fell intimate and

so I I thought of what this system was doing was kind of an more of an intimate

relationship this was a whereas the

Engelbart system as a customs fool is something that you watch and you

manipulate it and this kind of system

was something it was watching me and it was more like I was managing I was sort of showing it

more or less what I wanted it and it was figuring out the rest and completing it

so I have a very different way of thinking about it and so I made in 1968

I made this cardboard model of what an intimate computer would look like the

dimensions were arrived at by a variety of means one is that we quickly realized

that portable you have to be able to carry two

point-five herniation spur block is not portability and this this model we

loaded up with BB shot to see how heavy you could make it before you didn't want

to carry it around anymore and we asked crazy questions like what kind of a

computer would it have to be so that you would do something so mundane as to put

down your grocery list on it carry it in park and be willing to carry it out

again with two bags of groceries now let's let's many people hate that looks

like this right now can you hold it up

well then you don't have one like this so most people have paper and pens and

stuff on them but this is a different kind of thing than a desktop computer

and so now we're confronted by three

different ways of thinking about things the computer done was going from batch

processing to time sharing changing the route of the user

way the next big change was going from

time sharing to personal desktop computers again a huge change

particularly is your interface the new

user interface of using windows and icons and stuff is Wellum what we're

looking here is a third revolution these are not smaller desktop machines but of

course laptops right now our smaller desktop run the store because they're

just imitating what came before the way ms-dos imitated the interaction that you

did on the mainframe so this early thing

we don't just really realize that when you change the relationship of the user

with a machine a big way but the person winds up doing and the kinds of software

that gets gets built and used is very

very different now if integrated circuits where the where the forcing function for the for

the desktop machine what's the forcing function for this machine well it's networking

networking yeah these computers pervasively network

there will never be a time when the computer talking to a network watch they

won't have an on/off switch so testing

whether it's intimate or not non intimate technology has on/off switches

and the reason they can afford to have on/off switches is they aren't all that

important and use them they use them every day but they aren't your life as

paper does not have an on/off switch thank goodness and your base to make

some why the digital watches had LCD

displays that used a lot of battery power you had to put press them in order

to get them to light up remember those build a cajones they didn't last because

that's you don't want to go to that much trouble to find out what the time is you

want to find out the time as being part of your own environment not something

that's outside of your own environment so the metaphor here is another way of

extending humans but not the tool way what we call agents and an agent is

something that can take on our goals and carry them out on our behalf so simple

agents can manipulate tools for us that's nice we can take a nap while

somebody else is wielding the screwdriver and then agents can do

something the tools don't do and that is that they can deal with other agents so

once an agent has cloned our goals they can spread that goal around and in fact

we're part of just such a gold cloning set up right here in this room because

as Lewis Mumford pointed out many years ago the most of the machines made

people for most of human history have had other humans as their moving parts

like all the mecha and they were things

as large as civilization small hunting

parties businesses Boy Scout troops

whole panoply of things where a bunch of

people get together and they're a goal

work on it and so the M word is management here so tool is something you

look at and manipulate an agent is something that looks at you and you manage it and our boy that just go from

something like a control panel by the

human scale I'm sharing to the desktop computer so we found a tool metaphor for

people as we go to the end of it computer where we're going to be

connected with a pervasive network that

stretches all over the globe and more than a trillion objects that the whole

or of dealing with the computer and what

it's attached to is going to change and why why do you networks force agents

well when you have a trillion objects continually online you're not going to

spend a lot of time using sequel to try and find things all current information

receiving retrieving tools over retrieve and when you're dipping into trillions

of objects instead of a particular file where you happen to know the information

is you can't afford to try and do the retrievals yourself just as in the

Library of Congress where the card catalog is much larger than any library

in Indianapolis as an example Library of

Congress has some 85 million documents in it the card catalog is larger than

most hometown libraries when you go in there you don't use the card catalog you

actually are introduced to a person and that person attempts to find out what

you're interested in that person is an expert at finding those kinds of things

amongst all the different kinds of document collections and so we think

something much more like that it's going to happen so the here's another way of

thinking about these three revolutions institutional and we can make an analogy

to books and I will will in just a second but let's take a look at three of them like where is it well the mainframe

is owned by the institution here's a computer that you can own if you want

sometimes it's still owned by institutions because they're right in that border line we haven't decided

that's quite as useful as a car yet so only some people own their own machines

and then wherever you go

the intimate computer will go small and I am nearly connected you don't have to

be in any particular place in order to use the thing that was a nice parallel

here or the history of books the invention of writing is very much like

the invention of the computer it's a new way of representing information and the

first rebel revolution in the invention of writing you can think of as the

manuscript books that were copied by monks in the Middle Ages it's hard for

us to get a sentence back one of the

largest libraries in Europe at the end

of the Middle Ages was the Vatican Library as you might guess the Vatican

Library in the year 1400 had 392 books

now did a library look like it did today was

books on the shelves know there's still a an ancient library in Florence you go

into one of these things each book had its own desk they weren't

in the wall they're actually on a desk open and chained to the desk because

these books were almost priceless they took about 15 years to copy so you went

from desk to desk to read a book and if you look in one of these antique

libraries like the one in Florence nothing dry and that this looks like a

time-sharing bullpen all right it's it's

like a room with 50 terminals in it too expensive for any one person to own now

when Gutenberg came along he made books

but the books were the same size as the middle-aged manuscripts why because

nobody knew what size a book should be that's the size that books were what did

the what did the fonts look like including bars books well I look like

script finest at the monks but there are thirty-six point type 30 and 36 point

type half an inch high big big books and

their thought was is that they would still be owned by institutions but now

cities could own them so huge advance

with Gutenberg but it didn't make it how

many people here have ever heard of Aldous how many people here use a piece of

software called Aldus PageMaker okay

Alice's last name was not PageMaker would be great if it was his last name

as Manutius and predator that born two

years before the printing press was invented so here is a guy tire life

growing up in printed books and when he

was in his 30s he decided a couple of

important things one is that there should be lots of books Bibles weren't

enough and so Aldous and his sons over

the century and operated printed some

40,000 different books in their lifetime and they were one of the major sources

for ideas of the Greeks and Romans because they gathered up all the Greek

and Roman writings they could find and publish them as as books but Aldous did

something they'll always endear himself to me decided the book should be the

size they are today and wonder if anybody here knows why Elvis decided

books should be this size oh okay

you heard me give the talk before yeah that's not fair

he decided they should be this size because that was the size that saddle bags were in Venice in the 1480s okay so

Aldous had come to 30 years after the printing press had come to and a

tremendous realization and that is that books could now be lost

think about what that means because books could now be lost they can now be

taken with things could happen to them and they had to be a different size and

that size change forced Elvis to become one of the first typographers because

these script fonts did not shrink down very well he started developing fonts

based on Roman fonts and developed

lowercase characters and most of the fonts that we read from today Aldous had

a hand in designing so he had to design the display now for doing these newly

intimate books so important thing for us

today is the thing that if when you look

back in history that what happened between Gutenberg and Aldous which is

where we are today in computers counted not a whit nothing that happened between

Gutenberg and Aldous was significant because all of the things that we think

of as flowing from the book actually happened after Aldous had made it into an intimate thing that could now be lost

so we have to ask what our computer is

going to be like when we can afford to lose our computers something that most

of us would not countenance today now if we jump into a pool with the Japanese

watch on that cost 1295 we say yeah

that's too bad but I'll go get another one if we jump into a computer with our Mac

or our IBM PC we have a very different feeling about it because all of a sudden

we've ruined something that costs everything we have that the multiple

thousands of dollars is not the right scale for something that is like a

dynamic book and so when we talk about

things one of the best ways of predicting the future is to try and figure out what paradigm er in so in the

not not actually too many years in the future there was a paradigm shift in astronomy

where went from most people believing

that the son went around the earth the Ptolemaic

way of thinking about things suddenly got turned around by Copernicus and

Kepler and Newton into a heliocentric

way of looking at things and the world was never the never the same again never

the same on a book called the structure of scientific revolutions Thomas Kuhn

pointed out that the reason most scientific revolutions take about 25 or

30 years to happen is that you have to wait for the old physicists to die off

now if this is if this is happening to scientists who are supposed to be always

open to new versions of the truth but if scientists actually get imprinted like

ducks on old versions and old worldviews

and have to die off before new ideas can come along then it's no wonder that we

have the hardest time recognizing these paradigm shifts even wanting to see that

they're happening and adapting to them now the problem we've had in computing

science is that the technology is moving along in such a way that we've been able

to recapitulate 400 years in the

development of most technologies in just 40 and so we've gone from batch

processing to time sharing one of the

funnier announcements that has been made in the last 30 years was when IBM

announced that it had invented time sharing that happened around 1970 or so

which is just about ten years after it had been invented but yeah but now it

was real now it was time sharing with capital T and capital s actually IBM had

been against time sharing in many ways for years until it it actually come up

with a version of its of its own that's a perfect example of a company that has

a vested interest in one particular technology lagging behind and then all

of a sudden saying oh here it is and of

course the personal computer companies like Apple have to be very careful

because if we think of ourselves as a desktop then we're in exactly the same place as

IBM and Dec are for this new revolution that's coming along which is quite

different and in fact it's the kind of hardware revolution that the Japanese

are much better at and we are having to do with a combination of both highly

dense silicon artificial intelligence and digital wireless communications

Communications is an interesting thing the one of the simpler ways of thinking

about it is my friend Nicholas Negroponte of the Media Lab at MIT likes

to say he says everything that is going through wires right now is going to go

through the air and everything that's going through the air right now is going to go through wires so it's a complete

inversion in other words television is going to be forced into fiber for

various reasons including hive eye and

telephone which now goes through wires is going to be forced into the air

because we can't afford to wait to get

to a telephone for all the things that we need to get through it not just being able to talk to people when we want as

we do through cellular telephone but we need to be able to exchange data in

various ways and so we must be able to do it Wireless so the sleeper technology

in the network revolution in the next 10 years is wireless networking of various

kinds we are not in the u.s. ahead in

this because we're still conservatively trying to we think improving what we're

doing is making better wires and so

forth very similar to the railroads in the 20s who thought improving what they

were doing was to make faster locomotives and lay more track so while

they were looking like this their competition had taken to the third

dimension and was flying over them no railroad in America ever invested in an

airline company it's interesting a survey in the 20s would have shown them

that there would be more track and more railroads but they would never have

asked the question of whether they'd still be in business in 50 years okay

and that's what these paradigm shifts due to you now 10 20 years from now

there still be mainframes 10 20 years from now they'll still be desktop computers 10 20 years from now they'll

still be COBOL right that's not the

problem the problem is is what are the tools that are going to give you the

leverage that you need and those tools are not going to be the mainframe

they're not going to be the desktop computer and they are certainly not going to be COBOL so let's take a look

at contrasting these three we call them paradigms after scientific revolutions

how do we measure performance well in the mainframe it's response time there's

a phrase called path length which is the

millions of instructions that you execute before you get a response back

at the terminal I wants to ask three thousand Macintosh developers if they'd

ever heard the phrase path length and none of them had because the issue on

desktop computers is MIPS sort of like

in the 50s you know those great old dodges with 450 horsepower that you could lay a strip of rubber a block long

it's in particular most of you here are not old enough to remember that

wonderful that was when gas was still 25 cents a gallon you could but that's not

the issue because the issue actually is going to be access it's can I find the

resources I need I'm going to be connected up to damn near everything in ten years but can I find what I need I

don't even know what its name is a lot

of things I need I don't even know that they exist they're actually analogous to

the things I'm working on not directly related how am I going to find them once

I find them and I get them shipped to me what's the probability I'm going to be

able to use them I can barely use another application that I get from my personal computer at egghead software

what if I get what if somebody in in hindustan has done the perfect

application for me and it's delivered to me and it's sir

this is exactly what I want and I can't sit down and use it pretty frustrating

those are gonna be the issues of the next 10 years kinds of data yeah I

thought these green and white listing papers had gone forever and I saw one in

my doctor's office the other day and that caused me to look into his other

state-of-the-art medical practices

eventually changed my doctor they are

still around fonts and graphics on

personal computers on the Macintosh style of doing things and all other media coming in in this next revolution

and it doesn't mean just all other media on your machine but because the next

revolution is a networked revolution that means that we have to be able to retrieve all other media and it doesn't

mean just shipping film clips and stuff

over the networks that means that we have to be able to retrieve into the interior because most retrievals are

done by asking things about the content so it implies that some of the work for

instance being done by the Getty foundation I'm being able to retrieve pictures by talking about their contents

or even making a little sketch of a painting that you've seen 20 years ago

and having the computer find all the things that are like the sketch are

implied here how do we integrate

information very painfully on the

mainframe usually done through files

sometimes with a relational database I was shocked when I did this slide that I

did not know what the actual penetration of relational databases was I presume

that was like 90% so I actually called up some friends of mine at the Gartner

group and discovered that for the fortune 1000 companies in the u.s. less

than half of the company's information is in relational databases and I presume

that's more or less true of Lily - that is remarkable considering

relational database was not a big improvement over flat files and as more

than 20 years old so that was a very very slow adoption rate on Macintosh

style computers you can cut and paste

from any application to any other application and to the extent that

things are object-oriented the result

will be compatible in the future instead

of cutting and pasting pictures the things that we see on the screen what

will be actually moving is the applicant views of the application itself whether

the application will actually still be active but to be used as a component of

any other application now some of the operating systems are just starting to

happen now allow you to do or at least

start to do things like this how do you give commands remembering type so one of

the ways of thinking about is what is the job of the user interface well job of the user interface and this way of

computing is sort of like a control panel of a nuclear reactor you know it's

to give you access to function there's all this function in there and we'll map

it into control keys and different

screens and so forth it's not a bad way of doing it it's used for other kinds of

things in this user interface it's

seeing point and the job of the user interface is not to provide access to

function anymore but to make the user aware of what the possibilities are in

other words the user interface in the Macintosh style is a learning

environment it's job is regardless of what you're trying to do its job is to

make you aware of the whole machine and

the result is about the average number of applications

used by ms-dos users as an example is about 2 and the average number of

applications used by a Macintosh users about seven and a half and the reason is

is that you expect in this kind of user interface that the new application that

you may have borrowed from somebody or may have gotten off the local area net

that you expect that the new application is going to be very much like the

applications that you've already used we we look for a transference of something

like 70 to 80 percent between applications of familiarity so a person

can do 70% of the operations from one

application to another without having to open the manual and most people never

open the manuals which actually is not great because is not a perfect interface

there are usually unfortunately things in the manuals that are worthwhile knowing the interface doesn't make up

for and in the end of it computer because we're dealing with agents it's

going to be much more answer for morphic it's going to be gesturing like you saw

that's going to be speech in a variety

of ways could be written English it could be spoken English but it's going

to be much more casual it's going to be something much more like advise field of

interaction feels like editing a line of text feels like layout on the Macintosh and

it feels like conducting on the intimate computer because what you're dealing

with our active elements rather than

passive ones so I called the user interface that with the overlapping

windows and so forth when I wrote my thesis was called a reactive engine it

was designed to react to the kinds of things that you're doing and the new

user interface will be proactive it will be actually doing things ahead of you

trying to anticipate the kinds of things that you'll need

how do you print big impact printing and

enormous big laser printers now personal

laser printers and no printing in the

independent say now people have been predicting this for years and as people

like to say in the newspapers there's more paper now than there ever has been so how can this prediction possibly be

true and here's the reason this is really going to happen two things are

going to happen over the next ten years that are going to make printing a very

low yield operation one of them is hyper media not just having different kinds of

media but having the media interconnected in many different ways

that means that printing out any piece of hyper media is going to destroy a lot

of what's interesting about it hyper media is designed to be dynamically

dealt with it doesn't layout linearly in a very good way because it makes use of

this idea that the computer always has more dimensions than your data so if you

have n dimensional data space you're the computer can give n plus one dimensions

and bring all of the things to one place

extra if I had a if I had a pencil I'd illustrate that but I don't and the

other thing is that the we're going to be rapidly going from data structures

which are passive representations very much like the words in a book we're

going to be going from data structures to active simulations people don't want

just to see what happened in the corporation three months ago they really

would like to be dealing with a model of the company like people do in a crude

way with spreadsheets a model that they can ask what if questions of to try

different kinds of simulation and other kinds of gaming to try and figure out what they should do next

so both the multi dimensional and the simulation aspects are absolutely

antithetical to printing I believe that both of them are going to dominate to the place where we will not be as

interested in printing and the little machines with the page size displays

that way less than two we'll come along on just the nick of time so that we don't care whether we

print or not but we actually want is an active copy of that information on the

machine itself that we can look at whenever we want so I think all of the

technologies are going to hit together just at the right time and printing for

most things will go away just as there

are very few things besides and university will probably still print

University diplomas yeah I can write because we still use vellum and I guess

most universities today don't even go to develop or parchment anymore because

it's so expensive they probably use a Mac to do it cheap what kind of software

one purpose custom application typical

kind of thing that an Arthur Andersen does for a customer like Eli Lilly or

could be a big billing system it could be a chemical analysis system it could

be an airlines reservation system

personal computers we have we can run those kinds of things but what we

generally run on them are what are called generic tools these are tools that are like frameworks desktop

publishing systems spreadsheets they're frameworks that the end users do stuff

that is dangerously like programming where ease Mis people know no end

because they're all of these end users out there subverting them some end user

needs something that puts it into the Mis Department and gets back a friendly

note saying yes we'll be glad to do this for you you will do it in COBOL on the

mainframe and you'll get it in about a year and a half so the user goes away

and a few months later they think well maybe I should try that in Excel they

sit down and start hacking up something in Excel and by the time the COBOL

program line comes along a year and a half later the

personal computer user has forgotten he even asked for it because he's built

some incredibly hairy Cluj all by himself that does 90% of what he wants

so their various ways of going you know one of the things you could do is stamp out this kind of subversive activity by

instituting thought police in the in the companies so the only M is COBOL

programmers allowed to write code or the other thing you could do is to say well

users do have a tendency of trying to get on with it and maybe what we should do is give them

better tools so this whole notion of end-user programming was something that

was born at Xerox PARC was the idea of

the end users are going to do stuff let's try and figure out safer

frameworks for them to do this we don't expect them to be architects but they

sure are going to build dog houses of various kinds for themselves so let's see what kind of a dog house we can let

them build before they have to go and study architecture to do it and this is

even more so in the next ten years

because we're going to go to active self customizable components I'm going to try

and explain that a little bit in a couple of minutes that will make it much

much easier for the end users to put together their own their own tools so

the languages change COBOL is a data

structure and procedure language like Fortran and Algol and Pascal that's what

we call in the biz weekly modular one of

the ways to think in other words as modular modules are things called data structures and things called procedures

and this is not a happy division of the computer stuff because when you move a

data structure from point A to point B and there's maybe a thousand miles in

between them you have to write a lot of

code to use that data structure when it comes to the other end if you don't send

the code along with it and there's a there's a rule in this kind of program

I mean that you never send all of the code that it's needed and when you

change the representation of it you never change all the procedures that new

the old representation and so the result

here is some lightning bolts so you wind

up with very large fragile spaghetti-like code with this way of

doing things nonetheless this is the dominant way of doing things there are

whole companies that make their living doing nothing but writing programs like

this that seem to work another ah Allen

let's see if I did I do a whole bunch of

them like this No so ignore that nor the one on the right take a look at this

take a look at the Center for a second in object-oriented programming what you

do is there are two things one is you don't care how the data is represented

you just want to use it so you can stick all of the state-specific stuff inside a

thing called a little cloud called an object and the way you make it

independent of its representation is that you put all the procedures that know what the actual representation is

inside there to you make a little package when you send that package a

thousand miles you only have to write a very little bit of code in order to use the object safely by sending messages to

it the representation is quite independent of how you use it in fact the representation can change on the fly

while people are in the in the throws of

using it so you have this interesting thing that in some object-oriented

languages these systems programmers can be improving the efficiency of objects

that people are actually using in various structures and the inside and

the outsides are so sealed off that there's never any time when if one is in

danger of having a having breakage now

that's a object-oriented stuff is about 25 years old so it's just starting to

come into vogue now as I saw in one of the conference

things for this conference that it is now the 1990s buzzword which is really

kind of funny because I made up the term object-oriented in 1967 I did not invent

object-oriented programming I invented some of the languages they're used in it

but it was an idea that goes all the way back to the mid 60s and but this is the

paradigm shift that programmers are just

now starting to take you say you think you're conservative take a look at a

programmer some time just because they're using fancy technology doesn't

mean that they are they were about as conservative as a person can possibly

get once they've learned something they imprint on it like a duck to Konrad

Lorenz and never give it up no matter how spidery what it is that they're

doing now in the next 10 years we really

have a problem that is that the pervasive Network actually isn't strong enough to deal with objects being sent

randomly all over the earth and being done by various people and have any

possibility of using them you want something more biological for instance

if you take a a muscle cell from your shoulder and put it down in your thigh

muscle you don't have to reprogram anything down there in order for that

shoulder cells to survive that shoulder cell like all the cells in your body

knows what it wants from the environment and it's really proactive about getting

it and if there is stuff out in the environment it can use to survive it

well that's why we can build a trillion cell organism as how many cells we have

is about a trillion is because each cell spends about 90% of all of its effort

looking out for itself and protecting itself from the ravages of the

environment around it so most of us believe that there's going to be a new

way of programming which is called agent oriented programming or something is called modular control programming in

which what sand is something that is very shiny in

other words when you send something from A to B no code has to be written at the

other end in order for this object to be used it knows enough to adapt itself to

the environment that it finds there all by itself and no code has to be written

and this way of doing programming has been around now for about ten years just

give me an example of so these are not new ideas in the sense of research but

these are ideas that are about ready to come out of the research labs and start

making it an impact how big is the big

program COBOL million lines that's a big

one Arthur Andersen does them all the time an enormous Li large program with about

the same functionality is only a hundred thousand lines they're only a few of

these around cuz most programs are much smaller than that and what is quite

remarkable in the last 10 years of doing these agent oriented programs is that

programs with about the same functionality that have been deployed out in the real world have come to about

10,000 lines in other words there are these huge factors of 10

between these paradigms this is where it starts getting interesting right because

Americans are not interested in new ideas just because they're interesting that is not our culture never has been

our culture but here is actually a practical reason for getting interested

in that there are factors of 10 differences between these paradigms why

bust your chops working on one of these 1 million line fragile programs when you

can do it in a tenth the time with a tenth the resources wind up with

something that is much easier to validate much easier to maintain

now these used to be hand waving back in

the 70s when we're trying to promote object-oriented programming it's only

been in the last 5 years or so that very large companies have started to deploy these side-by-side

with some of the older ways of doing things than real comparisons have been done arthur anderson is a good company

to talk to about this because they have done some very large programs in

object-oriented style and large ones an agent oriented style and gotten

tremendous results so these are now field tested results

so another way of looking at it you can think of each one of these is a

kind of an architecture and in fact you think of each technology is the kind of

an architecture so if you know how to put posts down at the ground and put

lentils over them you can build structures of a certain size and we

still use that technology today for building small things Greeks used it to

build the largest things that they ever built with your temples if you want to

build something much much larger and moreover that lets light in you need a

different architecture the Greeks never built a structure with an arch except

for some grave structures and they never could actually see that you could get

the graves up above ground and they'd work there too so they missed completely

out on this architecture and it's quite remarkable that the amount of stone in a

Gothic cathedral like Notre Dom is very similar to the amount of stone in a

structure like the Parthenon seems incredible but the Gothic cathedral is

mostly air because the stresses have been balanced out and there's plenty of room for putting windows in when you go

to a completely new way of doing things that buckminster fuller called tensegrities

which means using things you can pull on as well as push you wind up with things

like the geodesic dome which is quite easy to build a geodesic dome that will

fit over all of the Gothic cathedrals that we've ever built on this earth so

each of these architectures is a qualitative difference in approach and

for companies it's the qualitative difference that gives you the leverage

now of course this is risky I remember

when I first did the overlapping window interface at Xerox I showed this to a

Xerox executive and this was 1971 or

something like that and I bound up the demo with a flourish and I said to him and what's what's more what's even

better about this is that this stuff only has a 20% chance of success I'm

taking risk just like you asked us to and he looked at me right square in the

eye and he said boy that's great but just make sure it works

so he wasn't interested in the romance of it and like most executives he wanted

us to be in the 20% 100% of the time right that's not the way you do it the

best lifetime batting average of any

baseball players Ty Cobb's it was 367 that meant about 2 out of every 3 times

they went up to the plate he made out and so research requires actually having

some outs as well as having some hits now what's the key to all this stuff key

is not to get embroiled with just

function if you ask somebody for a screwdriver and they give you this you get a very angry at them you'd say why

this is the functional part of a screwdriver and you'd say no I need to

use their interface because it's the function plus a user interface that

gives me the tool now when I made this slide it forced me to look at a

screwdriver in a new way and when I looked at it I thought boy this is a

terrible way of designing a screwdriver just think of it this the mechanical

advantage on the screwdriver is the ratio of the diameter of the handle to the diameter of the shaft it's not big

the best way to grab the screwdriver is like this but then it will slide off the

screw and if I grab it on the top the way you grab screwdrivers I don't get

them very much purchase on it so look at this and I thought god that is a terrible design for a screwdriver that

is the ms-dos of screwdriver design

yeah the screwdriver this problem my hobby is organ building and I have

one of the great old books of organ building it goes back to before the French Revolution and it has pictures in

there of the tools they use and included in there are screwdrivers that look just like the screwdrivers we have today so

this is a design that goes back more than 200 years and it's terrible

it doesn't fit to the human being so what if we wanted to fit it to the human

being well we wanted diameter as large as we possibly could get for maximum

mechanical advantage we need to grab it from the top and we need maximum

friction so what should it look like it looks like a ball does anybody ever seen

you know screwdriver look like a ball yeah Pyrus so years ago somebody looks

at the screwdriver the same way I did and said boy that's a terrible design maybe it's the COBOL of screwdrivers the

design design but if you think about if you want to fit to the human you

actually have to look at the human so if we want to do use their interface with

primates we're a primate then you have

to go with whatever is going on in the primates mind and that is not easy

because most of our models of the way

the human mind works are not are made up

out of common sense theories that are unfair I give you an example of that so

here's an upside down face and see if you can look at it look at this picture

for a minute and then see if you can see anything wrong with his face

yeah what is it the mouse upside down

okay see anything else

okay ears no how about eyes

no fair turning your heads to the side

okay so let's pretend we're in school school is a place that treats knowledge as a

fluid that can be dispensed from the

full teacher vessel to the empty student vessel drop by drop and it's usually

done by encoding the knowledge into facts in English sentences so let me

give you a fact about this picture what we've done is we've taken a picture of a

young girl extracted her eyes and mouth turned them upside down put them back

into the picture and then turned the entire picture upside down okay is that fair okay so having said that

you should be quite prepared for what it looks like right side up

I gotta turn this back because I discovered nobody will listen to me when it's on the other way okay so what

happened there I gave you exactly the same information twice once and in the

terms of a sentence it went in through the ears and went over to the left side

of your brain got evaluated as a proposition you have an okay reaction to

it and then I showed it to you as an image and went to the back of your brain over the right hand side of your brain and

got an emotional reaction out of you this is why McDonald's does not run

print ads saying if you eat a McDonald's hamburger you'll become a better-looking person because in English that's absurd

but if they show a picture of really good-looking people eating McDonald's

hamburgers then you'll make a different inference because it goes to a different

part of your mind in other words we are multiple minded we have different ways

of dealing with the world and they're not in sync with each other in fact we

have a special part in our mentality that thinks things are more true if they

rhyme so if I were to say to you a Big Mac and fries will slender your thighs

sound a little more convincing

if you think about it you can imagine why truth and rhyme go together if you

think back over the several hundred thousand years of how we've passed our culture down to each other that the

truths of the culture were passed down in written rhythmic schemes for memory

and the association with truth is something that advertisers still used today when they make up slogans it's

something that we're entirely unconscious of and because our mind

isn't a seamless fabric we can get

tricked very very easily so just very

quickly PJ said we have three stages of

intellectual development going from a body-centered stage where an object is

to grab it visually centered the kid thinks there's more water in the tall

glass and symbolically centered where the kid says oh there can't be more

water Bruner who's an American psychologist took a kid who said there's

more water in the tall glass and immediately put a cardboard in front of it and the child changed his mind said

what though but there can't be and Bruner removed the cardboard and the

kids said no look there's more water in the tall glass and Brenner put the cardboard back and the kid changed his

mind again so if you have any six-year-olds you'd like to torment

so what Brynner was doing was showing that it's not stages as Piaget thought

but actually parallel mental activity

the fact I was just talking to Brenner on the phone a couple of days ago talking about how well this model has

stood up over the last thirty years or so that in a very simplistic terms we

have at least three quite separate ways

of dealing with the world that you can think of as separate mentalities a body-centered way a visually centered

way in a symbolically centered way they can be appealed to differently they have

different logics they have different ways of remembering the world and you

can use them for designing ways of communicating with computers so if we

have a body-centered way of knowing the world in fact this is what Orient's us

in the world we need when we're communicating with a computer to have a way of sticking our arm into it the

mouse is one of the simplest ways of doing that it gives us a kinesthetic relationship we need something to relate

to so icons are a wonderful way of being

stand-ins both were symbolic things and for real objects in the world and here

are two but fact let me ask the audience here how many people flip channels on

television we have cable television here I noticed so whenever you have a cable

you flip it's okay we're not we're not gonna take a record of this so a bunch

of people do how many people have ever flipped in the middle of a movie that

they've hadn't seen for like 20 years

okay how long did it take you to recognize that movie that you hadn't

seen for 20 years a couple of seconds think about what that means 20 years ago

you saw this movie probably with somebody that you were in love with or

something so you you're really paying more attention to them than the movie

you didn't know you were gonna be tested on that movie 20 years later you pop it

into the middle of it without any preparation and in 60 frames you have

recognized that you saw that moving before it now let's test it out how many people have had that happen to

let me just just raise their hand so we can see okay how many people knew what

was gonna happen next yeah it's just

about right about half the people know

what's gonna happen think of what that means over the context of your entire life your visual mentality is set up to

memorize every scene you have ever seen

you can imagine why if you think back over the last couple hundred thousand

years and so appealing to the iconic is

something that is almost a no-brainer even though it's taken many years to do

it the other thing that's interesting is the iconic mentality can keep track of a hundred different things at once and if

we had a hundred images of animals you could find the elephant four times

faster if it were a picture than if it were at work that search is done by a

different part of your brain than the search for a work then you need a

symbolic environment which we called small talk an object-oriented

environment to tie them all together and you wind up with something like this

which is the first interface that looked like a like a Macintosh so this style of

interface I'm not here selling Macintosh computers this style of interface which

is now spreading to the IBM PC is one that was actually designed from a model

of the way the human mind works and it's fitted 'no stu people is what has made

it go out into the world and be

successful we're gonna have to do the same thing when we go and think about

agents now here's the screwdriver diagram for agents it's not function but

functionality is not a handle but the

agent has to have language and context what is context mean well an agent for

UNIX UNIX is one of these operating systems that graduate students love that has 500 commands that you have to

memorize Berkeley did a nice agent for

Unix and a user you could type to it in English anything that remotely had to do

with dealing with computers the

interface could translate and carry out a UNIX command to do it so one day about

five years ago somebody typed to it I just ran out of file space I need some

more those words 20 seconds later the agent came back and said okay now you

have plenty of file space

[Music]

later on that afternoon the port user

discovered that it had deleted about a third of his files now think about that

that's a high score for an artificial intelligence right the user wanted more

or something the agent had to figure out it meant less of something they had to

find out how to do that went and did it now this story would not have a happy

ending if this were on an IBM PC or a Macintosh right because those files

would be gone forever in this case though there was an undelete in the file

this file system for this particular system did not throw away files when you

said delete it just marked them for being archived in a particular way and

so that user when he discovered his files were guy just said undulate and

they came back this is what I mean by context artificial intelligences can be

very very smart strategically but they don't live in the same world that we

live in and we have to put them there and so when you combine the three

together you get something that will function as an agent one of the things

that agents have to do is to track to

track our goals in some way they have to stay with us they have to watch what

we're doing and try and understand what it is we're trying to do and I looked for a way of illustrating this and I

will try and skip to it here

you just bear with me this is kind of a

grant this is an agent that was done at MIT that I think illustrates what all

agents have to do pretty well

so what we have here is a flute player and the computer is going to play the

harpsichord the computer can hear what the flute player is playing

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

[Applause] [Music] [Applause]

[Music]

[Applause]

real people make errors so we want the

system to be able to track what we're doing even though we're not perfect even

at the things we said we were going to try to do

[Music]

[Applause] now you can imagine the poor computer

saying what is this guy trying to do but

the point is in the next 10 years that's what we want it to say what is this

person trying to do and how can I help so in the next 10 years the apple cart

is going to be overturned again we're going to go from the second revolution

which we're now midway through most large companies are just struggling to

acclimate this new technology and this

third revolution which is going to be a much larger one

than the desktop revolution is going to be in full swing I pointed out the Apple

that we could be incredibly rich by 1995

because we have the best second revolution technology and we could be

out of business in 1997 because there's going to be a complete switchover just

like Digital Equipment Corporation was in great shape just a few years ago and now

it's struggling like mad why well it just didn't move with the paradigms so

these kinds of things are really scary because again it's like a thunderstorm now we can anticipate a little bit we

don't know when the tornado is going to hit but we can certainly build storm cellars we can decide we can be

proactive about the kinds of things that are going to happen to us we can start

getting interested in networks we can start asking questions about what are

the kinds of goals that we're trying to do in this company and how can we build agents that will help spread those goals

around and help amplify people but still it's pretty scary sometimes when

companies get scared they hire consultants it's a good idea but

consultants are like a person who knows 100ms to make love it doesn't have a

girlfriend

they can advise but it's the people who

are actually within the environment that can do the best if they can find a way

of getting outside the reason that consultants work is because the consultants come in from the outside

they have a different perspective but they're weak in being able to tell you

exactly what you should do and how you should do it if you can get outside the

current perspective that you're in take another point of view and realize that

point of view is worth 80 IQ points right we're not any smarter than we were

a couple hundred thousand years ago imagine a person with a 250 IQ in 10,000

BC or Leonardo in the early 1500s with

it maybe a 250 IQ he still couldn't transcend the century that he was in our

smarts come from the change in representation systems that our culture

adopts so we have to do it ourselves

point of view is worth ad IQ points and it's scary to get to go to that other

point of view but as in all scary domains the best weapon we have is the

one between our ears providing us loaded

thank you

now we have some time for questions and

there are actually some microphones around I think I'm not sure I see them

but they're microphones in the aisles and the balconies of have any questions

about either my major or minor arguments

I'd be glad to entertain them do you

believe everything I said yeah

well actually not so well not so well

one of things I've become very aware of is how much of my mind is in paradigm -

I bought the paradigm 3 ideas the Apple one I came because we could see paradigm

3 starting to happen in the late seventies as soon as we got very well

networked up at Parc and we realized that the windows and icons interface was

not going to survive pervasive networking we realized that there was

another way and people had thought about this way and this notion of agents goes

all the way back to the late 50s was one of the original dreams of John McCarthy

who is one of the founders of artificial intelligence and and so forth so it's

not an old AI it's not an idea that was startlingly new but one of the things

that I realized in the last couple of years is that I am so much more comfortable I think it's partly because

as a musician I'd much rather play in the band than be a conductor as I just

know I like to grab on to things and so

my natural bent is to be a tool type user and so even though I can see

philosophically what's demanded by this paradigm 3 and in a way I'm kind of

trapped by the stuff that I helped invent you know I I've not had

particularly good ideas in paradigm 3 except pointing out what it's likely to

be like and stuff but I mean fundamental technical ideas of solving some of them

the problems are being done by other people and the that's a it's a very

interesting experience to be a

soothsayer and inventor of technologies and to realize that you're in a

different world and the one that's going to going to happen fortunately I like to

play music so I'm I have my retirement well planned but you see what I'm saying

I mean this this stuff the the toughest thing I think is particularly for

managers who tend to be embedded in one particular way of thinking or a

collection of ways of thinking to be tolerant to be able to see that there

are other ways of thinking and to be tolerant the people who are doing doing those that was the biggest problem at Xerox

was that Xerox turned out to be very

intolerant of things that weren't like copiers after all and so when we gave

them the Macintosh style way of doing things in 1975 they literally could not

see what it was they just could not see it and we didn't give it to them as an

idea we gave it to we had 500 Macintosh like machines connected to Ethernet

networks with six or seven pages second laser printers in 1975 they still

couldn't see what it was so that to me

is an example of what the paradigm shift problem is all about and I think for

quote unquote older people are people who are very efficient and thinking one

way you just have to realize that that isn't the only way to think and so I

think that that way of doing things I think that the people who are coming

into a new set of ideas will have enough freedom to develop them but it's tough

that's why so many new products have had to go to different companies than the

companies that paid for their invention because innovation is distressingly easy

to schedule you just rub money and smart people together but incredibly difficult

to recognize because Brian Eicher

something that's innovative is something that you haven't seen before when you

haven't seen before the tendency is to reject it or not understand it

yes

well it had a pen stuck in the side and

it was based very much on the pen based

system that I showed from RAND Corporation however anybody who has ever

used one of those systems and very few people have even the people who are

developing pen based systems today have ever used a good one once you've used a

really good one you realize that you still need something in order to do

volumes of text now for years in the

late 60s I tried to get people interested in steno type now where you

can go 180 words a minute it's like a court reporter does and I just can't get

people interested in learning that thing but there needs to be something the

fastest you can go on a on a pen writing system is maybe 15 to 20 words minute

that's not fast enough for doing all of the things that you're going to need to

do although the second version I mean

the the classier versions of the Dinah book that I did showed the keyboard

displayed on the display when you need it the display was touch sensitive okay

that was that was more of the vision and something like that will probably be

more true than than having a discreet keys yes

I think they're in paradigm zero aren't

they I mean not sure that well I think

the the major that's something I've been very interested in actually I've done

some work with the Indianapolis Children's Museum and and so forth and I

think the major thing on it is that the

values that the kid brings into any kind of learning situation are the values the

kid gets at home and I think the the

value space is more important than any kind of technology that can be be rigged

up I've worked with children and computers for 22 years and I've never been in a successful school situation

that didn't have very strong parental support that is the hardest thing to do

now saying that the technology is not a band-aid or imagine going event that

it's actually an amplifier or something it's like if you wanted your kid to

become a musician one of the things you could do is buy a piano or get a piano put it in a classroom but if there's not

a value system about music there's musicians will tell you the music isn't

in the piano right that where we'd have to let it vote so the musical impulses

inside of people and the technology is there to amplify it I think that model

works very well for computers in schools so the the really hard thing about

computers in education is that you have to fix the problems of Education without

worrying about the technology already got a great technology called Bo okay

basic organization of knowledge think about that solid state two and a half

megabytes cost about three bucks a megabyte a couple hundred million titles

and stuff and we've got technology up the kazoo and we always have had what we

need is actually some understanding of the way people's minds work so we can set up environments that are not painful

there's no reason why learning should be painful and we have to have some

understanding of what it means to

amplify those human impulses with technology then I think it's fairly easy and there

there are various examples of isolated

schools in the country that have no special budget but just have for

instance a principal who actually understands how to educate and the the

stuff happens the principal gets the parents involved realizing it's a

sociological process now not just see

what's once you get away from this transfer of knowledge fluid right this

is the factory model of Education that's so wrong if it were that easy we'd have

no educational problems because we could set it up as something like an

industrial process and that's and that's basically the way certain companies have

approached user interface you know where the idea is that this is an industrial process and we'll train people in order

to use the user interface of this computer the other way of looking at it is people have all of these human

dimensions and they have an interest in environments and exploring environments

and so forth and you can get them to learn this stuff painlessly while

they're using it and I think that approach works a lot better but as in

all things that we are not lockstep

fascist type control from above you have

to set up an environment that's actually well fitted to the human in order for it to work so it's one of those paradoxes

that education is a simple problem with

a very complicated solution because most of us don't really want to go through

what you have to go through to do it any more than most parents really want their

kids you know the parents sat down and thought about it for more than two

seconds they would not stick their kids in front of the television

even before the something like the Gulf crisis I I grew up during World War Two

in Australia where we actually had air raids and an occasional japanese suicide

sub and I had no trauma from the war because my parents told me about the war

on a need-to-know basis which was very very tiny for a 3-4 three-year-old

four-year-old that I was back then they listen to the radio after

I went to bed I realized now and stuff and so I had no trout you know there's

no way a three or four year old can handle something like that so why the heck let three and four-year-olds watch

unrestricted television and once you realize that that is a crime against

humanity to do that and think of all the other things that they were watching before the Gulf crisis television has no

secrets and childhood is all about that there's a difference between children

and adults so you know turning off the

television is the first value judgment that any parent could make to help their

child learn most parents won't take the effort to do that and take the

consequence of what it means to turn the television off that's why I say most

Americans actually don't care about education they want it to be a process

done by somebody else but they don't want to take the attack the responsibility for it it's a shame but

it sure is the way it is I saw another hand someone yeah

well I think that the there will always

be when you have networks you always have servers and I think to me what a

server is is a piece of computing

hardware that is designed to maximize certain kinds of processes that are not easy to distribute I can't imagine

anything like a 3090 continuing on but

of course they will I mean the customers have to stop buying these things before

they go away and the customers aren't sophisticated enough you have to figure

it out but I think that just as there will always be a COBOL they'll always be

things like the 30 90 but I think that the what we'll start seeing more and

more of our special-purpose servers and one of the places where you can beat the

heck out of a mainframe is in doing information retrieval even today it's

possible to buy massively parallel computing hardware for like a million

dollars like a connection machine from thinking machines that has 64,000

processors and can not only do conventional information retrieval tasks

much faster but can do information retrieval tasks that are not conceivable

on any kind of stream processing system

and I think we want to think very very much about what the server environment

actually means when we put networks in and to realize that every time we have

to you know the question is what are we send back and forth every time we send

things like characters back and forth we lose every time we can send something

like an object back and forth we win the problem with things like characters and

simple raw data is that we have to have very complicated protocols for dealing

with them at either end and what we

really want is to finesse solutions so just an example of a nice finesse

solution is where you have a laser printer one of the things you can do is

try and make a protocol for it right and all of a sudden you start thinking

about all the different kinds of page layouts this is the way people do

standards let's see all the different things people are going to use you trying to numerate them and then you

make that to standard that can't work there are too many degrees of freedom on

the page and so what the the Adobe people Adobe used to be a Xerox PARC lab

and what we did at Xerox PARC was to say

no we won't do that we'll just will let people send programs we'll just then the

program will interpret the program so we'll know how to execute about 80

operators and those 80 operators will span the degrees of freedom of the page

completely that's what PostScript is so the only

protocol is that you just send a program and at the other end there's an

information buffer that PostScript tries to build the image from that program and

if you think about the simplicity of the PostScript manual is about 20 pages long

the difference between that and trying to come up with a formatted way of doing

things is incredible this is true for things like cd-roms and and so forth

most of the standards that people think about on CD ROMs and video discs are

really stupid because they worry about things like pixels you know who knows

what display we're gonna have 10 years from now the CD ROMs are still gonna be around so why should there be a cd-rom

standard that knows anything about the pixelation of current displays so all of

those things I think say what we want to do is go to representation independent

ways of conveying information and that's what objects are all about getting away

from having to know anything about how things are represented or going to be

represented but going to things that are more like saying I want you to do this

and I want you to do that and the object figures out how to do it you can change

the representation yes

laughs LCD screen

yeah but we had a chance you know virtual reality was actually invented by

ivan sutherland who was the guy who invented computer graphics in the early

60s and when I was at Utah Ivan

Sutherland brought the first head-mounted display system in fact the

first real-time 3d graphics was done for I hadn't been a display that you want

you warned your head and the computer knew where you were looking and could change it so back in the late 60s we had

quite a bit of experience with that and I think there's quite a bit to be said

for one of the the alternative there

were actually three designs for that Dynabook one was the notebook one was a

head man a display and one was a wristwatch the wristwatch was for 2010

when you have as many different network connections as you have plug electric

plugs in the wall so that all you need to carry around with you is something it lets the local computer in the room know

it's you so as you move from one place to another in the physical world you can

imagine your computer agents hopping through the network following you a lot

right that's sort of the I usually don't bother subjecting audiences to that one

because it seems but think about how ubiquitous power outlets aren't even

phone outlets are now so just a short step from that to have all the networks

in the world the transponding all the time with you

I think the virtual I mean the virtual

reality stuff it like multimedia can be

a red herring in the sense that both of

them are much more concerned with display modalities than they are with

content both of them for instance in order to make virtual reality work and

this is something that we had determined this is my opinion but this is something

we had determined very strongly in the late 60s is you absolutely need to have

Tac Toe feedback from the environment putting

yourself in a 3d environment not being able to touch and feel it is almost

impossible if you ever tried one of these things it is almost impossible to

grab things and know that you're grabbing them in all this you need tactile feedback until they do that it's

just the curiosity now the same thing multimedia is a little bit like saying

well now that we have books let's put pictures back into them and we'll put the pictures back in in lots of

different ways we'll put sound in that doesn't count unless there's actually a

rhetoric that allows you to organize this stuff in the meaningful way and

that's what really needs to be looked for you want to in particular you want

to have it in such a way that multimedia doesn't wind up looking like television

because television appeals to one part of your mentality and not another

so it'd be distressing if with all the technology we have on this earth if we

wound up reducing the entire world to the mental state that people had in the

Middle Ages but that is entirely what could happen it's happening right now

television is basically electronic stained glass windows and it has all the

pluses and minuses that go along with that and if that is a pre-scientific

scientist ill ization worldview it's quite good we don't have time to really

go into it here but I think it's one of the biggest issues there's something I when I get to invited to a multimedia

conference I'm usually on the other side not saying make multimedia going away

but I'm saying trying to understand it for God's sakes just like try and do a

user interface you might as well trying to understand how the human mind works a

little bit for yes

yeah well there you know there's this old joke about rocks are to keep out

amateurs so basically most I mean you

can boil down most security mechanisms to how much work do you want the person

to do before they can steal your stuff and the answer is you can you can make

it you can make fairly inexpensive locks

that are an incredible amount of work for somebody to steal your stuff and

that's pretty good I have been for the last five years I've been trying to

convince publishers to publish on an

open network providing we can prove that we can make geometric copying impossible

it's the same thing in the recording industry they don't care about numeric

you know arithmetic progression copying

but what they hate about dat is that you can do it geometrically because you got

a pert you got no noise so you get a perfect copy and the copy can make

perfect copies and the copies can make perfect copies and you don't get any degradation and so you can geometrically

fairly easily overwhelm something without having the degradation in what

they would like is to have something where degradation is introduced so that you can't sell a copy as them as the

real thing right and same kinds of things you have to do when you're doing

network security there's so many different kinds of things that have to be done and all I can say is technically

the problems have been fairly well understood for a couple of decades

none of the processors that desktop

computers use have any security mechanisms whatsoever built into them

right so if we wanted to actually get secure and we wanted to extend the

address space of the network into our machines then we'd have to get rid of all of the machines in

in place of a separate architecture I think that will happen fairly slowly but

it's likely that when the first intimate computers start happening which is about

1995 that they will be built with

complete hardware level protection in them right from the start just from what

they are and how they have to interact continuously with the network yeah one

more question having a hard time saying oh yeah given

that institutions and businesses have to stay in business continuously do you

believe that it's possible for a company to leap one of your evolutionary steps

in other words to go from institutional to intimate without going through the

personal computer stage yeah I don't know I don't I don't have a good I don't

have a good sense of that and we're probably not gonna be able to find out

because the we had one chance for that and that was if Xerox had decided to do

the quote-unquote Macintosh in 1975 that

technology was actually invented before any desktop technology was and then we

would have had a chance to to see what

it was but I think that the because this third one that's coming along is so

Network driven and we're so lacking in the kinds of servers that it needs and

it's going to take five or eight years to get the network's going and where

artificial intelligence is and everything else I think that it's actually going to be a real struggle so

my I believe that by say 1993 to 9 1993

we'll start seeing devices that you put in here that are a combination digital

cellular phone and things like electronic mail and other kinds of be

like these notebook computers but tied into communications and by 1995 we'll

see full function things that have a fair amount of AI and we'll be

retrieving things that the system thinks that will be interesting for you to know

even today you can buy 10 years ago one

of the first agents I did was called News peak and it was the thing that stayed up all night and found you a

custom newspaper based on the kinds of

projects you're working on and so and this year 1990 is the first year

when you can there are two companies that are operated offering a product

like that one is called News edge and one of them is called first news

once for the Mac and once for the IBM PC and these business system where you can

gradually develop a profile of the kinds

of things you're interested in and it will log in to a half a dozen to a dozen different news things continuously for

you and present you with about a you

know the hundred most interesting things that's discovered for you so this is a

very simple agent and all of the agents I think in the next three or four years

will be retrieval type agents because that's an area that just isn't being

handled by the sequel direct method way of doing things and then we'll have to

see a person would be very interesting

to invite here is a guy by the name of dr. Doug Lennon who is doing a system

called psych it's the psych in encyclopedia and what this system is is

a an attempt to model human common sense so he believes that human common sense

can be dealt with with between 200,000 and a million rules this is the projects

been going on for about eight years you know it's like modeling the human genome and his belief is that we can't do real

agents until we have a model of human goals that the agent can relate

everything that you're doing to some understanding of what humans are trying

to do in this world and that you have to have something like common sense

reasoning in order to pull this off so

that project will not mature for another five or six years if indeed it ever does

because it was a very hard problem so I think that's something that can be can

be tracked and what I would do is the company right now is to start doing

retrieval type agents for instance here's one you could do that would be

incredibly useful right now most companies have electronic mail but they

just imitate surface mail right this is not moving the motion picture camera so

what would it be like to have a mail system that not only retrieve

stuff with your word with your name after the word - but what if it

retrieved mail that had your name in it

what if it retrieved mail that was about the kinds of projects that you're

working on what if it retrieved mail that was about projects that were

analogous to the kind of projects they were see an electronic mail system gives you a database that is essentially a

group mind it's the mind of Lily if the mail system is that all good and yet

because we don't think of it as a retrieval system we're not using it and

that's what agents are all about is to take enormous pieces of data and to just

fare it away at it and trying to trying to find relationships that we can't get

at directly so thanks a lot for inviting

me and enjoy the rest of the conquerer [Applause] [Music]

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