Camden Technology Conference (2000)

I was always impressed with that I was

old enough to remember this what he

really wants me to talk about is he invented the Dynabook he invented small

talk the first object-oriented programming language he invented

overlapping windows I was still impressed with the quiz kids though I

discovered when I was at Apple I didn't actually hire Alan Steve Jobs hired Alan

and coming from the old economy I didn't

realize that nobody hires Alan as an

employee you sponsor Alan and in keeping

with the Medici idea of sponsorship

where Alan is sponsored to think to read and to dream and fortunately he does it

well enough that he actually gets paid for it so he did that at Atari he did it

at Apple I presume that's what you're doing at Disney but you can tell us more

about it but he has this ability to

think ahead of the rest of us and I always thought a great definition of

genius is to see the obvious about 20

years before the rest of us see it and Alan has this ability to see things that

eventually become obvious to the rest of us but they aren't particularly obvious

at the time that he observes it and one of his most famous quotes is that point

of view is worth ad IQ points that if you can shift your orientation and see

things from a different vantage point you can actually get a whole different

context and a different frame of reference and that's something that I

think unique athletes experience he is

going to give us a treat tonight and I'm

not going to say anything more about it because I think he wants to do some of

the other introductions that are involved with this but let me just now

introduce to you okay

[Music]

well it's great when your former boss still likes you when in August when I

was thinking about this evening I was in

New Hampshire leaving a wonderful

concert that my friend Don Luis had done driving back to Boston and really

worrying about the front part of this

presentation because in my mind I was generating thousands and thousands of

words of context about pop culture and

civilization and I hated those thousands

because they weren't getting to what I

really wanted to talk about in the middle of the talk and while I was struggling with this some very clear and

simple musical ideas started drifting into my fevered brain in the car and I

started thinking to myself you know if I could just get Don Luis to come here and

start through the first part of this presentation tonight we could actually

cut through a lot of the verbiage and in

particular try and avoid putting useless categories on the most words that were

once wonderful words like civilization have been colonized just like personal

computer object-oriented programming

these words are meaningless now there is an object-oriented cobol for instance

you can I saw a wonderful Anderson consulting ad

in one of the airports that had a spray can that had a on it and as you've seen

that one but basic ideas whatever it is spray on it so civilization is one of

those words now it's been colonized to the point where it's useless and I think even pop culture is and I certainly

wanted to avoid having to discuss what I thought either those words were and but

trying to think in this non categorical way I also started thinking about where

are these ideas United whatever they

mean and I was thinking again well in the world of the child we have a huge

mixture of developed and undeveloped ideas a huge urge to be part of the

culture around them a need by most

adults to develop them beyond the

indigenous culture around them and so

all those things said I have to get done lewis here so I called up Don and we

started talking about it and he thought it was a great idea and we went up in

went to his house and spent a day thinking about this and Don is a

world-famous performing musician he

performs all over the world back playing a concert tomorrow plays concerts very

frequently but one of the things he does that is really neat is he puts out a lot

of time going around to schools and getting kids interested in music in a

very special way I was thinking if we could just get this audience to pretend

that they're children again and if we

could have Don come on and do the start of his concerts that he does for

children exactly the way he does them for children dressed exactly the way he

dresses for children and talking the way he

talks for the children that would be a wonderful way to start this session so

with that let's all be children and let me bring on my great good friend Don

Lewis [Applause] [Music]

good evening oh you can do better than

that goody all right that sounds what I

like it we're going to have a good time you ready for a good time tonight yeah I

know you are now some of your suspect of me right now because of these red shoes

yeah yeah I like these bitches um you

can get it arrested if I go out of this place with these red shoes on but yeah

you said probably more than likely but

the thing that I wear these red shoes it really is not really to match my

suspenders but it really is to pay

attention to the feet I have this weird kind of idea that everything that was

created was created out of dance and

rhythm and music and if we start to look

at the universe the way that it is the Sun comes up on time whether we like it

or not it's a rhythm in that and it

changes depending on where the earth is

positioned around the Sun it's tilt of

the axis and a light knows about on a good stuff right but that's music to me

not music that I hear but the same wave

propagation that basically resides in another area above where I can hear out

to where I can see that frequency range

so I can see the evidence of it and then

on the other end is that we've got these two senses now the eyes and the ears and

then there's the other end on the subject I basically up to the bottom and

then that other sense of feeling comes through

now you may not get as much feeling tonight is that what what really like

for you to have but just think that it is there when I hit the low notes and

you don't hear them they just sort of do this okay now up here I have you can't

see maybe well maybe later on you'll be able to see I have four keyboards three

of which I play with my hands and for the red shoes they play the keyboard

that resides down here on the floor the pedal keyboard which is normally what we

call the organ kind of a motif for

playing so I might be to going to be busy now the reason I picked the organ

to play is because the organ was I could

have played drums probably but I thought that the organ could make more noise

than the drums and then also a drummer

actually gets to dance a little bit with his feet but actually his feet stay

pretty much in the same place they might patent so forth like this but on this

pedal boy down here I can dance most

musicians can't do that unless they're playing guitar and they dancing around in state but I can sit and I can dance

and that's what I like to do now to test out once in a while I get some these new

keyboards and I always like to see whether the new keyboards can do the

traditional sounds as well as come up with some of the other sounds and so I

always like to test the instrument out to find out whether they can do the traditional sounds you know just to the

point because I may have to use those sounds for a real job

and so when doing so I always like to

test out my one of my favorite composers

is Beethoven anybody ever heard of a pelvis not the dog the composing reason

I like Beethoven is because Beethoven was a rebel

yeah and that's what most of these people in this room happen to be rebels

looking for some way to get it out so

what we're going to do reason he was a rebel I think because he changed the

symphonic form it was a form called symphonic and and and you know and it

had like four movements and stuff and and what happened is that Beethoven

decided that he wanted to have a chorus

sing with the orchestra and people

thought he was he lost it well by the

time he got to that part he did lose his hair but that was that was a whole

different thing but he didn't have to hear he really didn't have to hear

because he already understood the pulse

the time the beat and what I love about

Beethoven is that he had heart and no

matter what he composed he was able to

take his experiences and put those

experiences in a dynamic way just like this beautiful area of Maine where there

were hills and valleys and water and

leaves turning he knew how to do that

and so I want to see what Beethoven

would have done maybe 200 years ago and we'll start out with the fifth of

Beethoven we won't do the ninth that's the one that had the chorus in it

we didn't bring the course tonight at least on that number and then we're

going to do the fifth part of the sister of Beethoven so we are you ready to go

okay let's see if this will work

I have to pretend as though I'm the conductor - and I have to be also the

performers I'm going to be busy

[Music]

this is going to see how they sober my

to reacted if he has this kind of technology [Music]

from here [Music]

[Music]

so much [Music]

[Applause] [Music]

I'm not babe [Music]

that's what the kids face when I tell them that it really was real five

henchmen on an a-bomb news Sam stone

reproachfully

[Music]

thank you

I guess you like they telling us

I told you he was wild oh man I don't

know if we could spin him he came back get out and stuff he would be putting

the real hurt on it sometimes I even

asked how thing thing well that wasn't

the organ baptized but up playing the organ and them it started basically from

an idea that I saw somebody he played

the organ that just completely blew me away I just love the sound and the day I

play and mounting an Missionary Baptist

Church in Dayton Ohio you've never heard it place

we've got got a blackout here from somewhere I can tell they always want to

be identified strange group somebody's

tell me that effect I was a worse listen it but that's okay somebody got it over

here okay really like I used to hear this young

man ulysses rivers play the organ at our

church we had a pipe organ and our church we had to do all kinds of music

we had to sing the hymns we had to sing

the anthems we did the Mozart we did this state so

when we did the Box we did all of that stuff and then we had to slap you in the

face with some gospel and folk says God

did I'll let me check yeah and we loved it but this young man would sit there

and play the organ and well after church

this is when things really starts and

I'm having dinner and right after service and service was ended somewhere

between 1:30 and 2:00 o'clock Sunday afternoon it started somewhere around

10:45 that morning he said how did you stay at church that long well as abuse

and so this and uh somebody was saying

ow you see sister Jackson and that hats

he had on this morning yeah honey I was

sitting right behind it three pills and I still couldn't see anything around

that hat I'm gonna find out what that hat lives

and then somebody would say all the

choirs saying so wellness more Disney Hall they were I just love me and then

sister just can't she sang that's so whore that girl can sing for me anybody can say three blind minds that make me

happy and then there was a silence and somebody would say but did you hear that

boy plate of organs and I used to sit

there sunday after sunday islands to build up nine to ten years old and I

would give this Panther going on back and forth and I said I don't want to him

[Music] and a quiz and the kids choir they could

sing pretty well but but they couldn't

match this the adult choir the youth part and I didn't want to preach like

Reverend because sometimes ever took too long

I said but maybe I can learn to play that organ

I remember being awakened for

half-awakened I guess and a dream and that dream was I was sitting behind that

pipe work and I was playing I don't know what it was I was playing but it is

making it different it just felt good to be there because when I saw Ulysses play

I would sit right behind the organ every

Sunday and watching

and when I saw him play I watched everything he did they pull the shoe off

some 40 players do CL so when I started

to learn to play I put my shoe off to it but my organ teacher told me put it back on for two reasons but I was going with

those right now

how many of you how many of you had a drink how many is head Ewing come on now

some of them turn out to be nightmares once in a while but that just had dream

well there was a song that came out at

the 19 1996 for the lifting it's about a

dream it talks about the power of a

dream and I think John was talking about

Alan as being a dreamer and a doer and

many of us are in that situation of

trying to make those dreams come true and then smek song I'm about to play it

was the most difficult song I had to learn to play and sing not because of

anything fancy but every line of this song seemed to have been something that

I had experienced in my own lifetime and you'll see that and hear that as we

start out of the dream

[Music]

beep within each heart there lies a

magic spark the lights the fire of our

[Music] and since the bomb of the strength of

task has brought together back you go oh

[Music] there is something old a dairy in the

living of each day there's a special

part that every one of us the play bill

the same forever burn using classic we

is closer to the power of dream unites

enjoy a piece I would pray that always

it is the power [Music]

your mind will take you far less adjust

your heart you find your face

[Music]

[Applause] [Music]

we had love [Music]

the world unite to join me and we pray

that always the powers of the trees

so much strengthen all of us every woman

child and man is the pharmacist again

[Music]

that's the power of the gray

forever [Music]

Oh [Music]

[Music]

[Applause]

we used to rely

[Music]

[Laughter]

[Music]

you [Music]

thank you thank you

thank you

thank you

sometimes it is so hard to think about

the simplicity of what life is talking

about Paul thank you for bringing us that to that

sometimes I just want to sing one note

but it is wonderful that we have been given think Oh

music magical about it it is not as

predictable as the Sun coming up this is

the time that we actually have real-time control over wave propagation well sort

of you know and I think that is the

power that we have in music not just

from the hearing but the seeing and the feeling it's kind of hard going to this

next number but it is it I hope that

this technology thinking will be as

light as tall all over the world England

don't worry about the internet it's going to happen it's happening but we

had the internet way before internet

before Benjamin Franklin but it's kite

up there were cultures that were using

the drum as the Internet and we could

get a message across and that's the reason when the Africans came to this

country they were banned from using two

things that we look at as very vital in

our world one is to use your own language and secondly the other language

which could get information overload the

job there I don't know how to say it but

a miracle that has come out of that kind of strife and that type of situation for

all of us and I hope that to music that we will be able to heal ourselves as a

nation and then start to realize the

real fruits of our Labor's but it's only going to happen when we realize what has

been wrong and don't get too upset the

efforts what happens over here because

remember that Egypt happened to be one of the

places in Africa where the drill is in

the same place in there somewhere yeah so if you know that that's that

part of the Bible you know that story

like it was John but in the idea of this

there was the music that kept going the

fields that gave hope when there wasn't

any hope for tomorrow and I want you to

go with me if we can make bed now

there's this sound on a Dueling I think

I can do this now very simple words hold

on just a little

now if you get forget those words just repeat them

hold on just a little while long hold on

just a little while longer

why because everything gonna be all

right somebody's dinners a place

let's see what we can do with that the

tombs gonna go like this and I'm just gonna ask everybody singing in unison

[Music]

just a little while long just a little

while long

[Music] just a little while longer

watch this cuz everything's gonna be

alright everything's gonna be on yeah

that sounds pretty killer yeah now what I want you to do right now is

think about something that might have happened in your life or somebody close

to you where they needed some hope got

it ha huh maybe a software glitch but

something even more fundamental than that let's talk about a glitch in your

life we'll watch it and then think about

this and when you get to that word hold

I want you right before you say hold I want you to take a gasp of air in so

when the hole comes out it's going to be like this let's go oh

just maybe in that wreck just

[Music]

[Music] everything's gone beyond now when we get

to that everything I want you to build

it like you building a mountain out of the valley and I want you to think got

it yeah then I just want to hear the

lady sings come on ladies let's shine come on what

we'll be all right watch yourself girl

now I mess with it whoo I like are you ready brother

I won't hear that big crap now in the big room

just Stood Still holy just a little

while long live why everything gone oh

yeah let's try everybody now

[Music]

Wow [Music]

do it again I just want you to sit there

and think about it I'm gonna run through some stuff cuz I feel like it right now

yeah Josh just hold me down just want to

do this let's go

don't pay no attention to what I'm doing up here here we go

[Music]

whoa

[Music]

[Music]

[Music]

just everything

[Music]

[Applause] [Music]

it's gonna be

[Music]

[Music]

[Applause] [Music]

[Applause]

[Music] [Applause]

[Applause]

I trust that as put all categorical

stressed

so I don't have a lot to say here but I

thought I'd throw out a few ideas for the discussion as a musician and we're

all musicians that's why we like it I

think everyone has ever dabbled in music

to any degree realizes that it's really

not the spectrum between pop and

civilization or classical and jazz or any of those things that it's about

ideas and feelings I feel that there's

not a musician on earth that just wouldn't think that what they just heard

is one of the greatest things they've ever heard because it's the real deal

talk about authentic the real thing

I think to me about the access I think

of is between direct ideas and developed

ideas I think of what's sometimes called

of various kind being an incredible reservoir cornucopia of direct ideas it

doesn't matter that lots of them are not very good because that's the fate of all

ideas most ideas or mediocre down to

down to nothing but to have these ideas

they have to speak directiy I can say

that when I'm trying to play seventeenth in it organ is big Don playing this

stuff because that's the way it's got to come out

and what we rigged a little thing on you

here because when I was thinking about this thing I was thinking it would be

really grateful they have Don do his bait hoping singer he starts off in the classical mode then goes into what's

kind of kind of thought of as a pot mode then comes back out do some from the

heart things that we all can respond to directly then have the same starting

with a direct idea of hold on are the

great songs ever and then to develop it

a little bit with you what you're actually doing was singing something

like a bra a pray load because what he did was to take these beautiful simple

melodies that everybody knew and understood and to get people to pay much

more strongly by developing these ideas

so this developed idea exists I think is

an incredibly important one of course if you develop too much you get nothing

just sand and if you don't develop enough you get a lot of stuff that's of

no particular accord thanks peers

mansion I recently just recently saw a

wonderful version of the play love which

is about a young king and his male

friends who have to be now things and

study to obtain philosophical knowledge

for three years soon disturbed by the appearance in her

court all lovely young ladies which they promptly fall in love with

and on either side of this are some of Shakespeare's low character bumpkin type

characters and unusual for Shakespeare too he throws in a couple of academics

if you remember that person cannot

actually get a real sentence out of his mouth without defining every word and

thinking of 15 synonyms and to me the striking thing about that play is not

the extremes which we would all recognize but the fact what's normal

this is a verse play so what he thought was normal dialogue in this play is the

greatest stuff ever written and it's really interesting to think of what

Shakespeare thought of as medium medium discourse so here's here's another idea

that is in a different dimension which

is have to do with technique so when you

develop an idea you're usually it's not quite as spontaneous in one sense in

that you are developing it with technique the technique has been around

the artist has learned some of the technique every artist knows that the

technique can take over if you're not careful you want it to be the servant of

the art rather than the master of the art but you can I think you can always

judge a culture large and small by

whether the ethical system of the culture is matched up to the technique

that the culture has I think that's one

that we could think about our culture and other cultures as to how are we

doing on getting power through technique

at various kinds and what do we think is is reasonable for that power

I like I don't know the thought of the

idea someone of that ilk pointed out that every technique every

idea every tool has a front end and a back end as a handle and a blade if it's

a knife you can imagine somebody finding a knife and having never seen one before

and picking it up by the blade and cutting themselves we're always doing that with technology we haven't seen

before the fact immediately brings up a

question which is what is okay and even

more profound about til it's too late is

what have we become as because the every

time we come up we're also defending

ourselves as Brenda mentioned we're also

doing selves you have to become

something else in order to in order to use that

now pack again really helped me out this

is one of the wonderful things about this Casa this conference and going late

because a back of it is lines get said

before you get to them but on the other

ID as you can see Phil and I had an idea

for an ending for my talk and I couldn't

figure anything until Pat pointed out

her one of her great metaphors is that the web is the human brain and she said

a wonderful thing she said pop culture is the inventory of the cabinet in your

head I just love that image and the thing I immediately thought of yeah it's

a flea market you ever been to one of

these big flea markets like the Portobello market and in London just acres and acres of stuff every fact

which some stuff about to sync it up

design it fabricate it destroy and we

think most of it but somebody cared and sometimes in these big flea markets the

law of large numbers obtains and you're able to find that incredible stuff that

doesn't seem as interesting as you as you thought

now somebody once said and I think this

is less true now than it was but when the when the chatroom rage was happening

in the Internet somebody once said the Internet is an ocean of spit so it was

big it was shallow and it was mostly about excretion there's an

anthropologist parties of a name of

child who wrote a book with the title

humans make themselves I think we all have a sense that the large art that is

inventing ourselves we are that's it's

an invention of ours we aren't just the

genes that we're born with we have inventions about how we should live

those inventions on sometimes as though

we were born with them really important

question I think

Wow invention is hard this kind of

invention we call art and we're really

happy I think when an artist comes along and gives us a hint of how to be more

human I because it's the biggest

difficulty with the extreme democratizing of the internet is that it

gives everybody a voice but it might not give everybody a direction so I think

this was a very important thing it's I don't mind film and we could even you

know I hate these definitions we could even think about civilization is kind of about how we go about our art form we're

actually thinking of ourselves as one of our most important products where are we

just randomly tossing around as we use on a on a string is that an extreme

democratization of ideas can really help if you're tough about them

so science for example has a very interesting first-order theory of itself

it tries not to be dogmatic this is hard to explain to high schools the flip side

of the Kansas evolution going on now is

the interesting reaction of the science

that they couldn't teach evolution is fact and getting theory as a G one of

the worst things you can ever do to a child it's a very different kind of

thing and by group of people who have

grudgingly accepted I rather learn about

how the universe works than to find out ourselves while sharing our partial

knowledge with others even though they might get to some interesting thing before we do because we want to know and

because we can't pin down this knowledge in a stronger wave the important part of

science is that there are these other people out there to debug the theory no

human can be as tough on their ideas as

their friends are so you must have these colleagues and I

think this is one of the things can bring balance to this notion is extreme

democratization and voice which devote the voice in the extreme very very

important one but it's actually one of the worst things that we can ever take

upon ourselves unless we can find a way to criticize these voices now the

problem with social systems is the other reason that design to work a little bit

there's a universe out there that works

in that way even past our friends as

critics the universe is there to say no it doesn't would be a really stuff this

way it has a happy ending but it doesn't go this way goes this other way or maybe

it goes in some way that we can't think of yet and so one of the struggles that

has been going on where postmodern is

from is the struggle between the story

meaning to a lot as entirely on how apt

it was for the particular situations we found ourselves and the unpleasant

evidence that the universe might not actually care about what we think at all

and think that the the science started

bringing about in the 19th century to react to the first time the history that

we know up now the artist and this

parted company is one of the worst and this is terrible given that science is

an art so if a cargo cult in knowledge where

the effigies were made of things that were like what science was finding out

that really had very little to do with the sign once got asked to write a

brochure for Science Museum in San Jose

and they had decided to have 75

paintings about science they said so my

essay was it already is art science is

already off there's this wonderful two

people including Frank Zappa that you've

got music is like dance protector and

painting about science is right in that ballgame so a good way of appreciating

course science has this problem is it doesn't actually what you put in museums tends to be technology rather than

science science tends to be written down in in books last couple of ideas here is

that a thing that anthropologists and

people studying development going all

the way back to Maria Montessori great genius and observer of children and

thinking back to them the children in an

indigenous culture traditional culture don't seem to need to learn what the

cultures do they watch the adults and they make up games spontaneously that

are like the adult activities that they see and they play at those games that is

a way of learning what they think the adults are actually doing it works

pretty darn well works really well until you actually start inventing things and

a lot of these inventions are hard to learn all of a sudden they're not actually

open in the traditional marketplace of ideas people have made yeah that if you

take a child to France very early he's born and she was born in France then

this child will grow up to be French and an adult moving to France and living

there for some years will start becoming French this is because one paratus

is there is to learn the environment in

a fluent way that's around not some other one that is around you every

reason why you should be and this says

to me that when we start using technology to create things that are

like environments that are like total environments we are actually hooking in

to this skill people can't help doing

which is to start learning that environment and accommodating to that environment so television to me is a

particularly odious example of people will eat without any thought of it

something like a total fire that's it's

not I don't think a good idea to bash television unless you also look at books

Madame Bovary was about a woman who

created a total NamUs novels this was

what she learned about how her actions should come from so when you start

messing with the meta system you have to

be very very careful with the

transactions messing with a symbol system there or more importantly when we

start dealing with some deep drives that

humans have that I think don't think can turn to be turned aside so the thing

that worries me about the Internet is about this all the crap

same thing with television doesn't matter to me whether television is

trying to show good stuff or bad stuff the thing that worries me about television that f is as a Total

Environment it can't carry the full range of discourse that humans have

invented it makes a mockery of things like the political process and that to

me is something that we should pay an enormous amount of attention to and the

internet I think is about to be overrun in a big feeding frenzy fortunately

there it has an uncountable number of channels so it's not going to want to

put the content on the internet but it

is very likely that one of the things that we're going to rue the day 20 years

from now if we don't do something about it is to have done something about Total

Environment of this wonderful thing it

was invented so we want to weight one of

ways of thinking about this is that

if for instance boza AOL got larger me

don't have any sense of the internet beyond what AOL brings them many people

don't have any sense that the internet and the web are not the same thing the

web is a really badly facto standard on top Windows 98 is a really bad operating

system unsought type of something neat called the computer it's really

important to keep those distinctions I just I want to be as I said it same

thing with television it doesn't quite matter whether people are trying to do

good things or bad things that's what's interesting is how the total environment

makes this makes it very difficult to think about things that aren't in front

of this the other analogy which is much more dire one I think it's incredibly

important to take as an early warning which is the difference between the

response to aids in various parts of the world so when was found to be contagious

deadly and incurable the scientists

started beating on the government to do something about it because that no

matter what the time constant is and it's a long time constant you always get

and the good thing about the long time constant on ages it gives a chance to

actually do something about it and some things have been done but unfortunately

this right now more than 30 million

people are infected with AIDS just in sub-saharan Africa and most of these

people are going to die so this is three Holocaust of people we're going to be

used up if you will common sense didn't

look that bad didn't look that bad didn't look that bad didn't look that bad now it's looking bad and I believe

the only way to take action on these slow changes that are inexorable and eventually exponentially have to muster

the now to understand what the benefit

or the disaster is going to be of these technologies what else said civilization

it's between Eddie and you to discuss

and the question of answer and the answers who you think is in the lead

thank [Applause]

[Music]

that's not fair to end on that note

even though that's the note I wanted to end on and so it just happens that of

the many there are many many wonderful

pieces of music that done

this development and I was like one more

time to do one of the most beautiful

renditions of a direct idea developed so

we can really grab on to it it's gone [Applause]

[Music]

I'd like to take his time to to thank Alan for the invitation to come here

oh the let's see a em and then I was

back in Japan and uh all these

luminaries going to the park this

conference and to be here well that I

know have a great effect when I filled

wonderful but we are still happening

building and along with that freedom

that we have so forth that reality is

really in our hands we do with it this

next song that I am which is directly

genre you just sang to go

the Negro spiritual

and it's song that maybe who are old

older than you want to admit my and

because of recordings you can hear things that you were up to here

there was a lady by the name of Mahalia Jackson

who sang the song that I remember as a kid it was a song we said it's called a

city called heaven I heard a mystery and

I like to play that song for you and I want to couple it with selection and

we'll see what what this ends up to be they should be fine

[Music] [Laughter] [Music]

[Music]

[Music]

[Music]

[Music] I am lost out in this flight

[Music]

bye-bye [Music] ah

[Music]

you [Music]

this world harmony

[Music]

[Music]

there are

[Music]

whoa what a beautiful city University oh

yeah [Music]

[Music]

thank you thank you thank you thank you so very

much thank you

free John thanks so much this next bar to be pretty interactive

I'm going to ask out on a few questions have a conversation with him and ask you

to ask questions and let's take advantage of kind of drawing them out on

a few things maybe we'll just see like

anyone have a question Alan yes

um I've also found in my experience that the further you get some civilization

the more civil people get and I was wondering seeing technology and the

computer we are a cool I a highly

civilized society what do you see is the possibility for people being able to use

the internet to become more civil and have a civil experience and we're

talking a lot about democratization and ethics and I was curious how you felt

about that number of discussion your

John's I was interested in the one about whether the technology is easy or hard I

was just thinking a question so yes

years ago my violin help me keep time

better such a such a hard thing why

didn't somebody make it user-friendly and so the the nice thing about the

violin is it doesn't have any gratuitous difficulties so I think about that also

you can sort of tell when you're in a good place if Tony was something to us

because you're on the threshold of actually changing how your mind works in

something then you might not learn anything if they don't already and so

the trick on violin is they have a start

up transient where you have to

be in a supportive I killed Renard for

other kinds of things it's rare to have a parent scold a child for falling down

when they're trying to walk and so the

so part of the deal I think is to scaffold the things that are really so

that the difficulties are chosen by the learner and figures in both so the

civility thing the one of the things I

almost did for this I'm glad I did

there's a movie which nobody's ever

heard of but maybe some people here have which is called walkabout so this is one

of these incredible this is just an incredible movie is one of these nothing

happens until Athens is shaft but it's

about working girl and her younger

brother cast adrift on the Australian desert about to perish when they trick you

teenage boy Aboriginal och about as I

say nothing happens but you badly start noticing that the teenage boy is

treating this desert like it's a need

what was where it is and can dig under the sand to get it and need some food he

does this and they're always amazing things that happen and but is that in

the in the end of the thing he wills himself to death

because the inappropriate use of hunting

animals by the white settlers it's very

difficult in it but it's incredibly thing and it's a party anyway to watch

this movie without asking well who civilized it came up with this balanced

idea that the this particular culture

the aborigine culture is perfectly in balance its ethics and its techniques were perfectly in balance and would be

very difficult to think of anything

demeaning to say about them they were

just there they had the whole thing going there are human beings they could do and all of these things and it was us

with our ability to shoot bullets whenever that we're just surfing the

back of the thing was because the hunters weren't hunting for food they're

hunting for fun that's what caused this young kids will himself to death so I

think that they say I think the ethical problem is really difficult because like

Sciences place where we can go any

longer if there ever was where we can prove what the ethic should be it's more

like math or like designing a constitution of the country where you

have to to agree on some premises and try and make a system that is our

creation about how we should live I don't think we do right yeah I think

it's a good thing that any child should learn Allen you're a busy fellow and

struck five Disney probably as much as

any corporation in the world has defined a lot of the the contemporary icons of our culture

and society and yet when you think of Disney you think of a company to be role

to the finest detail yeah how do you

come different experience

how do you align yourself with that and

is there something there that we don't see well I'm sure there is the data I

think it's simplest way of explaining it just it's a show business company and

show business companies make deals so I made before I went there I got invited

there by them I thought about it for more than a year and then I negotiated for another to come up with something

that would be mutually beneficial for instance in our work the work of my and

other people I've been associated in the passes oh but all the work that I've

done in the years are so with children

in mind try and find better more interesting more challenging more

constructive environments for children the deals I've made with the companies

then John knows this because I made one with Apple when I went there was hey

don't don't ask where the golden eggs are coming from here if the golden eggs

are coming be satisfied with that let us do our research the way we want to the

other thing that's critical isn't I think for people simple

opinions about Disney is negotiation in

what was did in fact had made our software that we had started at Apple

open-source before going to Disney and so Disney on the part of what we're

doing is I'm just like Linux is and that

and even better most of the educational stuff in fact

all of the educational stuff we're doing right now is being put out on the Disney

free websites Disney has the philanthropic all the Disney learning

part and this is a free website for mostly for teachers and a bit for

parents that we're putting out a bunch of stuff also for free so last year you

were telling us about squeak some of the things that deal with it can you give us

an update a I

well first squeak is open source so for people who are of a kind of a hacker

mentality the open source site is kind of made for people who are kind of rough

and ready it's called squeaked org and every every fundamental thing that we've

done is on that site no Disney content

is there Disney owned by the way the license permits Disney to own the

content as though they have done it in Java or in director fundamental

authoring tools and everything else that stuff is part of this the open source

[Music] we're not too many months off from the

first Disney unveiling of some of its content as currently planned it's a free

website because never add Disney maybe a large company but they're interested in

learning as well and the open source

stuff stuck in their craw until I started thinking about the advantages of

open source for instance we do not have to pay for the 250 people around thee on

the Internet our ports for free for us and debugging our code for us and doing

a million things so this is milli literally millions of dollars

of free work by taught people that we're getting and Disney in a way is allowed

to take more risk with us because our budget is tiny compared to the amount of

cost for this project the other thing that they realized after a while is that

any kind of authoring tool of large scope is likely to be less accepted if

it's owned by a big company because the big company there are big companies that

own software that you'd hate to put on

your critical path because who knows what they might do so the advantage of

open source here is that anybody who wishes to control their own destiny can

split off a pathway from ours and not even worry about what we do or they can

follow us along and the open source thing that in fact they're not committing what we used to members Bob

at Parc Lee has musical arrow 33 putting

somebody else's work on your critical path very bad idea

our motto is what we is hugs but there

are bugs power that is a huge thing how

long though when you at Apple you've had the ovarian scene maybe you could

describe the moment what the goal of that team was actually whatever house it

is now I first met Don and the vivarium

was an idea about a whole bunch of things but was seeing whether we could

get kids to learn important ideas about complex systems organization by recreate

on the computer of simulated animals and

the image of this was to be clipped with

me people are interested so I could go

to that shows a thing we did on in Evans and cell phone flight simulator 15 of

what the same like and

so in the mid going to teach children math better restore the arts programs

that the state legislatures and the school boards have taken away so first

thing we did thanks to John actually John bankrolled this thing really

handsomely when we got started I'm not sure he knew exactly what he was getting

started with it was a plus he could

learn many things by making mistakes and

I right away kids weren't nearly as curious as we were hoping they would be

they tended to be very categorically so the first thing we did was to instead of

dealing with the computers with a noticing curriculum for these kids and I

ran across Don when we were getting some synthesizer equipment and Don was

demoing for a Yamaha in those days and you know to to meet Don and to know Don

is to become his brother and we just became brothers and we

started doing things with the kids to

getting them to pay more attention to what's going on - not just dismiss it by

putting a name to it and many other things happen too many things to talk

about tonight but these are the kinds of curriculum where to be totally

goal-oriented and curriculum is to kill the child you must do something that's

much more like gardening let's just let's it let the plant do its work help

plants grow to things that can come back

from the work with preserve and our creative team has been

finding out as we've been developing between the lions and Chris show you a

little bit of the other day that were not surprising and one thing that was a

surprise to us but to think that we're not surprising was that kids love humor

and kids love games and we've seen that with Tess I think Alice was the

incredible impact of music and and Chris

whether you're aware of this but he actually wrote most of the music for

between the Lions and when we went out and did the testing light started it

yeah why we did then we got much higher

response rate understanding engagement

than we had ever expected that our advisors my team Shaw and their own

Adams and others had anticipated and we

can trace a lot of that back to a very

security point of view us as well is to

do you think we could make some radical changes in our curriculum by introducing

you know the concepts of music or music itself into education or is that

something

yes but I I look at it from a different

vantage point last year in my home in my

town that I live Pleasanton California

the school board was about to shut off

the arts funding for our school district

and not in school now they were their

old people now do so long as one is 26 years old but they

came through that system and I knew that they came through that system and I knew

that both benefited because of the music

that was there so I went to the school board and maybe this will we have to

look at this from a different perspective I told them I said first

let's get our definitions about what we're teaching children about we have an

emphasis on math science and communications in school yeah that's

well funded extracurricular activity I

said first let's look at what math and science are to do basically they are to

help us to understand or some kind of way and some type of language - in fact

examine analyze and so forth our whole

life in this universe or the universe

itself I said first what is the universe

and the only thing that I could come up with is that it is a living interactive

art form [Music]

if anybody wants to argue with me about that fine but if you can find me a

better definition of what this universe is I want to know the truth so if we

have this art form and then we are going

to tell the children we're going to teach you how to do math and how to do

science but we're not going to teach you anything about the art form the art form

falls into these categories of what I said music the eyes the art all of this

stuff the stuff that we play with and you're not going to teach them about the

basic thing that they're to really try and examine because that's all we're

doing is gathering data about it and hopefully we can come up with some ideas

of how it works [Music]

critical this is interesting conversation I've had it

Disney one of the ones I had before I decided to go there was to see if

they're interested in doing some hard fun for children hard fun is that stuff

where you have to learn how to do something and keep on learning how to do stuff the more you learn the more you've

got to pay off soft fun is where somebody makes a vehicle for you so soft

coin is watching baseball on television and hard funner is learning to hit a hard ball and the typical entertainment

that has happened in the last 30 or 40

years has tended to be soft fun you're in various kinds of ride vehicles which

might be theatrical of some kind of might be musical of some kind and to me

that I think if you go into schools it tends to be soft fun so I think the most

difficult thing now is to convince kids

who who are basically looking at experience and this was actually and Chris Cerf knows that I have some doubts

about Sesame Street Neil postman made a good point about Sesame Street he said

he said whatever Sesame Street taught kids on television but she was perhaps

somewhat dubious about but he says whatever it did it made it almost

impossible for a kid to go to school without looking for superior production values and so if you think about the the

ability to transmit Evo Keable experiences to people which is amazing

we just saw Don get it all out over the

footlights it's an incredible thing when you are in the presence of that but in

fact one of the reasons he always does and we want to do in this thing is to get you involved in this thing is that

it it isn't soft fun so that it's extremely important for

people to realize that where you get self-esteem from is by learning how to do hard fun not by being put into

situations where you're automatically

successful it's the worst thing you can ever do for a child because if at some

point they realize very quickly that they're being put into a completely bogus setup and their children are

awfully good bullshit detectors let's take another question from the audience

yes [Music]

we're looking at you yeah okay here

comes a Mike first a comment and then a

question just continuing on the arts theme I've spent a lot of time photographing in Waldorf it's Waldorf

classrooms and I can recall being in a sixth grade class on fire and the kids

listen to the Firebird suite they've studied the Greek cosmology of earth air

fire and water they looked at fire in the inner cone and the outer cone and

the chemistry of oxidation and no one told them which is the real fire or that

one is science and one is art or one is more important or one is not they were

learning about fire and they're learning how to experience at an understanding

and and I think we put art off on the

side and then debate whether it's a luxury or a necessity it's not off on

the side I do want to ask question as I

as I reflected on this conference we have a remarkable set of propositions

that seem to be taken for granted here and I wonder if they're really a stable

said that the Internet is a bunch of plumbing that's morally neutral that on

that internet we can put all the structures of corporate power as they

exist so Microsoft has its big site and GM has its big site and Disney has its

site all the corporate power is there and at the same time it's a

decentralized networking force on which we can originate content agglutinate

come together groups that have been marginalized can find their identity and

these will coexist and will feel an

identity and freedom at the same time that this technology is being used to

develop very sophisticated marketing profiles that as John Sculley told us

are are of considerable economic value and are being sold

and I just asked all of you is this an

accurate reflection of what we've said and is it a stable set of beliefs or are

we deluding ourselves I don't think we want to nail it down why or at least I

wouldn't nail it down quite like that I think this e again I wish Neil

I this is this is a wonderful conference it's one of the few pretty much the only

conference that I go to that I actually stay for all of the days because the and

it's partly because of the speakers but the audiences is neat and when you go to

various conferences the tendency is to judge them on how neat the audience is

it was the neat audience I think that

the a better maybe you want to say

better but I think everybody has

remarked at one time or another how powerful a single person with a little

machine in their closet can be on the Internet

especially since the world wide web is so paltry you can hardly do anything

with it anyway and so it actually has a democratizing effect right there anybody

can sling what HTML can do and so I

think that individuals can compete fairly well until they get popular and

then they have to have some other recourse I wish that this conference

would do one more thing when they convene next year in the succeeding

years which is to invite some critics so one of my favorite critics is Neil

postman who wrote a book called amusing ourselves to death

the subtitle of it is serious discourse

in the age of show business and it's and

the important thing about Neal is you don't have to agree with everything he says because he is actually raising

points that are worth while discussing and thinking about and one of his his

notions is that along with the three or four R's should be a extensive course

and crap detection because he says look look at it this way since the printing

press came along and in fact before that with the Holy Roman Empire every culture

is competing for mindshare with its ideas and every cultures had I think

most people here realized that the great paintings of the Renaissance were funded by the church they were advertising

that's what all of these great ceilings they were they were there to enhance the

feeling that you're supposed to have when you're in a church and ten

generally speaking advertising is always funded by the people who have the most

money right that's the kind of way it works so I don't feel bad about that

what I feel bad about is the level of credulity that most people have today

another one of Neal's great points is that he he says people are now accept

most people have to accept more on faith than they ever did in the Middle Ages he

says they have to accept what they did in the Middle Ages most of them plus they have to accept all the science they

don't understand which is a whole nother set of things which they haven't learned

so basically they're on the outs from most of the knowledge that's going on

and it's very difficult for them to decide whether somebody is simply

telling them a good story and here's the other thing I'll just add one other

point to it is it would be really ridiculous if you came into this place

tonight and weren't willing to become children

with dot right because once we give up theater we might as well give up

humanity that's us so we're going so we have to

give over to the gig we have to allow

ourselves to be influenced to have feelings of vocht in all of these things but you could just as easily have walked

into a place with the same great music and John here is running for mayor

political rally is just like theater good-looking people well-spoken telling

stories you want to hear great music should you have the same attitude in

America at a political rally as you have in the theater no way but just think

about that both in the flash and on

television you're put into exactly the same media environment for the Evoque

ation of feelings willingly and one in which you should be super critical of

anything anybody is saying to you it's the ability to make those choices that

is the number one thing for learning to live in the late 20th century that's the

huge thing that we have to peek many

people said John F Kennedy was the first television president are we going to have a first internet president well I

think John Perry is running here we

haven't quite got here opera darkonians thing really down yeah okay or who yes

Richard in education and learning and music

synthesis and so forth where is Ray Kurzweil and since he's not here to

defend himself although the evolution of some of his

products have been available at the conference but you have much to say

about well his his view of a little tiny package the next 10 k9k sorry my

favorite the thing I was quite surprised when I turned 50 10 years ago to

discover that the fondest and sharpest memories I had we're of people that I've

met and worked with and I've always considered myself a lone wolf and the in

a way the the ability of people to be

interestingly different from each other while still being human I think it's a

really important thing and so you know if I were to be harsh about Ray which I

have no such feelings I would call him a bit of a mystic mystic is a person who

tends to see unity in the strongest possible way even when it may not be a

good idea and I think that his the

general intellectual course his life has taken has been to alternate between

trying to find unity in interesting

things and he is an interesting guy versus trying to start businesses from

these various insights Suzanne please he's an interesting guy should he should

be invited here sometime

oh well it should be back in 1985 Alan I

remember you and I were walking along a

sidewalk in Cupertino in Apple's campus and and you turn to me and you said John

next time Apple doesn't have Xerox PARC and I said what do you mean it now let

me and you said well this time Apple's got on Bennett's own stuff and he was

looking at me do this so I said well how

do we do it and Alan said well actually every idea whether it's simple like a

mouse or complex like you know software

programming system like small talk takes about fifteen years from the time that

it's concede and fill it those who gestation and comes out if it is going

to come out as a commercial product and I thought about it for a few minutes

sensible if that's true Alan then that means that there are technologies that

are already you know in English in somewhere and you know if we could go

and recognize what they're going to turn into you know maybe that would give us a

clue what direction to go in so this really began my education in things from

a technology standpoint not so much of how the technology works

I don't even claim to understand that now but really in terms of what the

implications are of the of the technologies and we developed something

Alan's ideas I named it called of knowledge and navigator and then I asked

Alan esand isn't there some way that we could visualize this thing so that if

people saw it they could recognize it and see whether it was something they would like I remembered a few years

earlier that I had the privilege to be

with Steve Jobs in doctor land founder Polaroid inner-city in his

research laboratory in Cambridge Massachusetts and he's left Polaroid at

that point and he and Steve were talking and dr. land said he said he said no one

really invent anything he said things are just waiting there and they're kind

of invisible sitting out there waiting to be discovered and Steve said yeah he

said we've gone out and done research on the Macintosh and asked people what the

perfect commercial computer was they couldn't have told us because they had

no reference point for it so we had to go and tell him you know Steve had very

strong ideas of what that should be but

with the knowledge navigator he said why

can't we build a simulation of it on film a special effect long before we

could actually build the product and a simulation wasn't back put together and

was Alan's wife Bonnie and Q EE and he

Doris Mitch interesting we didn't work you know Michael Markman interesting

enough a couple of those people he was utterly few others who work in that

project went off to a startup company a few years later called Netscape and

develop something called navigator

and I was like a win sentence I'm sure I thought it would be fun to show you the

knowledge navigators that Bonnie and her

team with Allen put together this was actually done I think in late 87 early

88 that about right Bonnie do remember somewhere around late

87 yeah so it isn't quite 15 years yet Allen but let's take a look at it and

it'd be kind of interesting to have you mention one thing about one of the most

amazing things about this was that there are some very funny anachronism zand see

if you can spot them of certain things that Apple was already doing that we

couldn't put in the video because of spilling the beans so there's one that

is quite glaring and I'll leave it up to you to see if you can spot how odd it

actually is okay so we could just run that about a four minute video and then

be funded here Allen fatique

[Music]

[Music]

undergraduate research team in Guatemala just checking in Robert Jordan a second

semester junior requesting a second extension on his term paper and her

mother reminding you about your father surprise birthday party next Sunday

today you have a faculty lunch of 12 o'clock you need to take Kaffee to the

airport by 2:00 you have a lecture at 4:15 on

deforestation in the Amazon rainforest right let them see the lecture notes

from last semester

no that's not enough I need to review more recent literature pull all the new

articles I haven't read yet journal articles only fine your friend Jill

Gilbert has published an article about deforestation in the Amazon and the

defects on rainfall in the sub-sahara it also covers droughts effect on food

production in Africa and increasing imports of food contact kill I'm sorry

she's not available right now I left a message that you would call

okay let's see where's an article about

five years ago dr. Plimpton or something he really disagreed with the direction

of Jill's research John Fleming about Sula University he published in the

Journal of earth science of July 20 of 2006 that's it he was challenging Joe's

projection of the amount of carbon dioxide being released to the atmosphere through before stations I'd like to

recheck his figures here is the rate of deforestation he predicted no what

happened yeah he was really off

give me the University Research Network

show only universities with geography nodes

to Brazil

copy the last 30 years at this location at one month intervals excuse me Jill

Gilbert is calling back great put her through hi Mike what's up Jill

thanks for getting back to me well I guess that new grant of yours hasn't dampened your literary abilities

rumor has it that you just put out the definitive article on deforestation ha

ha is this one of your typical last-minute panics for lecture material

no no no that's not until um 4:15 it's

about the effects that reducing the size of Amazon rainforest can have outside of

Brazil I was wondering them it's not really necessary but yeah you would be great if

you were available to make a few comments nothing formal after my talk

you would come up on a big screen discuss your article and then answer

some questions from the class and bail you out again

well are there I could squeeze that in you know I have a simulation that shows

the spread of the Sahara over the last 20 years here let me show you

nice very nice I've got some maps of the

Amazon area during the same time let's put these together

great I'd like to have a copy of that for myself what happens if we bring down

the logging rate to a hundred thousand acres per year

hmm interesting I can definitely use it

thanks for your time Jill I've really appreciated no problem

but next time I'm in Berkeley you're buying the dinner dinner right see ya

4:15 okay

while you were busy your mother called again to remind you to pick up the

birthday cake and clintus article 2.0

now printing okay I'm going to lunch

down it's a default hello I'll be there at 2:00 your class also find out if I

can set up a meeting tomorrow morning with some family enjoy your lunch

hello professor Bradford is away at the moment would you like to leave a message

Michael this is your mother I know that you're there I'm just calling to remind

you

[Music]

so a couple of it the actor is really a stick that was one of the one of the

interesting problems with it the there's an interesting difference of opinion by

the couple of Negro panties ideas in this as well one of the one of the

things I argued against was how large the knowledge navigator was made because

it's and it was much more since notice he didn't take it with him when he went

off to lunch that that means it's not really portable something you can say

about laptops today so who spotted one

of the weirdest anachronism is on this

well definitely the icons are odd but did you notice anything that just you

couldn't imagine for a second doing as

far in the future why would anybody stick something like a flash memory card

in to record something how many who has who has nine gigs on

their disk right now right so that was

one that was out of the that was out of the sequence one of the things that we

tried to do was to have the agent be an

expert at extremely limited things we're thinking that the first kinds of things

that AIS can actually help for our

extremely limited narrow tasks like being the calendar agent we're not too

far away from having a calendar agent you could one of the problems in the movie was which we showed a little bit

and then it broke down because they didn't want to force people to try and

read from the screen but did you notice that the knowledge navigator had a

camera that was looking at the person okay and the idea there was that the

agent would only read when it could see that the person wasn't looking at the screen the first software to do that by

the way is now out on the Sony Vaio the

small Sony Vaio that has the built-in camera actually watches to see whether

you're actually looking at the screen and this answer is one of Nagar pontes

oldest complaints that he had which it used to say used to say an infrared

urinal knows more about what you're doing then your computer does so they're

a bunch of bunch of different things in there but the in each of the the media

things that Bonnie and I did with John we always try to have a real problem it

involves some kind of simulation because our belief was that the real computer

literacy has something to do of going into a dynamic model of something you're

trying to understand and thinking up these little problems that could fit

into a couple of minutes of video and be comprehensible is probably the biggest task in doing these really big insights

that you had was that the C is about communications not about just

computation and that knowledge navigator is really as much about people

communicating with people yeah well I got that from the ARPA what I call the

ARPA dream and especially a guy by the name of Bob Barton he was one of the

world's greatest computer designers and he was very into McLuhan he didn't like

graduate students at all and I wanted to

talk to him about computer design and so I spent one summer laborious ly reading

McLuhan until I understood what McLuhan was trying to say I thought but I

certainly did it enough to have an extended conversation with this guy and he was right on because his whole notion

was its it's a media game understand the

difference between the technology and the media and it will tell you what to do [Music]

Silicon Valley who just did not trust a

marketing guy in charge of a computer company and so to me to go out and start

showing the knowledge navigator video around was evidence that this was purely

he needs to call Apple a vertically integrated advertising agency at that

point the interesting thing was that it

created a tremendous debate and you remember the Stanford University

engineering school actually held a symposium of people who came from all

over the world to argue on the issue of whether the knowledge navigator was

correct in its anthropomorphic interpretation of the Asian or whether

oughta be a proteases as an extension of the human being and I certainly might in

fact the answer for morphic agent stuff is a little bit over my dead body

but there was a really good this is the

medium is the message because the cinematography really wanted to have an

answer morphic agent there but the great idea of this is one of the oldest ideas

that has to do with networks which is McCarthy's advice taker which goes back

to the late 50s and it was in one of

those early papers with McCarthy wrote that the term information utility was

first used and John was thinking he's

advocating time sharing back then he was thinking about what it would be like to have a worldwide information utility and

he started thinking about it he realized wow we better start having programs with

common sense this was one of the terms that he used because the idea that

people would communicate with the computers algorithmically he thought was unreasonable but he thought that you

should be able to build an expert at some narrow domain like your calendar or

how to get to the airport and stuff like that and those experts and in fact there

are experts right now how many people here use travel planning

the Internet those are the a Iook it's a

kind of a bad rap because as soon as the problem solved it's no longer AI so hey

I as always all that stuff we don't know how to do yet so a person some years ago

said AI is a promising technology and always will be navigator which was

actually from my vantage point extremely helpful I remember Allen you came into

my office one day and you said Bill Atkinson is in tears and Bill accident

for those who don't know was was Apple's first software engineer ever and he was

also a person who created a lot of the

software that went into the original Mac and Bill was like Alan in Apple fellow

and he was off working on a project called wild card and he had shown it to

the Apple engineers and they had totally laughed at what he was doing

still I wasn't here themselves yeah he

was going to quit so Alan said you've got to get over and talk to him so I went over and talked to Bill and he

really was in tears and wild card I

agreed to sponsor it out of my office and wild card became a product called

HyperCard