Difference between revisions of "Alan Kay at The Association of American Medical Colleges (1996)"

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<subtitle id='00:00:00'> [Music]</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:00:08'>good morning ladies and gentlemen would you please take your seats welcome</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:00:14'>to the association's final plenary session our presider this morning is the</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:00:20'>president of the association dr. Jordan Cohen</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:00:32'>morning everyone I'm really excited about the opportunity to participate in</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:00:39'>this morning's session before I introduce our speaker though I would</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:00:43'>like to encourage those of you in the back to come forward there are plenty of seats up for that they're going to be a</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:00:48'>number of graphical elements to the talk</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:00:52'>this morning that you'll certainly benefit from being closer to see so if</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:00:56'>you want to come forward please do and I've been assured that our speakers will not mind if you get up and leave early</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:01:01'>if that's necessary so come forward if you can well this is a very special</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:01:07'>session we've entitled it information as</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:01:11'>the bridge to the future in keeping with</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:01:15'>our theme about building bridges of the future and as I mentioned in my remarks on Friday clearly one of the major</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:01:21'>themes we wanted to have clearly in evidence at this meeting was the fact</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:01:26'>that information and the incredible revolution that's occurring in the</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:01:30'>information sciences offers all of us in academic medicine I think an unjust an</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:01:36'>unprecedented opportunity to make quantum leap forward in the way we do</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:01:41'>everything that we're responsible for in our institution so I really commend you</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:01:47'>to listen carefully to what Alan Kay has to say this morning because I think it</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:01:52'>has tremendous relevance for for everything that we do and I think those</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:01:57'>who still believe that this is a passing phase a passing fancy really do so at</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:02:03'>their peril because I think there are a few advances in technology that that are</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:02:10'>as as exciting and as meaningful as what is going on in information ability to</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:02:14'>harness information to create it to collect it customize it organize it</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:02:19'>disseminated ability to do all those things I think are clearly going to be</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:02:23'>the things that sort out the winners from the losers and the leaders from the</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:02:27'>followers in the next century and beyond</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:02:31'>well someone who has always been aware of this particular attribute of</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:02:35'>technology as Alan Kay always a visionary he is credited with developing</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:02:41'>the idea of the personal computer the concept of a new</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:02:45'>generation of laptop computers and the overlapping window interfaces that we</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:02:49'>now use and take sort of pretty much for granted as as as if it were always there</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:02:54'>while a scientist at Parc Xerox labs he</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:02:58'>led one of the research teams whose work ultimately led to the development of the workstation the Macintosh computer the</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:03:04'>Ethernet the laser printer and the networked client servers just a few of</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:03:09'>the minor tools that are now in evidence later he was chief scientist at Atari a</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:03:16'>that was before he joined Apple Computer in 1984 where he stayed until literally</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:03:21'>just a few weeks ago when he joined Walt Disney Company as a Disney fellow and he</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:03:26'>is now the driving force in Walt Disney's Imagineering x' research and</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:03:30'>development organization where he works to find innovative ways to enhance the</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:03:35'>educational and entertainment value of Disney's offerings dr. K seems to have</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:03:41'>been on hand whenever the big events in the computing field took place and I</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:03:47'>want to give you just one quote from him yet that's published in the Nicholas</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:03:53'>Negroponte EES book the quote from dr. K is that point of view is worth 80 IQ</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:04:00'>points think about that ones point of</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:04:04'>view is worth 80 IQ points so as you</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:04:08'>listen to dr. K's remarks keep in mind that we are looking for that boost in IQ</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:04:13'>in academic medicine and I'm really greatly honored to introduce to you Alan</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:04:18'>Kay</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:04:25'>thank you</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:04:30'>thank you well gosh I just didn't think anybody would come out at nine o'clock</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:04:35'>in the morning on Sunday thank you I'll try and make it worthwhile for you maybe</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:04:42'>the first idea we should take issue with or at least explore a little bit is the</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:04:47'>notion that information is the bridge to the future and I can't think of a better</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:04:53'>way of doing that than to take you back</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:04:57'>to a Harvard commencement Harvard</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:05:02'>graduation a few years ago and we follow</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:05:06'>an NSF camera team right after the</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:05:10'>diplomas have been awarded they asked a few simple questions of some of the</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:05:15'>graduating seniors alumni and faculty so let's roll that first tape and check</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:05:22'>this out</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:05:32'>[Music]</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:05:47'>Aaron Lee fingerman candidate in art</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:05:52'>[Applause]</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:05:59'>despite a lifetime of the very best education students in our classrooms are</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:06:04'>failing to learn science many of these students will graduate from college with</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:06:08'>the same scientific misconceptions that they had on entering grade school to</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:06:13'>test how a lifetime of Education affects our understanding of science we ask</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:06:17'>these recent graduates some simple questions in astronomy consider for</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:06:22'>example that the causes of the seasons is a topic taught in every standard curriculum okay I think the seasons</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:06:27'>happens because as the earth travels around the Sun it gets nearer to the Sun</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:06:32'>which produces warmer weather and gets farther away which produces colder</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:06:36'>weather and that's it and hence the seasons how hot it is or how cold it is</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:06:40'>at any given time of the year has to do with the the closeness of the earth to</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:06:45'>the Sun during the seasonal periods the earth goes round the Sun and and it gets</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:06:51'>hotter when we get closer to the Sun and it gets colder when we get further away from the Sun these graduates like many</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:06:56'>of us think of the Earth's orbit as a highly exaggerated ellipse even though</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:07:01'>the Earth's orbit is very nearly circular with distance producing</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:07:05'>virtually no effect on the seasons we carry with us the strong incorrect</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:07:10'>belief that changing distance is responsible for the seasons I took</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:07:15'>physics and planetary motion and relativity waves I've never really had a</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:07:22'>scientific background whatsoever and I and I got through school without having it I've gotten very far without having</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:07:27'>it I had quite a bit of science in high school yeah through physics</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:07:33'>want first year in two years of chemistry regardless of their science</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:07:37'>education 21 of the 23 randomly selected</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:07:41'>students faculty and alumni of Harvard University revealed misconceptions when</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:07:47'>asked to explain either the seasons or the phases of the Moon when it's further</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:07:51'>away from the Sun then it gets colder the earth</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:07:55'>position interferes with the reflection</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:07:59'>of the Sun against the moon so I think</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:08:07'>we can see that the real curriculum at Harvard is confidence 101</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:08:17'>[Applause] actually when I when I first saw this</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:08:22'>tape a couple years ago I kept on waiting for NSF to ask the logical</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:08:27'>second questions of these people and they never did because they were on a</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:08:31'>they're on one track but it happened</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:08:35'>that a couple of weeks after I saw this this tape the first time I had to give a talk over at UCLA to basically a</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:08:42'>first-year graduate course that had some also had some seniors who are going to</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:08:46'>graduate and a few professors so the end</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:08:50'>of the course I asked for volunteers to come up and talk to me afterwards and I</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:08:55'>got a chance to ask the very same questions about the seasons and about</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:08:59'>the phases of the Moon and I found about the same roughly 95 percent had serious</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:09:05'>misconceptions the the NSF here cites 21</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:09:09'>out of 23 had serious misconceptions about one of the other or both and I</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:09:14'>found about the same but of course I got a chance to ask the second question so</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:09:19'>the people who had this notion about the</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:09:24'>relative distance of the Earth from the Sun being the cause of the seasons I</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:09:29'>asked them well tell me when it's summer up here in North America do you know</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:09:33'>what season it is down in South America in Australia and what is it it's winter</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:09:41'>everybody knows that and these kids all did and then I just did one of these</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:09:46'>Jack Benny Waits</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:09:52'>and the wheels started slowly turning</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:09:57'>and to the the kids and professors that</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:10:01'>thought that the phases of the Moon had something to do with the earth being in</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:10:05'>the way which of course is what causes lunar eclipses I asked them will tell me</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:10:11'>your entire life have you ever seen the Sun and the moon in the sky at the same</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:10:15'>time and have you sure everybody has and</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:10:19'>often the moon is in phase so again that</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:10:23'>that long pause while they struggle to realize what was actually going on and</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:10:28'>my claim here is that NSF was barking up</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:10:32'>the wrong tree we have to be very very happy that these kids could not remember</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:10:38'>the explanation of the seasons or the phases and the moon that they were</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:10:42'>taught in grade school because we learned something the problem here is not a science problem the problem is</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:10:47'>what I would call a math problem in the sense that math is about how we can</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:10:54'>infer things from premises and every</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:10:58'>single one of these kids had the information to contradict the very</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:11:02'>theory they were formulating so confidently and couldn't find that</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:11:06'>information it was buried somewhere else</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:11:10'>even though it was about the same subject that's a math problem it's a</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:11:14'>thinking problem and one way of putting</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:11:20'>talking about information here is that most people in fact in a conference like</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:11:25'>this most people come to conferences like this in search of information but</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:11:30'>in fact most of us and these kids especially what they need needed was not</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:11:35'>more information but more context they couldn't deal with the information that</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:11:41'>they had in an interesting way or what we would call an operational way so an</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:11:46'>image for that I'll go to the slides</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:11:50'>here is my favorite saying of McLuhan which is I don't know who discovered</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:11:55'>water but it wasn't a fish and of course he wasn't interested in fish or water he</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:12:00'>meant us where the fish and the water is our beliefs</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:12:04'>now here's an interesting thing to think about which is if we could directly</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:12:10'>perceive reality we would then have nothing to argue with anybody else about</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:12:16'>because there's just one reality and if we're perceiving that reality that's all</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:12:21'>there is but in fact the reason we're constantly fighting with each other all</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:12:25'>over the earth for thousands of years is because we don't perceive reality at all</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:12:29'>what we do is we make up stories about it those stories are beliefs they become</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:12:37'>the goldfish bowl at the we swing or swim around in and what happens is that</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:12:44'>at some point most of these great stories we make up get reified by us</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:12:50'>into dogma that is we start claiming these stories of reality and then all of</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:12:55'>a sudden our stories are different from other people's stories we think they're reality and all of a sudden we have</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:12:59'>incredible conflict so this is something that happens over and over again let me</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:13:03'>ask the AV people to keep the slides on</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:13:08'>so here's another way of looking at this idea here I flatten out the goldfish</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:13:13'>bowl into a plain pink plain and this is</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:13:18'>an idea from Arthur Kessler who was a terrific novelist who became a cognitive</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:13:24'>science at Stanford late in life and his</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:13:28'>way of thinking of it is that we're kind of like ants wandering through a context</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:13:34'>terrain in this case it's colored pink as we snake our way around through it</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:13:39'>every once in a while we might have a little blue thought but our entire life</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:13:45'>of parents and culture and school just</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:13:49'>smashes that blue thought right back down into pinkness and when we make</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:13:55'>progress we make progress by advancing in the pink domain for instance the the</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:14:01'>railroads in the 20s and 30s never</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:14:05'>invested a cent in either airplane</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:14:09'>factories or airline travel everything they thought about was making well</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:14:16'>better better track faster locomotives meanwhile the</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:14:20'>competition that was going to do them in was flying up above them where they weren't even looking there were</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:14:24'>two-dimensional people optimizing</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:14:28'>locally and missing the big picture and this is a theme that this is one of the</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:14:32'>most important themes it's something what's interesting about this is</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:14:36'>something that everybody knows about it's like the theme of hubris in Greek</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:14:40'>tragedy that most of what goes wrong with human beings has to do with our</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:14:45'>capacity for overreaching we all know</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:14:49'>that but in fact we keep on doing it there's one of these things that has to surface then Kessler says every once in</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:14:56'>a while when you're maybe when you're taking a shower out jogging waking up in</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:15:03'>the morning these constraint mechanisms</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:15:07'>for making you be a pink type person let go and all of a sudden you have an</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:15:12'>insight you see that what you thought was a pink thing is that suddenly a blue</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:15:17'>thing and this is an incredible revelation and in fact it sometimes has</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:15:23'>the trappings of religion and it's like</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:15:27'>it comes from God almost and Kessler pointed out something that was quite</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:15:32'>quite interesting says if you're telling a joke then the reaction is ha ha if</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:15:38'>it's science or die I guess medicine</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:15:42'>it's AHA or sometimes it's oh and an art</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:15:47'>it's ah because in each one of these</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:15:51'>cases what we have here is what Kessler calls the act of creation is to see</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:15:55'>something that you thought was one kind of thing to be able to see it completely differently and it's this kind of change</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:16:02'>in point of view that I meant when I said point of view is worth ad IQ points</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:16:07'>if you imagine a person like a Leonardo</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:16:11'>with a 250 IQ or more 10,000 years ago</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:16:16'>or even in the time that Leonardo lived you can see how little a person with</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:16:21'>unbelievable IQ could actually accomplish compared to what's been</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:16:26'>accomplished by the shifts in point of view that have taking place more</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:16:30'>gradually and given as more powerful tools for viewing the world and of course here's one really</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:16:37'>unpleasant thought which is in order to get those blue ideas you have to have</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:16:41'>some blue knowledge and so in fact some</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:16:46'>of the most highly educated people I know are completely uncreated because</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:16:50'>they've only got good at pink things a lot of engineers I know are that way</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:16:56'>I dare say more than a few doctors because when you get really really good</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:17:02'>at that thing it is so it so creates its own reality that it's hard to imagine</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:17:07'>that there's anything else there and the the new ideas are pretty much invisible</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:17:12'>that's in part what was happening to these to these college students another</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:17:18'>thing was happening to them NSF goes in a little bit is that the way that they</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:17:24'>remembered things that they had learned was not what mathematicians would call</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:17:29'>operational learning or scientists would call operational learning that was</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:17:33'>compartmentalized learning the learning was kind of in terms of stories or</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:17:38'>almost like learning proverbs King</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:17:42'>Solomon was the wisest person in the Bible and it says why because he knew</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:17:47'>3,000 proverbs which is more than anybody else and the way a proverbs work</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:17:52'>is if you come home from a trip and your significant other is really glad to see</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:17:57'>you then the reason for that is absence made the heart grow fonder but if you</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:18:03'>come home from a trip and your significant other is not particularly glad to see you then what's the reason</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:18:08'>for that out of sight out of mind</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:18:13'>if you're faced with a situation that</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:18:17'>really confirms one of your beliefs then</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:18:21'>you say where there's smoke there's fire but if you're faced with a situation</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:18:26'>that you don't happen to believe in beforehand what you say is you can't</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:18:30'>tell a book by its cover and in fact this is why proverbs are mostly used in</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:18:37'>literate semi illiterate or illiterate societies because if you list out the</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:18:42'>Proverbs in fact this is one of the big transitions in Greek thought was when</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:18:48'>they started actually putting out there but their beliefs about legal systems by</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:18:53'>chiseling them on the wall walls of things so the citizens could read them</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:18:58'>they started discovering that when looked at that way things that it seemed</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:19:02'>perfectly reasonable in fact the law is all about case based reasoning these</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:19:08'>under these circumstances the following thing happened back then they started</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:19:12'>noticing that that if you compare this one with this one over here out here in</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:19:16'>your visual field they started contradicting each other and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:19:20'>contradiction is actually one of the major bases for doing real mathematical</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:19:26'>kind of thinking so the part of the</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:19:31'>problem with these students was that they were embedded we could say in the</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:19:36'>most technologically rich culture in the</subtitle>
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<subtitle id='00:19:40'>world and we can imagine that every single one of them had access to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:19:44'>personal computers all the way through school and at college and yet their</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:19:48'>thinking patterns were being done in a Neolithic form in a preliterate form</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:19:53'>their knowledge was being compartmentalized in forms of things of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:19:57'>Proverbs in which contradictions didn't matter to them so one way of thinking</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:20:05'>about this is that we have a natural way of thinking about things built into us</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:20:10'>which is to think about things in terms of stories one of the problems with</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:20:15'>stories as I mentioned is this this tolerance of contradiction one way of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:20:21'>thinking your own experience if you see a movie today you really like</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:20:25'>or play and it happens to contradict in every way shape or in form the movie you</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:20:33'>saw last week that you like it's not going to bother you not going to bother</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:20:37'>you at all because stories create their</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:20:41'>own context you evaluate them by how good they are right now this is why it's</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:20:46'>very dangerous when you think of the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:20:50'>difference between going into a theatrical context where you willingly</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:20:56'>give yourself up to the context that's been created on the stage by the author</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:21:01'>and by the actors by the scenic designers and the almost exactly same</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:21:08'>environment of a political rally all the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:21:12'>people darkroom music rich words rolling forth and so</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:21:17'>forth and it's quite clear that some</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:21:21'>other mechanism has to interpose itself of saying in the theater well it's okay</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:21:25'>for me to give myself over to this fantasy land but I think it's clear that</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:21:30'>in a political context it makes no sense at all to give ourselves over to that</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:21:34'>fantasy land but in fact most of us do and that's why politicians keep on doing</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:21:40'>it so - two other big systems of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:21:45'>thinking that have been invented that are not directly built-in to us we have</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:21:50'>to learn how to do them our logic which I think we're all familiar with which is kind of a taking thought and making it</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:21:56'>into a mechanism where you link one thought to another through inferential</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:22:00'>chains of thing is there's one break in the infirm an inferential change then</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:22:05'>the Machine doesn't run and the idea that we're thinking about doesn't doesn't hold water that has been the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:22:11'>basis of many different systems including the arguments that depose the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:22:17'>monarchy that created this country and then a more recent kind of thinking</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:22:21'>which you could call ecological you could call the first story logical the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:22:26'>second one logical and the third one ecological in which what we're dealing</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:22:30'>with is really systems that have the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:22:34'>same complexity as the interior of cells or the interior of tissues</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:22:38'>the complexity of the human body or Ecology's in which if something goes</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:22:45'>wrong it doesn't kill off the organism there are dozens and dozens of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:22:50'>homeostatic mechanisms there to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:22:54'>constantly bring the system back to a kind of dynamic equilibrium those</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:22:59'>systems are just starting to be studied and particularly just in the last thirty</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:23:04'>years or so because the study of these last kind of thinking is very much</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:23:11'>facilitated by having computers to help you with you can think of the logical</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:23:17'>thought systems as being facilitated by having a particularly in particular</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:23:21'>alphabetic type reading and writing they</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:23:25'>came in at the same time and if you think about it for five minutes or so</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:23:29'>you can see why reading and writing and particularly alphabetic reading and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:23:33'>writing might have something to do with evolving logical thought I'm going to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:23:37'>talk about that and a little bit more so part of the problem is that these kids</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:23:42'>who went to Harvard never learned how to do either of these invented kinds of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:23:47'>systems that have been so important over the last three or four hundred years it</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:23:51'>simply wasn't part of their education at any point meanwhile they're taking courses in mathematics and science but</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:23:58'>they were learning them in in this proverbial form certainly one of the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:24:03'>most disputing experiences I have ever had are the occasions where I've wound</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:24:09'>up have trying to have scientific conversations with high school science teachers and by and large they simply do</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:24:15'>not understand what science is at all they teach it as religion it is taught</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:24:20'>as something that is this was found out by great people it's true you have to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:24:26'>learn what the truth is you have to be able to regurgitate that truth and so forth very discouraging so the important</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:24:36'>thing about this goldfish bowl metaphor is that the human mental iam our ability</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:24:46'>to think is because of the way it's set up basically always forces us to be in</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:24:51'>some sort of goldfish bowl sometimes we can pretend to be in more than one</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:24:55'>goldfish bowl at once but nobody has</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:24:59'>found a way of training us out of this particular context dependent way of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:25:04'>thinking about things but of course the culture that we're born into and even so</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:25:10'>we can think of being in the green culture might be incredibly helpful if</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:25:14'>we have diabetes some cultures are have</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:25:20'>a context that allows us to do something serious about in other cultures can't we</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:25:25'>can also think of this green goldfish</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:25:30'>bowl is something that we might actually create this has been the big thing</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:25:38'>that's happened in the last 400 years is this understanding this enough so we realize hey we can create systems of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:25:43'>thought calculus is an example of creating a system of thought it's it's a</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:25:48'>completely different way of looking at the world in terms of the integration of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:25:54'>differential equations a very very powerful idea not something that's built</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:25:59'>into our nervous system at all and the the halving of it turns a person with an</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:26:04'>ordinary IQ into something at the level of a Newton that's where the original</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:26:09'>idea of the ad IQ points came from and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:26:13'>of course any field like medicine or</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:26:17'>computer science or science in the large itself has to have this in mind as it's</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:26:23'>trying to progress so Joseph Campbell once pointed out that the biggest</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:26:28'>problem with with religions and the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:26:32'>origin of religions is that most of them he said came from social geniuses having</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:26:37'>an incredibly useful insights about the way people should live but the problem</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:26:42'>and these insights being abstract are</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:26:46'>put in some kind of metaphor usually a story if you look back</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:26:52'>historically to try and get what the import of this new insight was but a few</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:26:58'>generations later the followers of this religion have reified it into dogma that</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:27:03'>as the metaphor is taken literally and now people are supposed to believe in</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:27:07'>the metaphor itself and forget what the actual insight is and we see that</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:27:12'>happening over and over again in science so Thomas Kuhn who wrote a book about</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:27:16'>the structure of scientific revolutions pointed out that even in science the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:27:22'>place where people are the most concerned about what's really going on</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:27:26'>in trying to not get fooled by their senses in the context in which they live</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:27:31'>he said even in science revolutions take about 25 years and the reason he gave</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:27:36'>for that is that you have to let the old scientists die off because once you get</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:27:44'>good at something there's less and less motivation to get out of that pink</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:27:49'>context once you've optimized being able to do things in the pink so another way</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:27:57'>of thinking about what I'm talking about here is that we mainly get smarter by</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:28:02'>changing the way we represent our ideas this is not an informational idea at all</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:28:08'>but an architectural idea here's something that your kids will love you</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:28:12'>for if you copy down these numbers from 1 to 9 exactly as they appear there and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:28:19'>you can play this game with them you pick a number they pick a number you</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:28:24'>pick a number they pick a number the first person who's any of who three of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:28:29'>whose numbers first person who picks three numbers that add up to 15 wins and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:28:34'>you can always beat your kid doing this</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:28:38'>and they will not like that but they will love you when you show them how you're doing it so they can always beat</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:28:43'>their friends and what you have done they're playing with this but what</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:28:47'>you've done is simply to take this and draw four lines and now can you see what</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:28:54'>game you're playing what game is it</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:28:59'>Tic Tac Toe something everybody knows how to play with and when we now see</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:29:05'>that these numbers are a magic square in which every column Row and diagonal adds</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:29:10'>up to 15 so this is a simple example of what calculus does for us which it</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:29:16'>basically pre computes powerful results</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:29:20'>in an area that's of use to us and gives us a framework for thinking about now</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:29:24'>this is not the same thing as information this is context ting</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:29:28'>meanwhile the poor kid over there is struggling having to remember kid is</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:29:33'>still in an oral Society the kid has to remember the numbers that have already</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:29:39'>been picked and doesn't have this automatic computation mechanism working</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:29:44'>for them that's basically what we're out after when we create a new kind of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:29:48'>goldfish ball now what I want to do now</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:29:55'>is turn to some inventions in personal</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:30:00'>computing that we made a few years ago give you a little bit of a sense of how</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:30:04'>they how they happened and why they've</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:30:08'>taken so long still are taking so long to get into the general culture in</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:30:13'>particular in a way that would help you the genesis for personal computing goes</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:30:18'>all the way back to 1945 we just celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:30:22'>this last year a bunch of us people who</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:30:28'>have a lot of gray in their hair met at MIT to commemorate the 50th anniversary</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:30:33'>of Vannevar Bush's idea of Memex Bush was President Roosevelt science</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:30:39'>advisor and in 1945 he wrote an Atlantic Monthly article called as we may think</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:30:45'>and in there he just said in not too</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:30:49'>many years from now everybody will be able to have in their home a desk and in</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:30:57'>the interior of this desk will be the equivalent of a small-town libraries</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:31:01'>worth of books five to ten thousand volumes held on high-resolution optical</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:31:05'>storage and we'll be able to look at all of this wealth of information with</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:31:11'>multiple screens on top of the desk will be put in information they'll be both</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:31:15'>pictures and text and most importantly he said there will be cross connective</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:31:20'>trails he called them that will cross connect up the information and start</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:31:25'>turning the information into knowledge and even maybe into wisdom and he said</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:31:30'>that they'll even be a profession born with this device which he called</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:31:34'>pathfinding so there'll be people called path finders whose job will be to find</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:31:39'>interesting connections between the raw stuff that's here and they'll sell these</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:31:44'>connections as as products so this was</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:31:50'>bushes bushes notion and it happened that a lot of the people that had something to do with personal computing</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:31:55'>were aware of this Douglas Engelbart whom you'll meet in a minute read this</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:32:01'>he was in the Navy in the Pacific as I guess a 19 year old or so read in 1945 I</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:32:08'>was only 5 years old in 1945 but I came across it when I was a teenager in the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:32:12'>50s and other people were captivated because who wouldn't want to have 10,000</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:32:19'>volumes worth of the best that humans have ever found out all cross-index and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:32:23'>linked so that you could add to it and etc etc I mean it's an incredibly</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:32:27'>romantic vision and around the end of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:32:31'>the 50s and early 60s people started</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:32:37'>doing something about this already in the late 50s people had</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:32:41'>started writing papers saying the destiny of information science is that</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:32:47'>before too many years are out we will have what was termed then an information</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:32:52'>utility and the idea was to think of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:32:56'>something like the power and lighting utility that we have for bringing in</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:33:05'>water and gas and electricity that's now</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:33:10'>in a one-for-one correspondence with our</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:33:15'>with our our houses with our places of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:33:19'>living and among them John McCarthy said there's going to be an information</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:33:24'>utility like that as to is everybody will have a terminal at home and be able to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:33:29'>connect be connected into the world of information and this was literally the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:33:33'>the first solid proposal for what became</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:33:37'>the Internet there's a direct chain from this proposal through the internet that</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:33:41'>we have today the people who did the internet were part of this early group</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:33:46'>and I show you here just two interesting things from the very early 60s 1960 to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:33:51'>the invention of computer graphics by Ivan Sutherland which was done by the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:33:55'>way on a on a computer the size of this</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:33:59'>room the last computer in the u.s. large enough to have its own roof it was the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:34:06'>building and we like to think of that time of when there was only one personal</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:34:11'>computer which was when Ivan Sutherland used it from 3 to 6 o'clock early in the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:34:16'>morning was about the power of an X T of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:34:20'>10 years ago computer graphics was</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:34:24'>invented on that and there was already a thing that I think of as the first personal computer called the link also</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:34:29'>done at Lincoln labs at the same time by Wes Clark and you see that one of its</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:34:34'>design criteria was that you should be able to look over it literally Wes Clark</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:34:41'>did not walk this thing looming over you he wanted it to be something that you</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:34:45'>could loom over it and that was one of the impulses towards personal computing</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:34:50'>and then Engle Bart came along and what</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:34:54'>I'm going to do is show you the the first cut on the second videotape here</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:35:01'>which is Engelbart around 1966 to 68 and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:35:05'>I think you'll see it's a very modern picture so let's roll that tape that's</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:35:15'>not it but now it's it</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:35:22'>so here's a photograph taken around 1966</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:35:26'>down at s RI and Menlo Park I daresay</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:35:30'>most of you in this room do not have a two page display on your desk e so I'll</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:35:34'>say I'd like to go to produce but I'd like to go to produce they get big I</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:35:41'>like to say one branch only and let me look just that low can I see it</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:35:46'>oh I can say I'd like to see one line</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:35:50'>only I can see it but there's another</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:35:54'>thing that I can do there's a root I said I have here</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:36:00'>so here I'm afraid I'll need a different pictures of you so here's what I do with</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:36:06'>a picture drawing capability here's a slight and lamp if I start from work and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:36:10'>here's the route I seem to have to go to pick up all the materials and that's my</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:36:14'>plan for getting home tonight but if I want to I can say the library what am I</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:36:19'>supposed to pick up there I can just point to that you know oh I see overdue</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:36:24'>books and all while there was a statement there with that name on it go back what if I what's my supposed to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:36:29'>pick up the drugstore mm-hmm I see you've everything all right</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:36:34'>[Music] can do things if I want we'll just say I'd like to interchange the Protestant</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:36:40'>and materials bingo and they're all numbered right and if I care to look and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:36:46'>are changing them very quickly cans are going to get interchanged with Prados</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:36:51'>they do it and all gets renumber okay so</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:36:56'>does 30 years ago and you might have noticed that the response he was getting</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:37:01'>on this system was a little faster than you get on your PCs today so it's</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:37:08'>something we can talk about later but it's an interesting phenomenon that of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:37:12'>the many interesting things that Engelbart was the first of course he was</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:37:17'>the inventor of the mouse and the inventor of hypertext that you see there</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:37:21'>so what what people are just starting to experience on the Internet now through</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:37:25'>the World Wide Web is like what he had 30 years ago in Menlo Park and the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:37:31'>important thing for you to realize is that there was nothing about the technology back then that precluded you</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:37:38'>from having it back then nothing it was</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:37:42'>possible on the tiny that machine he was</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:37:46'>on served 20 people and it had a memory</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:37:51'>a ram of a grand total of 192 K 192 K so</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:37:59'>it was all possible back then and one of the people sponsors he went to to try</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:38:04'>and get them to take it over and make it part of our lives was AT&T and they</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:38:09'>threw him out on their ear he just they just had no sense of what</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:38:15'>it was that he was actually driving at the other thing it was really interesting about angle Bart is he said</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:38:21'>way way back in the beginning that most interesting things that people do are</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:38:25'>done by more than one person working together and so his idea it was</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:38:31'>I don't want as he likes to say I he says I didn't want to invent personal</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:38:35'>computing I wanted to invent group computing that he want what he wanted to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:38:40'>do is boost the collective IQ of human groups working on important things</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:38:45'>together these ideas that he has and he</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:38:49'>would be a good speaker to have maybe next year because he gives a great talk</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:38:53'>which is essentially the talk that I heard him give back in 1966 that I think</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:38:58'>is more compelling to most people today than it was back then people are now</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:39:03'>starting to get to see this is a blue idea right and it's only after 30 years</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:39:10'>of peach will grudgingly starting to get</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:39:14'>involved with these things that they can understand what this genius was able to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:39:19'>think out think of right out of the blocks so in 67 this is my first</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:39:28'>personal computer was a desktop computer for a very special desk namely those</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:39:34'>made out of steel it's a weight about 400 pounds but it it had all of the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:39:40'>paraphernalia had a tablet instead of a</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:39:45'>mouse so you could draw on it and it had</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:39:49'>actual windows that clipped had many it</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:39:53'>had multiple views of things at many of the paraphernalia that were used to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:39:58'>today and while I was working on this</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:40:03'>machine I visited RAND Corporation in</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:40:07'>Santa Monica and saw something that really blew my mind and this isn't now</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:40:12'>in the summer of 68 so let's show the second cut on that tape here's the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:40:17'>system without a keyboard</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:40:21'>we erase a flow arrow then move the connector out of the way so that we may</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:40:25'>draw a box in its place recognizes he wants a box and makes one now it's</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:40:30'>recognizing his handwriting the printing in the box is being used as commentary</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:40:35'>only in this case the box is slightly too large so he may change its size</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:40:40'>that's where modern window control came from literally then draw flow from the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:40:45'>connector to the box attach a decision</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:40:50'>element to the box and draw a flow from it to scan we then erased the floor</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:40:56'>arrows attached to the process post new area and move the box to a new position</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:41:02'>this allows us to draw a new box okay</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:41:13'>now you might have noticed that that system works a little bit better than</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:41:17'>the hand writing systems you might have seen recently and again the reason here</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:41:25'>is even more interesting which is people in the computer field are almost</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:41:29'>completely disinclined to look back in the past for any good ideas that might</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:41:34'>have been done this is in part why systems are worse today than angle Bart</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:41:38'>conceived of them and it's in part why the pocket organizers the PDAs today are</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:41:43'>worse than these people that ran conceived of them people that ran were</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:41:48'>actually much better than the average programmer a designer of today but in</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:41:54'>fact it didn't even matter because the program or designer of today is</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:41:58'>egotistical II involved in doing their own invention</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:42:02'>even if it's worse and because you the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:42:06'>public don't know about this stuff in the past you don't even complain about it there's an interesting thing to think</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:42:13'>of this these videos are still shocking to people today now the same summer I</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:42:22'>visit a seymour papert and saw that he was trying to do something really</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:42:26'>incredibly interesting which he was trying to get kids to think in these</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:42:30'>more powerful forms by getting them to do certain kinds of things with</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:42:35'>computers to make simulations on computers of complex ideas and learn the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:42:41'>ideas from the inside by actually constructing them that changed my life</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:42:45'>completely that was one of the biggest blue things that ever happened to me and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:42:50'>flying back on the plane to Utah in 68 I</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:42:54'>designed this in May when I got back there I made this cardboard model of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:42:59'>what I thought a children's computer would look like which later became known as the Dynabook and we made it Hollow</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:43:05'>we filled it with lead pellets to see how heavy you could make it before you didn't want to carry it anymore on the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:43:10'>notion that portability meant you can carry something else too it's not point</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:43:21'>five herniation spur block and we</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:43:25'>discovered that the maximum weight you could make this machine was two pounds</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:43:29'>and I believe that we'll find that when the industry eventually gets around to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:43:34'>making reasonable ones of these things that the maximum weight of those things</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:43:38'>will be two pounds so this became kind</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:43:42'>of a holy grail now the idea of let's let's not worry about adults anymore</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:43:46'>they're hopeless but let's actually try and make something that will help</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:43:51'>children go up to be more interesting than the than the average adult is and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:43:57'>the reason we knew this would work is that Gordon Moore had started noticing</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:44:03'>that there was a possibility of doubling</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:44:07'>the number of components on a silicon chip and having their size and so forth</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:44:13'>somewhere between the rate of a factor of two every year and a factor of two</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:44:17'>every two years and in fact the interior</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:44:21'>jacketed jaggedly lying there is what actually happened so here's the guy who</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:44:26'>gave us a 30 year prediction of exactly what was going to happen in silicon you</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:44:30'>know what IBM and Dec didn't pay any attention to this that's why they're</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:44:34'>almost out of business today but some of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:44:38'>us started thinking about wow all we have to do is go out you know because</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:44:44'>that's a factor of two every 18 months or so is about a factor</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:44:49'>of a hundred every decade so we thought</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:44:53'>gee whiz factor of hundred every decade in ten years we'll be able to have a</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:44:57'>machine that has the same computing power for a hundredth of the cost and it</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:45:02'>will be one hundredth the size incredible and so we could start</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:45:07'>thinking about how long it was going to take to do these various technologies</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:45:13'>and here's another thing just to give you yet another understanding of how</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:45:17'>long ago these ideas came about the whole idea of virtual reality goes back</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:45:22'>to the mid 60s and was actually implemented in the late 60s so here's</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:45:27'>the first real reality helmet done by Ivan Sutherland again at the University</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:45:32'>of Utah in 1969 and again this is an</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:45:36'>idea that's taking and I think doctors especially can understand why being able</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:45:41'>to deal with things by immersing yourself inside the computer rather than</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:45:46'>having the computer outside of you might be incredibly useful for learning</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:45:50'>understanding communicating and so forth</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:45:54'>well at this period there were three</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:46:00'>ways of thinking about doing interactive computing there was a really expensive</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:46:04'>terminal into a mainframe there is my</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:46:08'>little desktop computer the Flex machine and then this new idea that I'd had of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:46:12'>the laptop computer and that reminded me</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:46:16'>of something I had seen before which was</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:46:20'>the history of printing manuscript</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:46:25'>Bibles for instance cost millions of dollars and often had precious gems on</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:46:30'>them because the gems were nothing compared to the 10 or 15 years it took</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:46:34'>to have one of these things copied and made how many people in the room think</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:46:40'>they have 372 or more books in home we</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:46:46'>all probably do and you might why did he say 372 well its hat it happens that in</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:46:53'>the Year 1400 they took a census of the Vatican Library which was the one of the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:46:58'>largest libraries in Europe and it exactly 372 books in it the richest man</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:47:03'>in France the brother of the king is about ten times as rich as the King Jean</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:47:08'>Duke Du Barry was a bibliophile and had many books created for him and he when</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:47:15'>he died the inventory of his library was</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:47:19'>154 books this is in 1435 so this first</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:47:26'>phase of books and interactive computing</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:47:31'>only an institution could own then in</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:47:35'>this middle phase came the Gutenberg Bible which looked as much like a</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:47:39'>hand-done Bible as possible Gutenberg even had two hundred and fifty three</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:47:43'>separate characters in his type font so he could mimic every abbreviation and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:47:48'>style that the Gothic scribes had and as you see there the Gutenberg Bible was</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:47:53'>actually hand illuminated so they put it through the press then they would have</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:47:57'>people come in who had worked on manuscript books to put illuminations and because they wanted this thing to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:48:02'>look exactly what if they thought a book should be liked and these Gutenberg Bibles if you've seen they're about this</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:48:07'>big big heavy bulky things and then</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:48:11'>something really interesting happened about fifty years later around the Year 1500 Aldous whose last name was not</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:48:18'>pagemaker [Laughter]</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:48:23'>Aldus Manutius a Venetian printer</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:48:27'>decided that book should be this size fact the size the most books are today</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:48:34'>was specified by Aldous and what's</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:48:38'>particularly poignant about the story is the reason that books are this size</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:48:42'>today and this is something you'll never forget now whenever you look at a book is to realize that Aldous decided they</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:48:48'>should be this size by going out into Venice and measuring people's saddlebags</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:48:55'>because the first run from his press was called the portable library in the books</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:49:00'>now instead of being millions of dollars in these institutional books or sixty</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:49:05'>thousand dollars in the case of a Gutenberg Bible were now down to about</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:49:09'>$100 a piece and Aldous was actually the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:49:13'>faux mentor of the real revolution in printing now think about this the fifty</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:49:19'>years between Gutenberg and Aldous in the history of printing did not count</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:49:25'>nothing that happened in those 50 years is like what happened since then guess</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:49:31'>where we are in the history of personal computing we are squarely in the middle</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:49:37'>trying to as McLuhan said driving faster and faster into the future but only</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:49:41'>steering by looking in the rearview mirror and in fact it was that was what</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:49:54'>it was the similarity of the Flex machine personal computer to time</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:50:00'>sharing terminal it made me realize hey wait a minute we're not even thinking here we're just slavishly reusing forms</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:50:06'>there's no reason why a personal computer should look like a time sharing</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:50:10'>terminal we just didn't know any more about what they should look like then Gutenberg</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:50:14'>knew what a book should look like so that means that any belief systems</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:50:18'>you're likely to have generated about computing today are likely to be totally</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:50:24'>obsolete over the next ten years because we are now going through this phase</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:50:29'>transition to this third form of computing and I back then in the late</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:50:34'>60s I gave names these phases or belief systems</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:50:38'>institutional personal computing and intimate computing an intimate computer</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:50:43'>you can think of as being kind of like part of your clothing something that</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:50:47'>would be remarkable only if you didn't have it and one of the things we</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:50:51'>realized that if it was going to be portable like your course in California</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:50:55'>here will will weave computers into our</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:50:59'>t-shirts because again that's another way of thinking about what Moore's law</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:51:04'>is all about and we realized that the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:51:08'>the big differentiable factor for intimate computing was going to be</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:51:12'>Portability and it meant that the networking was going to be by wireless</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:51:16'>and so when you're looking for and this is again they're interesting things</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:51:21'>about should you even buy a PDA that can't do wireless communication and the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:51:26'>answer is no you shouldn't bother buying a PDA that can't do Wireless and try and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:51:31'>set what the criteria for that might be because that is when the leverage of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:51:35'>learning this new way of thinking about things starts getting into balance now</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:51:42'>once you have the world organized into</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:51:46'>separate belief systems you can start asking questions like how do you print and of course the institutional printing</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:51:52'>has these fan fold paper personal computers are not mobile so we decided</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:51:57'>well we better invent something like a laser printer but the intimate computer</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:52:04'>is far enough in the evolution of things</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:52:08'>so that we aren't going to want to print and in part because if you think about</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:52:13'>what angle Bart was doing there of dealing with hyperlinked stuff you can't print out hyperlink stuff you can't</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:52:19'>print out the world wide web and you can't print out dynamic simulations so</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:52:24'>all of the things that computers are actually good for and in fact the things that are going to be the biggest impact</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:52:29'>in your lives are not printable of course bills are printable</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:52:35'>so maybe I am overreaching here but I</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:52:40'>certainly remember a couple of years ago I found out that my doctor was still using this green and white stripe</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:52:45'>fan-fold paper I wondered what other old techniques he</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:52:50'>might still be hanging on to so again</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:53:02'>just two asking questions about this we realized that sort of a high-resolution</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:53:06'>printing approach to things required us to invent a new kind of computer ethics</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:53:11'>in fonts and eventually there'd be enough bits in the world by Moore's law</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:53:17'>to take every kind of medium that has ever been used to hold our</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:53:21'>representations and to make them all digital so that differentiates that</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:53:26'>third area just even how you measure performance response time from a</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:53:30'>time-sharing system we measure MIPS or megahertz when we buy personal computers</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:53:36'>which is completely irrelevant but the most important way to think about it is</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:53:40'>access can you sitting at your computer or with your computer with you out on</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:53:46'>the field or in a hospital room will you be able to access all of the different</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:53:50'>things that are relevant to what your task is can you bring those things to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:53:54'>your machine will they interoperate with the things that you have the answer</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:53:59'>right now is absolutely not you can't do any of those things and the things that</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:54:04'>you need to push for are these it's not a question of dealing with information but again being able to contextualize</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:54:09'>the information we realized new</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:54:14'>interview user interfaces would have to be invented when you only have a few</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:54:18'>thousand people learning a system like on an airlines reservation system you</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:54:23'>can train them but most of the people are going to use personal computers in</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:54:27'>the middle there aren't going to be in a situation to be trained there will be millions of them so the user interface</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:54:32'>has to be learn about by them and we realized again that by the time we got</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:54:37'>to intimate computing that the computers would be powerful enough to learn the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:54:41'>user all right so this another phase transition is tremendous is going to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:54:47'>happen just to the next few years my friend Nick Nicholas Negroponte</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:54:51'>has a couple of powerful images his images from Moore's law which is the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:54:57'>ability to make everything digital said to him that there's going to be incredible implosion between three</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:55:02'>fields that don't that didn't 20 years ago talk to each other at all publishing</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:55:08'>entertainment and computing they were all going to fuse into one thing another</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:55:15'>interesting idea he had that every signal that now traveled through the air</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:55:19'>like television was now going to travel</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:55:23'>through the ground there's going to be this change abrupt change would all go to cable and fiber and everything that</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:55:29'>now travels for the ground like telephones were going to be sent through</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:55:34'>the air right now of course this isn't</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:55:38'>going to be completely true but the way you get the truth is by completely exaggerated by throwing the quartz lamp</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:55:43'>on it - enough to get contrast and his</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:55:48'>insight was really good because mobility is part of the destiny of personal</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:55:53'>computing as the computers get smaller and smaller as people get more and more mobile there's only so much bandwidth</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:55:58'>out in the ether and therefore almost all of it should be used for a mobile</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:56:03'>digital whereas television and other kinds of things might as well go into</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:56:08'>the ground and there so this is an insight by knee growing to about 20</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:56:13'>years ago or so and here's my favorite eager Ponty one which is he said we'll</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:56:19'>know it's the future when my left cuff length can communicate with my right</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:56:23'>cuff linked by a satellite</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:56:29'>now again you could say well that's hyperbolic Nicholas but how many people</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:56:33'>here have found themselves at a restaurant table with somebody who else</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:56:38'>has a cellular phone anybody have you ever tried calling them</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:56:43'>you ever thought of where your call might have gone in order to get to the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:56:48'>other side of the table now it's the important thing for you to understand is</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:56:53'>that it is indeed totally possible in even in the next five years for your</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:56:58'>left cufflink to communicate with your right cufflink by satellite the same</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:57:03'>amount of power that your portable phones put out now is enough power to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:57:07'>get up through the ionosphere to a low-flying satellite and within the next</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:57:12'>five years we'll be start buying even the StarTAC of Motorola which is only a</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:57:16'>three and a half ounce phone could be fitted to go up into the ionosphere now</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:57:23'>of course we might want to have something more noble to do than just having our cuff links talk to each other</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:57:28'>but the metaphor here is the powerful one okay now if we go back to where is</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:57:35'>the computer you use what we decide to do at Xerox PARC is to implement the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:57:40'>middle one because that's where the technology was and the first proposal</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:57:45'>was to do something like this this is 1971 or so then in 1972 we built this</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:57:53'>machine which is the first thing to be like a workstation or like the Macintosh</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:57:59'>this is the first image you ever put up on it because you you all of a sudden</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:58:04'>you could paint on it you can make really nice characters on it you could</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:58:10'>have something to look more like printing quality text on it we invented</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:58:15'>desktop publishing and screen painting multimedia and the overlapping windows</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:58:20'>interface and now if we could go to the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:58:24'>let's go to the the overhead thing here</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:58:28'>I'll just show you that by 1975 about 25</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:58:34'>people had created this machine I talked about the interface desktop publishing</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:58:40'>object-oriented programming pages second laser printing the ethernet and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:58:45'>pierre-pierre client-server computing</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:58:49'>these are all the technologies that you're wrestling with now they're more than twenty years old now now what</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:58:56'>happened well nobody showed up at the wedding and here's what happens we go</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:59:03'>back to Kessler again and notice that</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:59:07'>when a technological advance comes along there's two basic ways you can think</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:59:12'>about doing this you can try and force it into being something that you already</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:59:16'>know like Gutenberg did with the with the printed Bible and that's what has</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:59:21'>happened or you can try and embrace it as a blue idea and try and think of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:59:26'>what's new and important about and let's leverage that but this pink way the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:59:31'>staying on the pink I think gives you an idea that the about the same mental</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:59:37'>effort as it took to invent the stuff in the first place is required for people</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:59:42'>to reinvent it in their mind there's a problem with imagination that's a little</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:59:49'>easier to learn calculus than to invent calculus from scratch but only a little</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:59:54'>bit easier we have to go through the same changes in process we have to build</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='00:59:59'>the new structures in our head similar to what Newton went through when he</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:00:03'>invented it we can be guided but the fact that we can be guided doesn't mean</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:00:08'>it's going to be easy and it generally isn't it's much easier to try and first</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:00:13'>reject it as Schopenhauer pointed out and then to say oh that's obvious</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:00:22'>because now it's been assimilated as being like everything else that's around and then ten years later the original</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:00:27'>rejecters claim to have invented it these things get absorbed in and very</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:00:32'>little changed takes place so I want to finish the talk by just exploring a</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:00:38'>couple of the ways that humans shoot themselves in the foot why can't we</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:00:43'>learn things faster and of course this is a talk all of its own but I'll just</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:00:48'>show you a couple of interesting notions here's another way of looking at the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:00:52'>goldfish bowl this is one that scientists particularly like it's an interesting fact about</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:00:58'>frogs that if you take their natural food which your flies paralyze them with</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:01:03'>a little chloroform so they're still alive put the flies around the frog the frog</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:01:07'>will starve to death because the frogs nervous system cannot see that these</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:01:12'>paralyzed flies are its natural food if</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:01:16'>you flip a little piece of oblong shaped cardboard at the Frog it will try and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:01:20'>eat it every time and one way of thinking about this is these little</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:01:25'>flies are actually the ideas that we need to have they're around us all the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:01:29'>time but we just can't see them we're always snapping at the cardboard that's</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:01:34'>in what our nervous system is willing to let us notice another interesting thing</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:01:42'>about some frogs is if you heat up the water slowly enough they will just</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:01:46'>remain in there and get cooked this is one of my images of Corporate America</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:01:57'>and of course the opposite image of this is also true which is when the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:02:02'>saber-tooth Tiger does appear of getting so frightened</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:02:06'>the only reflexive things are done so this the joke is well I don't have to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:02:10'>fix the roof because it isn't raining and when it's raining well I can't fix the roof because it's raining so nothing</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:02:15'>happens so both the extremes of this picture are important lots of different</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:02:22'>layers of our nervous system are set up to give us completely false information</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:02:27'>about the world there are dozens of these illusions where here the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:02:33'>rectangles of course are the same size you're all familiar from your psychology</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:02:38'>class as long ago but seeing isn't believing we see what we believe our</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:02:42'>beliefs about the world are what</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:02:46'>conditions what we're able to see here's a more profound one if you take a look</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:02:51'>at this upside-down face here can you</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:02:55'>see anything unusual about this what's the teeth or what teeth or side down</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:03:07'>okay so let's pretend we're in medical school actually I'm allowed to make these jokes</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:03:12'>is like one of my undergraduate majors was molecular biology it happened to be</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:03:17'>it was in a small College where the biology majors did exactly the same</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:03:21'>track as the pre-meds and so one of the things we got were all</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:03:25'>sorts of wonderful pre-med type jokes let's suppose we're in any normal</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:03:30'>American institution of learning where it's believed that knowledge is a fluid</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:03:35'>that you can transfer a drop by drop from the full teacher vessel to the empty student vessel and of course the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:03:42'>transfer is done in terms of English sentences so an English sentence about</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:03:47'>this picture is we've taken a picture of a young girl extracted her mouth and her</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:03:53'>eyes turned them upside down put them</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:03:57'>back into the picture and then turned the picture upside down I see you</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:04:01'>nodding that that sounds reasonable so you should be quite prepared for what it looks like I notice you had a completely</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:04:09'>different reaction but I didn't change the amount of information that I'd given</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:04:13'>you back I'm going to change this back because I've discovered that nobody will</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:04:17'>listen to me when it's on the other way</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:04:23'>this is why McDonald's doesn't run print ads saying that if you eat McDonald's</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:04:29'>hamburgers you'll become a better-looking person because in language is absurd but in fact what they</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:04:35'>do run our ads showing gorgeous looking people eating McDonald's hamburgers and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:04:40'>a different part of your brain does the inference that the advertisers want it</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:04:44'>that some psychologist once said to McLuhan why do you keep on making up all</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:04:50'>this obscure jargon why don't you read psychology books and use the correct</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:04:55'>terms for all of this stuff you're talking about and he says in the 50s he</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:04:59'>said all you psychologists only study right rats he says I like to see what advertisers do they are the ones who are</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:05:04'>really studying human beings so the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:05:08'>notion here is that even though we think of ourselves as a single identity our</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:05:13'>minds are actually made up of separately</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:05:17'>acting modules contending for a single body and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:05:21'>this one is actually this particular effect over here is understood quite well and it's actually built into most</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:05:27'>mammals this reaction that you have so if you try this out on a dog I suggest</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:05:31'>you pick a small one and one of the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:05:39'>biggest problems with teaching is that the parts of your mind that you want to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:05:44'>have learn often don't understand English this is why it's so hard to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:05:49'>teach many things in terms of English sentences because many cases you have to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:05:54'>do it you have to feel it you have to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:05:58'>see it okay so let's roll the next the last cut</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:06:03'>here I think everybody will recognize</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:06:08'>this go ahead of one of the most unforgettable news stories ever reported</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:06:14'>the scene Midland Texas 1987 another</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:06:20'>yard several youngsters had been playing</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:06:26'>here and one of them 18 month old Jessica McClure has toppled down into a</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:06:31'>narrow unused uncapped well she is</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:06:35'>wedged in there 22 feet below the ground dozens of rescue workers are frantically</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:06:40'>trying to get her out but it's a long difficult job hundreds of neighbors are</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:06:46'>watching praying Jessica's teenaged parents chip and sits</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:06:51'>on the floor stand there looking very young and very scared</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:06:55'>what's your prayer [Music]</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:06:59'>the media moves in like an army of course the biggest problem is the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:07:04'>rescuers if everybody is everybody remember this it's wonderful I've been</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:07:08'>able to use this over and in Europe and even in the Pacific Rim the entire world</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:07:13'>sat glued to their television sets for the 58 and a half hours she was in that</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:07:18'>well she's in there for more than two days and they finally got her out and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:07:22'>here's an interesting thing in those in those 58 and a half hours that all this</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:07:28'>activity was going on according to the World Health Organization 105 thousand</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:07:33'>children died of easily present preventable causes for lack of water for</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:07:38'>lack of a dollar inoculation and a fact</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:07:42'>there's about 10 million children die each year a holocaust worth of children</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:07:47'>each year from easily preventable cause now I think you are aware of this but</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:07:51'>this is a perfect example of the difference in human beings Minds between</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:07:55'>a real disaster in which people will</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:07:59'>risk their lives for perfect strangers and gang together and jump into rivers</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:08:04'>and lift cars off people go into burning buildings and wean the big the enormous</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:08:10'>true disasters of our time which aren't yet happening like the World Health</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:08:15'>Organization estimates 50 million people in the Pacific Rim alone are going to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:08:19'>die of AIDS in the next 10 years and 35</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:08:23'>million in Africa in spite of the fact that there's treatment for it so one of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:08:31'>the things you could say about us human beings is we have incredibly puny</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:08:36'>imaginations and especially we cannot</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:08:40'>look at an exponential curve that represents what it happens in an</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:08:44'>epidemic and have it the enormity the concrete enormity that would cause us to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:08:49'>muster ourselves into action to leap into our mind vividly enough in order</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:08:53'>for us to do something because it's one of the hallmarks of civilized societies</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:08:57'>that we have developed some of that imagination we plan a lot more than</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:09:01'>traditional societies do and B we plan because we do have that we are starting</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:09:06'>to develop some of that but I think the lack of vividness of imagination</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:09:10'>is probably the thing that holds most of us back from dealing with a new idea</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:09:14'>when it comes we just can't imagine what</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:09:18'>it's going to be like one of the ways of dealing with us by the way is to take</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:09:22'>yourself 15 years into the future and try and imagine things in which it would</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:09:28'>be ridiculous for them not to be there just from judging what I for instance</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:09:33'>Moore's law is going to go on for another 15 years that means every 18</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:09:37'>months the computing power will that you have on your desk right now will cost</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:09:42'>half as much or the size of the computer will be half that size carry that out</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:09:48'>for 15 years and you have something that you can put into a ring there will be</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:09:53'>many times more powerful than what you have on your compiled a and just try and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:09:57'>imagine what it would be like for that to be there and how ridiculous it would</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:10:02'>be if it didn't happen in fact it is going to happen so we have this little</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:10:13'>keyhole the keyhole we can see something</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:10:18'>in there it could be something simple and exciting like a little girl dropping</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:10:22'>into a well or it could be something really boring like the start of an epidemic we have to open up the keyhole</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:10:29'>and again this is another way of thinking about let's look at the blue stuff as well as the pink stuff we are</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:10:35'>great problem solvers this is one of the hallmarks of our civilization a problem</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:10:40'>solving is one of the worst things to have as a central goal too many</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:10:45'>mosquitoes let's dump the DDT in but in fact it wasn't a problem it was a system</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:10:52'>all sorts of other things are actually at work there and we wind up with</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:10:56'>something much worse than we have in fact there are three general ways of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:11:01'>solving problems this first one is the kind of the drunkards walk the random walk so I think of the executive way of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:11:07'>solving problems which is you can get two from A to B if you walk around</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:11:12'>randomly enough and eventually you get there and that's so much fun that</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:11:17'>exactly was keep on doing it and it's also an interesting</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:11:22'>explanation for why executives want B to be so close to a right because random</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:11:28'>walks work much better the closer B is to a now as problem solvers going to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:11:34'>college we learn to reduce the differences between us and our goal this</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:11:39'>is the general American way of doing things it's also a disaster because</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:11:43'>what's usually going on is that there are enormous Grand Canyon's that we</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:11:48'>can't see the world is not two-dimensional it's actually three-dimensional so they're Grand</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:11:52'>Canyon's the huge mountains and if we just plot towards the goal tell you an</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:11:58'>interesting story Fineman was convinced to work on the atomic bomb project</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:12:02'>because it looked like hitler was going to develop an atomic bomb and he tells</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:12:08'>the story that he was jumping around</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:12:12'>with everybody else when they tested the first atomic bomb and then all of a sudden they looked at each other and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:12:17'>realized that the war in Europe had been over for six months the sub goal had</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:12:22'>become the goal the solution of the problem had become the problem now the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:12:28'>way things really work well is the bottom one in which you have to go away</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:12:32'>from the goal until you find a superhighway superhighway is called a</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:12:37'>powerful idea you get on the superhighway it will take you over very</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:12:41'>close to B and lots of other interesting places and you get off not going away</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:12:46'>from the goal in order to find the superhighway is called scientific</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:12:50'>research it is the hardest thing to explain to potential funders why they</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:12:55'>should fund going away from the goals in order to get these super hires in spite</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:12:59'>of the fact that everything interesting that has happened over the last four</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:13:03'>hundred years has been from finding the super highways here's one of my favorite</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:13:09'>ones it's a hand axe and you notice that the one on the left is designed so that</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:13:14'>when you hit with it you grab it from the bottom when you hit with it it also hits you the more you chop with it the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:13:20'>more it chops up your hand then sometime later people invented a modified hand</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:13:27'>axe which had a blunt ER end that didn't chop up your hand as much when you chop things with it and I wonder if anybody</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:13:32'>in this room knows what the period of time between these two hand axe</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:13:36'>as was anybody got a guess</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:13:45'>okay two-hundred thousand two hundred thousand years but I'm sure that in many</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:13:50'>villages somebody was chopping with this</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:13:54'>thing and said man this hurts I'll just</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:14:00'>I'll just whack off the end of this thing and this is much better in the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:14:06'>persons chopping with it and some elder in the tribe came along and said what are you doing this person would be</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:14:12'>ejected from the tribe immediately or burned at the stake or something so one</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:14:21'>way of thinking about where we are is that we're essentially cave people</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:14:26'>carrying briefcases around our brains are roughly the same brains as far as</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:14:30'>anybody can tell us we had so long ago and whenever we act like a cave person</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:14:36'>in face of these new contexts we lose</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:14:40'>okay so here's the last idea how can we</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:14:44'>get around this well in any challenge we</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:14:51'>bring some ability or skill when the challenge and skill are pretty much</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:14:56'>matched we have this nice condition is called flow everybody has experienced</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:15:02'>this the time seems to pass very quickly the problem is is that the balance</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:15:06'>between challenge and skill is a very</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:15:10'>narrow one very chancy if the challenge is a little bit more than the skill we</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:15:15'>start getting anxious if the skill is</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:15:19'>more than the challenge we start getting bored and the problem is that most of</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:15:24'>the good learning that we do is done in this place where we're in this flow State</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:15:28'>so one of the ways we can deal with</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:15:33'>places that are anxious is to increase safety that allows the flow area that</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:15:37'>means we can take on more challenge than we have skill for and that allows us to</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:15:43'>do more learning but the most important one I think the hardest one for</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:15:47'>Americans to deal with is that what to do and we have more skill than the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:15:51'>challenge the answer is we have to increase our awareness we have to and</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:15:57'>one of the ways of doing that is increasing our stead cents over what it is that we're</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:16:01'>actually doing this is what allows us to widen out and getting get one of these aha and ahhs so if you want to get those</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:16:10'>terrific ideas you have hiding behind your good pink ones the best weapon for</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:16:17'>it is the one between your ears providing your that weapon is loaded</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:16:23'>thank you [Applause]</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:16:49'>thank you very very much dr. kay that concludes this morning session on to the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:16:54'>focus sessions thank you [Music]</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:17:04'>good morning ladies and gentlemen would</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:17:08'>you please take your seats welcome to the association's final</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='01:17:12'>plenary session our presider this morning is the president of the</subtitle>
 +
<subtitle id='4637'>association dr. Jordan Cohen </subtitle>

Latest revision as of 22:33, 5 December 2017

[Music]
good morning ladies and gentlemen would you please take your seats welcome
to the association's final plenary session our presider this morning is the
president of the association dr. Jordan Cohen
morning everyone I'm really excited about the opportunity to participate in
this morning's session before I introduce our speaker though I would
like to encourage those of you in the back to come forward there are plenty of seats up for that they're going to be a
number of graphical elements to the talk
this morning that you'll certainly benefit from being closer to see so if
you want to come forward please do and I've been assured that our speakers will not mind if you get up and leave early
if that's necessary so come forward if you can well this is a very special
session we've entitled it information as
the bridge to the future in keeping with
our theme about building bridges of the future and as I mentioned in my remarks on Friday clearly one of the major
themes we wanted to have clearly in evidence at this meeting was the fact
that information and the incredible revolution that's occurring in the
information sciences offers all of us in academic medicine I think an unjust an
unprecedented opportunity to make quantum leap forward in the way we do
everything that we're responsible for in our institution so I really commend you
to listen carefully to what Alan Kay has to say this morning because I think it
has tremendous relevance for for everything that we do and I think those
who still believe that this is a passing phase a passing fancy really do so at
their peril because I think there are a few advances in technology that that are
as as exciting and as meaningful as what is going on in information ability to
harness information to create it to collect it customize it organize it
disseminated ability to do all those things I think are clearly going to be
the things that sort out the winners from the losers and the leaders from the
followers in the next century and beyond
well someone who has always been aware of this particular attribute of
technology as Alan Kay always a visionary he is credited with developing
the idea of the personal computer the concept of a new
generation of laptop computers and the overlapping window interfaces that we
now use and take sort of pretty much for granted as as as if it were always there
while a scientist at Parc Xerox labs he
led one of the research teams whose work ultimately led to the development of the workstation the Macintosh computer the
Ethernet the laser printer and the networked client servers just a few of
the minor tools that are now in evidence later he was chief scientist at Atari a
that was before he joined Apple Computer in 1984 where he stayed until literally
just a few weeks ago when he joined Walt Disney Company as a Disney fellow and he
is now the driving force in Walt Disney's Imagineering x' research and
development organization where he works to find innovative ways to enhance the
educational and entertainment value of Disney's offerings dr. K seems to have
been on hand whenever the big events in the computing field took place and I
want to give you just one quote from him yet that's published in the Nicholas
Negroponte EES book the quote from dr. K is that point of view is worth 80 IQ
points think about that ones point of
view is worth 80 IQ points so as you
listen to dr. K's remarks keep in mind that we are looking for that boost in IQ
in academic medicine and I'm really greatly honored to introduce to you Alan
Kay
thank you
thank you well gosh I just didn't think anybody would come out at nine o'clock
in the morning on Sunday thank you I'll try and make it worthwhile for you maybe
the first idea we should take issue with or at least explore a little bit is the
notion that information is the bridge to the future and I can't think of a better
way of doing that than to take you back
to a Harvard commencement Harvard
graduation a few years ago and we follow
an NSF camera team right after the
diplomas have been awarded they asked a few simple questions of some of the
graduating seniors alumni and faculty so let's roll that first tape and check
this out
[Music]
Aaron Lee fingerman candidate in art
[Applause]
despite a lifetime of the very best education students in our classrooms are
failing to learn science many of these students will graduate from college with
the same scientific misconceptions that they had on entering grade school to
test how a lifetime of Education affects our understanding of science we ask
these recent graduates some simple questions in astronomy consider for
example that the causes of the seasons is a topic taught in every standard curriculum okay I think the seasons
happens because as the earth travels around the Sun it gets nearer to the Sun
which produces warmer weather and gets farther away which produces colder
weather and that's it and hence the seasons how hot it is or how cold it is
at any given time of the year has to do with the the closeness of the earth to
the Sun during the seasonal periods the earth goes round the Sun and and it gets
hotter when we get closer to the Sun and it gets colder when we get further away from the Sun these graduates like many
of us think of the Earth's orbit as a highly exaggerated ellipse even though
the Earth's orbit is very nearly circular with distance producing
virtually no effect on the seasons we carry with us the strong incorrect
belief that changing distance is responsible for the seasons I took
physics and planetary motion and relativity waves I've never really had a
scientific background whatsoever and I and I got through school without having it I've gotten very far without having
it I had quite a bit of science in high school yeah through physics
want first year in two years of chemistry regardless of their science
education 21 of the 23 randomly selected
students faculty and alumni of Harvard University revealed misconceptions when
asked to explain either the seasons or the phases of the Moon when it's further
away from the Sun then it gets colder the earth
position interferes with the reflection
of the Sun against the moon so I think
we can see that the real curriculum at Harvard is confidence 101
[Applause] actually when I when I first saw this
tape a couple years ago I kept on waiting for NSF to ask the logical
second questions of these people and they never did because they were on a
they're on one track but it happened
that a couple of weeks after I saw this this tape the first time I had to give a talk over at UCLA to basically a
first-year graduate course that had some also had some seniors who are going to
graduate and a few professors so the end
of the course I asked for volunteers to come up and talk to me afterwards and I
got a chance to ask the very same questions about the seasons and about
the phases of the Moon and I found about the same roughly 95 percent had serious
misconceptions the the NSF here cites 21
out of 23 had serious misconceptions about one of the other or both and I
found about the same but of course I got a chance to ask the second question so
the people who had this notion about the
relative distance of the Earth from the Sun being the cause of the seasons I
asked them well tell me when it's summer up here in North America do you know
what season it is down in South America in Australia and what is it it's winter
everybody knows that and these kids all did and then I just did one of these
Jack Benny Waits
and the wheels started slowly turning
and to the the kids and professors that
thought that the phases of the Moon had something to do with the earth being in
the way which of course is what causes lunar eclipses I asked them will tell me
your entire life have you ever seen the Sun and the moon in the sky at the same
time and have you sure everybody has and
often the moon is in phase so again that
that long pause while they struggle to realize what was actually going on and
my claim here is that NSF was barking up
the wrong tree we have to be very very happy that these kids could not remember
the explanation of the seasons or the phases and the moon that they were
taught in grade school because we learned something the problem here is not a science problem the problem is
what I would call a math problem in the sense that math is about how we can
infer things from premises and every
single one of these kids had the information to contradict the very
theory they were formulating so confidently and couldn't find that
information it was buried somewhere else
even though it was about the same subject that's a math problem it's a
thinking problem and one way of putting
talking about information here is that most people in fact in a conference like
this most people come to conferences like this in search of information but
in fact most of us and these kids especially what they need needed was not
more information but more context they couldn't deal with the information that
they had in an interesting way or what we would call an operational way so an
image for that I'll go to the slides
here is my favorite saying of McLuhan which is I don't know who discovered
water but it wasn't a fish and of course he wasn't interested in fish or water he
meant us where the fish and the water is our beliefs
now here's an interesting thing to think about which is if we could directly
perceive reality we would then have nothing to argue with anybody else about
because there's just one reality and if we're perceiving that reality that's all
there is but in fact the reason we're constantly fighting with each other all
over the earth for thousands of years is because we don't perceive reality at all
what we do is we make up stories about it those stories are beliefs they become
the goldfish bowl at the we swing or swim around in and what happens is that
at some point most of these great stories we make up get reified by us
into dogma that is we start claiming these stories of reality and then all of
a sudden our stories are different from other people's stories we think they're reality and all of a sudden we have
incredible conflict so this is something that happens over and over again let me
ask the AV people to keep the slides on
so here's another way of looking at this idea here I flatten out the goldfish
bowl into a plain pink plain and this is
an idea from Arthur Kessler who was a terrific novelist who became a cognitive
science at Stanford late in life and his
way of thinking of it is that we're kind of like ants wandering through a context
terrain in this case it's colored pink as we snake our way around through it
every once in a while we might have a little blue thought but our entire life
of parents and culture and school just
smashes that blue thought right back down into pinkness and when we make
progress we make progress by advancing in the pink domain for instance the the
railroads in the 20s and 30s never
invested a cent in either airplane
factories or airline travel everything they thought about was making well
better better track faster locomotives meanwhile the
competition that was going to do them in was flying up above them where they weren't even looking there were
two-dimensional people optimizing
locally and missing the big picture and this is a theme that this is one of the
most important themes it's something what's interesting about this is
something that everybody knows about it's like the theme of hubris in Greek
tragedy that most of what goes wrong with human beings has to do with our
capacity for overreaching we all know
that but in fact we keep on doing it there's one of these things that has to surface then Kessler says every once in
a while when you're maybe when you're taking a shower out jogging waking up in
the morning these constraint mechanisms
for making you be a pink type person let go and all of a sudden you have an
insight you see that what you thought was a pink thing is that suddenly a blue
thing and this is an incredible revelation and in fact it sometimes has
the trappings of religion and it's like
it comes from God almost and Kessler pointed out something that was quite
quite interesting says if you're telling a joke then the reaction is ha ha if
it's science or die I guess medicine
it's AHA or sometimes it's oh and an art
it's ah because in each one of these
cases what we have here is what Kessler calls the act of creation is to see
something that you thought was one kind of thing to be able to see it completely differently and it's this kind of change
in point of view that I meant when I said point of view is worth ad IQ points
if you imagine a person like a Leonardo
with a 250 IQ or more 10,000 years ago
or even in the time that Leonardo lived you can see how little a person with
unbelievable IQ could actually accomplish compared to what's been
accomplished by the shifts in point of view that have taking place more
gradually and given as more powerful tools for viewing the world and of course here's one really
unpleasant thought which is in order to get those blue ideas you have to have
some blue knowledge and so in fact some
of the most highly educated people I know are completely uncreated because
they've only got good at pink things a lot of engineers I know are that way
I dare say more than a few doctors because when you get really really good
at that thing it is so it so creates its own reality that it's hard to imagine
that there's anything else there and the the new ideas are pretty much invisible
that's in part what was happening to these to these college students another
thing was happening to them NSF goes in a little bit is that the way that they
remembered things that they had learned was not what mathematicians would call
operational learning or scientists would call operational learning that was
compartmentalized learning the learning was kind of in terms of stories or
almost like learning proverbs King
Solomon was the wisest person in the Bible and it says why because he knew
3,000 proverbs which is more than anybody else and the way a proverbs work
is if you come home from a trip and your significant other is really glad to see
you then the reason for that is absence made the heart grow fonder but if you
come home from a trip and your significant other is not particularly glad to see you then what's the reason
for that out of sight out of mind
if you're faced with a situation that
really confirms one of your beliefs then
you say where there's smoke there's fire but if you're faced with a situation
that you don't happen to believe in beforehand what you say is you can't
tell a book by its cover and in fact this is why proverbs are mostly used in
literate semi illiterate or illiterate societies because if you list out the
Proverbs in fact this is one of the big transitions in Greek thought was when
they started actually putting out there but their beliefs about legal systems by
chiseling them on the wall walls of things so the citizens could read them
they started discovering that when looked at that way things that it seemed
perfectly reasonable in fact the law is all about case based reasoning these
under these circumstances the following thing happened back then they started
noticing that that if you compare this one with this one over here out here in
your visual field they started contradicting each other and
contradiction is actually one of the major bases for doing real mathematical
kind of thinking so the part of the
problem with these students was that they were embedded we could say in the
most technologically rich culture in the
world and we can imagine that every single one of them had access to
personal computers all the way through school and at college and yet their
thinking patterns were being done in a Neolithic form in a preliterate form
their knowledge was being compartmentalized in forms of things of
Proverbs in which contradictions didn't matter to them so one way of thinking
about this is that we have a natural way of thinking about things built into us
which is to think about things in terms of stories one of the problems with
stories as I mentioned is this this tolerance of contradiction one way of
thinking your own experience if you see a movie today you really like
or play and it happens to contradict in every way shape or in form the movie you
saw last week that you like it's not going to bother you not going to bother
you at all because stories create their
own context you evaluate them by how good they are right now this is why it's
very dangerous when you think of the
difference between going into a theatrical context where you willingly
give yourself up to the context that's been created on the stage by the author
and by the actors by the scenic designers and the almost exactly same
environment of a political rally all the
people darkroom music rich words rolling forth and so
forth and it's quite clear that some
other mechanism has to interpose itself of saying in the theater well it's okay
for me to give myself over to this fantasy land but I think it's clear that
in a political context it makes no sense at all to give ourselves over to that
fantasy land but in fact most of us do and that's why politicians keep on doing
it so - two other big systems of
thinking that have been invented that are not directly built-in to us we have
to learn how to do them our logic which I think we're all familiar with which is kind of a taking thought and making it
into a mechanism where you link one thought to another through inferential
chains of thing is there's one break in the infirm an inferential change then
the Machine doesn't run and the idea that we're thinking about doesn't doesn't hold water that has been the
basis of many different systems including the arguments that depose the
monarchy that created this country and then a more recent kind of thinking
which you could call ecological you could call the first story logical the
second one logical and the third one ecological in which what we're dealing
with is really systems that have the
same complexity as the interior of cells or the interior of tissues
the complexity of the human body or Ecology's in which if something goes
wrong it doesn't kill off the organism there are dozens and dozens of
homeostatic mechanisms there to
constantly bring the system back to a kind of dynamic equilibrium those
systems are just starting to be studied and particularly just in the last thirty
years or so because the study of these last kind of thinking is very much
facilitated by having computers to help you with you can think of the logical
thought systems as being facilitated by having a particularly in particular
alphabetic type reading and writing they
came in at the same time and if you think about it for five minutes or so
you can see why reading and writing and particularly alphabetic reading and
writing might have something to do with evolving logical thought I'm going to
talk about that and a little bit more so part of the problem is that these kids
who went to Harvard never learned how to do either of these invented kinds of
systems that have been so important over the last three or four hundred years it
simply wasn't part of their education at any point meanwhile they're taking courses in mathematics and science but
they were learning them in in this proverbial form certainly one of the
most disputing experiences I have ever had are the occasions where I've wound
up have trying to have scientific conversations with high school science teachers and by and large they simply do
not understand what science is at all they teach it as religion it is taught
as something that is this was found out by great people it's true you have to
learn what the truth is you have to be able to regurgitate that truth and so forth very discouraging so the important
thing about this goldfish bowl metaphor is that the human mental iam our ability
to think is because of the way it's set up basically always forces us to be in
some sort of goldfish bowl sometimes we can pretend to be in more than one
goldfish bowl at once but nobody has
found a way of training us out of this particular context dependent way of
thinking about things but of course the culture that we're born into and even so
we can think of being in the green culture might be incredibly helpful if
we have diabetes some cultures are have
a context that allows us to do something serious about in other cultures can't we
can also think of this green goldfish
bowl is something that we might actually create this has been the big thing
that's happened in the last 400 years is this understanding this enough so we realize hey we can create systems of
thought calculus is an example of creating a system of thought it's it's a
completely different way of looking at the world in terms of the integration of
differential equations a very very powerful idea not something that's built
into our nervous system at all and the the halving of it turns a person with an
ordinary IQ into something at the level of a Newton that's where the original
idea of the ad IQ points came from and
of course any field like medicine or
computer science or science in the large itself has to have this in mind as it's
trying to progress so Joseph Campbell once pointed out that the biggest
problem with with religions and the
origin of religions is that most of them he said came from social geniuses having
an incredibly useful insights about the way people should live but the problem
and these insights being abstract are
put in some kind of metaphor usually a story if you look back
historically to try and get what the import of this new insight was but a few
generations later the followers of this religion have reified it into dogma that
as the metaphor is taken literally and now people are supposed to believe in
the metaphor itself and forget what the actual insight is and we see that
happening over and over again in science so Thomas Kuhn who wrote a book about
the structure of scientific revolutions pointed out that even in science the
place where people are the most concerned about what's really going on
in trying to not get fooled by their senses in the context in which they live
he said even in science revolutions take about 25 years and the reason he gave
for that is that you have to let the old scientists die off because once you get
good at something there's less and less motivation to get out of that pink
context once you've optimized being able to do things in the pink so another way
of thinking about what I'm talking about here is that we mainly get smarter by
changing the way we represent our ideas this is not an informational idea at all
but an architectural idea here's something that your kids will love you
for if you copy down these numbers from 1 to 9 exactly as they appear there and
you can play this game with them you pick a number they pick a number you
pick a number they pick a number the first person who's any of who three of
whose numbers first person who picks three numbers that add up to 15 wins and
you can always beat your kid doing this
and they will not like that but they will love you when you show them how you're doing it so they can always beat
their friends and what you have done they're playing with this but what
you've done is simply to take this and draw four lines and now can you see what
game you're playing what game is it
Tic Tac Toe something everybody knows how to play with and when we now see
that these numbers are a magic square in which every column Row and diagonal adds
up to 15 so this is a simple example of what calculus does for us which it
basically pre computes powerful results
in an area that's of use to us and gives us a framework for thinking about now
this is not the same thing as information this is context ting
meanwhile the poor kid over there is struggling having to remember kid is
still in an oral Society the kid has to remember the numbers that have already
been picked and doesn't have this automatic computation mechanism working
for them that's basically what we're out after when we create a new kind of
goldfish ball now what I want to do now
is turn to some inventions in personal
computing that we made a few years ago give you a little bit of a sense of how
they how they happened and why they've
taken so long still are taking so long to get into the general culture in
particular in a way that would help you the genesis for personal computing goes
all the way back to 1945 we just celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of
this last year a bunch of us people who
have a lot of gray in their hair met at MIT to commemorate the 50th anniversary
of Vannevar Bush's idea of Memex Bush was President Roosevelt science
advisor and in 1945 he wrote an Atlantic Monthly article called as we may think
and in there he just said in not too
many years from now everybody will be able to have in their home a desk and in
the interior of this desk will be the equivalent of a small-town libraries
worth of books five to ten thousand volumes held on high-resolution optical
storage and we'll be able to look at all of this wealth of information with
multiple screens on top of the desk will be put in information they'll be both
pictures and text and most importantly he said there will be cross connective
trails he called them that will cross connect up the information and start
turning the information into knowledge and even maybe into wisdom and he said
that they'll even be a profession born with this device which he called
pathfinding so there'll be people called path finders whose job will be to find
interesting connections between the raw stuff that's here and they'll sell these
connections as as products so this was
bushes bushes notion and it happened that a lot of the people that had something to do with personal computing
were aware of this Douglas Engelbart whom you'll meet in a minute read this
he was in the Navy in the Pacific as I guess a 19 year old or so read in 1945 I
was only 5 years old in 1945 but I came across it when I was a teenager in the
50s and other people were captivated because who wouldn't want to have 10,000
volumes worth of the best that humans have ever found out all cross-index and
linked so that you could add to it and etc etc I mean it's an incredibly
romantic vision and around the end of
the 50s and early 60s people started
doing something about this already in the late 50s people had
started writing papers saying the destiny of information science is that
before too many years are out we will have what was termed then an information
utility and the idea was to think of
something like the power and lighting utility that we have for bringing in
water and gas and electricity that's now
in a one-for-one correspondence with our
with our our houses with our places of
living and among them John McCarthy said there's going to be an information
utility like that as to is everybody will have a terminal at home and be able to
connect be connected into the world of information and this was literally the
the first solid proposal for what became
the Internet there's a direct chain from this proposal through the internet that
we have today the people who did the internet were part of this early group
and I show you here just two interesting things from the very early 60s 1960 to
the invention of computer graphics by Ivan Sutherland which was done by the
way on a on a computer the size of this
room the last computer in the u.s. large enough to have its own roof it was the
building and we like to think of that time of when there was only one personal
computer which was when Ivan Sutherland used it from 3 to 6 o'clock early in the
morning was about the power of an X T of
10 years ago computer graphics was
invented on that and there was already a thing that I think of as the first personal computer called the link also
done at Lincoln labs at the same time by Wes Clark and you see that one of its
design criteria was that you should be able to look over it literally Wes Clark
did not walk this thing looming over you he wanted it to be something that you
could loom over it and that was one of the impulses towards personal computing
and then Engle Bart came along and what
I'm going to do is show you the the first cut on the second videotape here
which is Engelbart around 1966 to 68 and
I think you'll see it's a very modern picture so let's roll that tape that's
not it but now it's it
so here's a photograph taken around 1966
down at s RI and Menlo Park I daresay
most of you in this room do not have a two page display on your desk e so I'll
say I'd like to go to produce but I'd like to go to produce they get big I
like to say one branch only and let me look just that low can I see it
oh I can say I'd like to see one line
only I can see it but there's another
thing that I can do there's a root I said I have here
so here I'm afraid I'll need a different pictures of you so here's what I do with
a picture drawing capability here's a slight and lamp if I start from work and
here's the route I seem to have to go to pick up all the materials and that's my
plan for getting home tonight but if I want to I can say the library what am I
supposed to pick up there I can just point to that you know oh I see overdue
books and all while there was a statement there with that name on it go back what if I what's my supposed to
pick up the drugstore mm-hmm I see you've everything all right
[Music] can do things if I want we'll just say I'd like to interchange the Protestant
and materials bingo and they're all numbered right and if I care to look and
are changing them very quickly cans are going to get interchanged with Prados
they do it and all gets renumber okay so
does 30 years ago and you might have noticed that the response he was getting
on this system was a little faster than you get on your PCs today so it's
something we can talk about later but it's an interesting phenomenon that of
the many interesting things that Engelbart was the first of course he was
the inventor of the mouse and the inventor of hypertext that you see there
so what what people are just starting to experience on the Internet now through
the World Wide Web is like what he had 30 years ago in Menlo Park and the
important thing for you to realize is that there was nothing about the technology back then that precluded you
from having it back then nothing it was
possible on the tiny that machine he was
on served 20 people and it had a memory
a ram of a grand total of 192 K 192 K so
it was all possible back then and one of the people sponsors he went to to try
and get them to take it over and make it part of our lives was AT&T and they
threw him out on their ear he just they just had no sense of what
it was that he was actually driving at the other thing it was really interesting about angle Bart is he said
way way back in the beginning that most interesting things that people do are
done by more than one person working together and so his idea it was
I don't want as he likes to say I he says I didn't want to invent personal
computing I wanted to invent group computing that he want what he wanted to
do is boost the collective IQ of human groups working on important things
together these ideas that he has and he
would be a good speaker to have maybe next year because he gives a great talk
which is essentially the talk that I heard him give back in 1966 that I think
is more compelling to most people today than it was back then people are now
starting to get to see this is a blue idea right and it's only after 30 years
of peach will grudgingly starting to get
involved with these things that they can understand what this genius was able to
think out think of right out of the blocks so in 67 this is my first
personal computer was a desktop computer for a very special desk namely those
made out of steel it's a weight about 400 pounds but it it had all of the
paraphernalia had a tablet instead of a
mouse so you could draw on it and it had
actual windows that clipped had many it
had multiple views of things at many of the paraphernalia that were used to
today and while I was working on this
machine I visited RAND Corporation in
Santa Monica and saw something that really blew my mind and this isn't now
in the summer of 68 so let's show the second cut on that tape here's the
system without a keyboard
we erase a flow arrow then move the connector out of the way so that we may
draw a box in its place recognizes he wants a box and makes one now it's
recognizing his handwriting the printing in the box is being used as commentary
only in this case the box is slightly too large so he may change its size
that's where modern window control came from literally then draw flow from the
connector to the box attach a decision
element to the box and draw a flow from it to scan we then erased the floor
arrows attached to the process post new area and move the box to a new position
this allows us to draw a new box okay
now you might have noticed that that system works a little bit better than
the hand writing systems you might have seen recently and again the reason here
is even more interesting which is people in the computer field are almost
completely disinclined to look back in the past for any good ideas that might
have been done this is in part why systems are worse today than angle Bart
conceived of them and it's in part why the pocket organizers the PDAs today are
worse than these people that ran conceived of them people that ran were
actually much better than the average programmer a designer of today but in
fact it didn't even matter because the program or designer of today is
egotistical II involved in doing their own invention
even if it's worse and because you the
public don't know about this stuff in the past you don't even complain about it there's an interesting thing to think
of this these videos are still shocking to people today now the same summer I
visit a seymour papert and saw that he was trying to do something really
incredibly interesting which he was trying to get kids to think in these
more powerful forms by getting them to do certain kinds of things with
computers to make simulations on computers of complex ideas and learn the
ideas from the inside by actually constructing them that changed my life
completely that was one of the biggest blue things that ever happened to me and
flying back on the plane to Utah in 68 I
designed this in May when I got back there I made this cardboard model of
what I thought a children's computer would look like which later became known as the Dynabook and we made it Hollow
we filled it with lead pellets to see how heavy you could make it before you didn't want to carry it anymore on the
notion that portability meant you can carry something else too it's not point
five herniation spur block and we
discovered that the maximum weight you could make this machine was two pounds
and I believe that we'll find that when the industry eventually gets around to
making reasonable ones of these things that the maximum weight of those things
will be two pounds so this became kind
of a holy grail now the idea of let's let's not worry about adults anymore
they're hopeless but let's actually try and make something that will help
children go up to be more interesting than the than the average adult is and
the reason we knew this would work is that Gordon Moore had started noticing
that there was a possibility of doubling
the number of components on a silicon chip and having their size and so forth
somewhere between the rate of a factor of two every year and a factor of two
every two years and in fact the interior
jacketed jaggedly lying there is what actually happened so here's the guy who
gave us a 30 year prediction of exactly what was going to happen in silicon you
know what IBM and Dec didn't pay any attention to this that's why they're
almost out of business today but some of
us started thinking about wow all we have to do is go out you know because
that's a factor of two every 18 months or so is about a factor
of a hundred every decade so we thought
gee whiz factor of hundred every decade in ten years we'll be able to have a
machine that has the same computing power for a hundredth of the cost and it
will be one hundredth the size incredible and so we could start
thinking about how long it was going to take to do these various technologies
and here's another thing just to give you yet another understanding of how
long ago these ideas came about the whole idea of virtual reality goes back
to the mid 60s and was actually implemented in the late 60s so here's
the first real reality helmet done by Ivan Sutherland again at the University
of Utah in 1969 and again this is an
idea that's taking and I think doctors especially can understand why being able
to deal with things by immersing yourself inside the computer rather than
having the computer outside of you might be incredibly useful for learning
understanding communicating and so forth
well at this period there were three
ways of thinking about doing interactive computing there was a really expensive
terminal into a mainframe there is my
little desktop computer the Flex machine and then this new idea that I'd had of
the laptop computer and that reminded me
of something I had seen before which was
the history of printing manuscript
Bibles for instance cost millions of dollars and often had precious gems on
them because the gems were nothing compared to the 10 or 15 years it took
to have one of these things copied and made how many people in the room think
they have 372 or more books in home we
all probably do and you might why did he say 372 well its hat it happens that in
the Year 1400 they took a census of the Vatican Library which was the one of the
largest libraries in Europe and it exactly 372 books in it the richest man
in France the brother of the king is about ten times as rich as the King Jean
Duke Du Barry was a bibliophile and had many books created for him and he when
he died the inventory of his library was
154 books this is in 1435 so this first
phase of books and interactive computing
only an institution could own then in
this middle phase came the Gutenberg Bible which looked as much like a
hand-done Bible as possible Gutenberg even had two hundred and fifty three
separate characters in his type font so he could mimic every abbreviation and
style that the Gothic scribes had and as you see there the Gutenberg Bible was
actually hand illuminated so they put it through the press then they would have
people come in who had worked on manuscript books to put illuminations and because they wanted this thing to
look exactly what if they thought a book should be liked and these Gutenberg Bibles if you've seen they're about this
big big heavy bulky things and then
something really interesting happened about fifty years later around the Year 1500 Aldous whose last name was not
pagemaker [Laughter]
Aldus Manutius a Venetian printer
decided that book should be this size fact the size the most books are today
was specified by Aldous and what's
particularly poignant about the story is the reason that books are this size
today and this is something you'll never forget now whenever you look at a book is to realize that Aldous decided they
should be this size by going out into Venice and measuring people's saddlebags
because the first run from his press was called the portable library in the books
now instead of being millions of dollars in these institutional books or sixty
thousand dollars in the case of a Gutenberg Bible were now down to about
$100 a piece and Aldous was actually the
faux mentor of the real revolution in printing now think about this the fifty
years between Gutenberg and Aldous in the history of printing did not count
nothing that happened in those 50 years is like what happened since then guess
where we are in the history of personal computing we are squarely in the middle
trying to as McLuhan said driving faster and faster into the future but only
steering by looking in the rearview mirror and in fact it was that was what
it was the similarity of the Flex machine personal computer to time
sharing terminal it made me realize hey wait a minute we're not even thinking here we're just slavishly reusing forms
there's no reason why a personal computer should look like a time sharing
terminal we just didn't know any more about what they should look like then Gutenberg
knew what a book should look like so that means that any belief systems
you're likely to have generated about computing today are likely to be totally
obsolete over the next ten years because we are now going through this phase
transition to this third form of computing and I back then in the late
60s I gave names these phases or belief systems
institutional personal computing and intimate computing an intimate computer
you can think of as being kind of like part of your clothing something that
would be remarkable only if you didn't have it and one of the things we
realized that if it was going to be portable like your course in California
here will will weave computers into our
t-shirts because again that's another way of thinking about what Moore's law
is all about and we realized that the
the big differentiable factor for intimate computing was going to be
Portability and it meant that the networking was going to be by wireless
and so when you're looking for and this is again they're interesting things
about should you even buy a PDA that can't do wireless communication and the
answer is no you shouldn't bother buying a PDA that can't do Wireless and try and
set what the criteria for that might be because that is when the leverage of
learning this new way of thinking about things starts getting into balance now
once you have the world organized into
separate belief systems you can start asking questions like how do you print and of course the institutional printing
has these fan fold paper personal computers are not mobile so we decided
well we better invent something like a laser printer but the intimate computer
is far enough in the evolution of things
so that we aren't going to want to print and in part because if you think about
what angle Bart was doing there of dealing with hyperlinked stuff you can't print out hyperlink stuff you can't
print out the world wide web and you can't print out dynamic simulations so
all of the things that computers are actually good for and in fact the things that are going to be the biggest impact
in your lives are not printable of course bills are printable
so maybe I am overreaching here but I
certainly remember a couple of years ago I found out that my doctor was still using this green and white stripe
fan-fold paper I wondered what other old techniques he
might still be hanging on to so again
just two asking questions about this we realized that sort of a high-resolution
printing approach to things required us to invent a new kind of computer ethics
in fonts and eventually there'd be enough bits in the world by Moore's law
to take every kind of medium that has ever been used to hold our
representations and to make them all digital so that differentiates that
third area just even how you measure performance response time from a
time-sharing system we measure MIPS or megahertz when we buy personal computers
which is completely irrelevant but the most important way to think about it is
access can you sitting at your computer or with your computer with you out on
the field or in a hospital room will you be able to access all of the different
things that are relevant to what your task is can you bring those things to
your machine will they interoperate with the things that you have the answer
right now is absolutely not you can't do any of those things and the things that
you need to push for are these it's not a question of dealing with information but again being able to contextualize
the information we realized new
interview user interfaces would have to be invented when you only have a few
thousand people learning a system like on an airlines reservation system you
can train them but most of the people are going to use personal computers in
the middle there aren't going to be in a situation to be trained there will be millions of them so the user interface
has to be learn about by them and we realized again that by the time we got
to intimate computing that the computers would be powerful enough to learn the
user all right so this another phase transition is tremendous is going to
happen just to the next few years my friend Nick Nicholas Negroponte
has a couple of powerful images his images from Moore's law which is the
ability to make everything digital said to him that there's going to be incredible implosion between three
fields that don't that didn't 20 years ago talk to each other at all publishing
entertainment and computing they were all going to fuse into one thing another
interesting idea he had that every signal that now traveled through the air
like television was now going to travel
through the ground there's going to be this change abrupt change would all go to cable and fiber and everything that
now travels for the ground like telephones were going to be sent through
the air right now of course this isn't
going to be completely true but the way you get the truth is by completely exaggerated by throwing the quartz lamp
on it - enough to get contrast and his
insight was really good because mobility is part of the destiny of personal
computing as the computers get smaller and smaller as people get more and more mobile there's only so much bandwidth
out in the ether and therefore almost all of it should be used for a mobile
digital whereas television and other kinds of things might as well go into
the ground and there so this is an insight by knee growing to about 20
years ago or so and here's my favorite eager Ponty one which is he said we'll
know it's the future when my left cuff length can communicate with my right
cuff linked by a satellite
now again you could say well that's hyperbolic Nicholas but how many people
here have found themselves at a restaurant table with somebody who else
has a cellular phone anybody have you ever tried calling them
you ever thought of where your call might have gone in order to get to the
other side of the table now it's the important thing for you to understand is
that it is indeed totally possible in even in the next five years for your
left cufflink to communicate with your right cufflink by satellite the same
amount of power that your portable phones put out now is enough power to
get up through the ionosphere to a low-flying satellite and within the next
five years we'll be start buying even the StarTAC of Motorola which is only a
three and a half ounce phone could be fitted to go up into the ionosphere now
of course we might want to have something more noble to do than just having our cuff links talk to each other
but the metaphor here is the powerful one okay now if we go back to where is
the computer you use what we decide to do at Xerox PARC is to implement the
middle one because that's where the technology was and the first proposal
was to do something like this this is 1971 or so then in 1972 we built this
machine which is the first thing to be like a workstation or like the Macintosh
this is the first image you ever put up on it because you you all of a sudden
you could paint on it you can make really nice characters on it you could
have something to look more like printing quality text on it we invented
desktop publishing and screen painting multimedia and the overlapping windows
interface and now if we could go to the
let's go to the the overhead thing here
I'll just show you that by 1975 about 25
people had created this machine I talked about the interface desktop publishing
object-oriented programming pages second laser printing the ethernet and
pierre-pierre client-server computing
these are all the technologies that you're wrestling with now they're more than twenty years old now now what
happened well nobody showed up at the wedding and here's what happens we go
back to Kessler again and notice that
when a technological advance comes along there's two basic ways you can think
about doing this you can try and force it into being something that you already
know like Gutenberg did with the with the printed Bible and that's what has
happened or you can try and embrace it as a blue idea and try and think of
what's new and important about and let's leverage that but this pink way the
staying on the pink I think gives you an idea that the about the same mental
effort as it took to invent the stuff in the first place is required for people
to reinvent it in their mind there's a problem with imagination that's a little
easier to learn calculus than to invent calculus from scratch but only a little
bit easier we have to go through the same changes in process we have to build
the new structures in our head similar to what Newton went through when he
invented it we can be guided but the fact that we can be guided doesn't mean
it's going to be easy and it generally isn't it's much easier to try and first
reject it as Schopenhauer pointed out and then to say oh that's obvious
because now it's been assimilated as being like everything else that's around and then ten years later the original
rejecters claim to have invented it these things get absorbed in and very
little changed takes place so I want to finish the talk by just exploring a
couple of the ways that humans shoot themselves in the foot why can't we
learn things faster and of course this is a talk all of its own but I'll just
show you a couple of interesting notions here's another way of looking at the
goldfish bowl this is one that scientists particularly like it's an interesting fact about
frogs that if you take their natural food which your flies paralyze them with
a little chloroform so they're still alive put the flies around the frog the frog
will starve to death because the frogs nervous system cannot see that these
paralyzed flies are its natural food if
you flip a little piece of oblong shaped cardboard at the Frog it will try and
eat it every time and one way of thinking about this is these little
flies are actually the ideas that we need to have they're around us all the
time but we just can't see them we're always snapping at the cardboard that's
in what our nervous system is willing to let us notice another interesting thing
about some frogs is if you heat up the water slowly enough they will just
remain in there and get cooked this is one of my images of Corporate America
and of course the opposite image of this is also true which is when the
saber-tooth Tiger does appear of getting so frightened
the only reflexive things are done so this the joke is well I don't have to
fix the roof because it isn't raining and when it's raining well I can't fix the roof because it's raining so nothing
happens so both the extremes of this picture are important lots of different
layers of our nervous system are set up to give us completely false information
about the world there are dozens of these illusions where here the
rectangles of course are the same size you're all familiar from your psychology
class as long ago but seeing isn't believing we see what we believe our
beliefs about the world are what
conditions what we're able to see here's a more profound one if you take a look
at this upside-down face here can you
see anything unusual about this what's the teeth or what teeth or side down
okay so let's pretend we're in medical school actually I'm allowed to make these jokes
is like one of my undergraduate majors was molecular biology it happened to be
it was in a small College where the biology majors did exactly the same
track as the pre-meds and so one of the things we got were all
sorts of wonderful pre-med type jokes let's suppose we're in any normal
American institution of learning where it's believed that knowledge is a fluid
that you can transfer a drop by drop from the full teacher vessel to the empty student vessel and of course the
transfer is done in terms of English sentences so an English sentence about
this picture is we've taken a picture of a young girl extracted her mouth and her
eyes turned them upside down put them
back into the picture and then turned the picture upside down I see you
nodding that that sounds reasonable so you should be quite prepared for what it looks like I notice you had a completely
different reaction but I didn't change the amount of information that I'd given
you back I'm going to change this back because I've discovered that nobody will
listen to me when it's on the other way
this is why McDonald's doesn't run print ads saying that if you eat McDonald's
hamburgers you'll become a better-looking person because in language is absurd but in fact what they
do run our ads showing gorgeous looking people eating McDonald's hamburgers and
a different part of your brain does the inference that the advertisers want it
that some psychologist once said to McLuhan why do you keep on making up all
this obscure jargon why don't you read psychology books and use the correct
terms for all of this stuff you're talking about and he says in the 50s he
said all you psychologists only study right rats he says I like to see what advertisers do they are the ones who are
really studying human beings so the
notion here is that even though we think of ourselves as a single identity our
minds are actually made up of separately
acting modules contending for a single body and
this one is actually this particular effect over here is understood quite well and it's actually built into most
mammals this reaction that you have so if you try this out on a dog I suggest
you pick a small one and one of the
biggest problems with teaching is that the parts of your mind that you want to
have learn often don't understand English this is why it's so hard to
teach many things in terms of English sentences because many cases you have to
do it you have to feel it you have to
see it okay so let's roll the next the last cut
here I think everybody will recognize
this go ahead of one of the most unforgettable news stories ever reported
the scene Midland Texas 1987 another
yard several youngsters had been playing
here and one of them 18 month old Jessica McClure has toppled down into a
narrow unused uncapped well she is
wedged in there 22 feet below the ground dozens of rescue workers are frantically
trying to get her out but it's a long difficult job hundreds of neighbors are
watching praying Jessica's teenaged parents chip and sits
on the floor stand there looking very young and very scared
what's your prayer [Music]
the media moves in like an army of course the biggest problem is the
rescuers if everybody is everybody remember this it's wonderful I've been
able to use this over and in Europe and even in the Pacific Rim the entire world
sat glued to their television sets for the 58 and a half hours she was in that
well she's in there for more than two days and they finally got her out and
here's an interesting thing in those in those 58 and a half hours that all this
activity was going on according to the World Health Organization 105 thousand
children died of easily present preventable causes for lack of water for
lack of a dollar inoculation and a fact
there's about 10 million children die each year a holocaust worth of children
each year from easily preventable cause now I think you are aware of this but
this is a perfect example of the difference in human beings Minds between
a real disaster in which people will
risk their lives for perfect strangers and gang together and jump into rivers
and lift cars off people go into burning buildings and wean the big the enormous
true disasters of our time which aren't yet happening like the World Health
Organization estimates 50 million people in the Pacific Rim alone are going to
die of AIDS in the next 10 years and 35
million in Africa in spite of the fact that there's treatment for it so one of
the things you could say about us human beings is we have incredibly puny
imaginations and especially we cannot
look at an exponential curve that represents what it happens in an
epidemic and have it the enormity the concrete enormity that would cause us to
muster ourselves into action to leap into our mind vividly enough in order
for us to do something because it's one of the hallmarks of civilized societies
that we have developed some of that imagination we plan a lot more than
traditional societies do and B we plan because we do have that we are starting
to develop some of that but I think the lack of vividness of imagination
is probably the thing that holds most of us back from dealing with a new idea
when it comes we just can't imagine what
it's going to be like one of the ways of dealing with us by the way is to take
yourself 15 years into the future and try and imagine things in which it would
be ridiculous for them not to be there just from judging what I for instance
Moore's law is going to go on for another 15 years that means every 18
months the computing power will that you have on your desk right now will cost
half as much or the size of the computer will be half that size carry that out
for 15 years and you have something that you can put into a ring there will be
many times more powerful than what you have on your compiled a and just try and
imagine what it would be like for that to be there and how ridiculous it would
be if it didn't happen in fact it is going to happen so we have this little
keyhole the keyhole we can see something
in there it could be something simple and exciting like a little girl dropping
into a well or it could be something really boring like the start of an epidemic we have to open up the keyhole
and again this is another way of thinking about let's look at the blue stuff as well as the pink stuff we are
great problem solvers this is one of the hallmarks of our civilization a problem
solving is one of the worst things to have as a central goal too many
mosquitoes let's dump the DDT in but in fact it wasn't a problem it was a system
all sorts of other things are actually at work there and we wind up with
something much worse than we have in fact there are three general ways of
solving problems this first one is the kind of the drunkards walk the random walk so I think of the executive way of
solving problems which is you can get two from A to B if you walk around
randomly enough and eventually you get there and that's so much fun that
exactly was keep on doing it and it's also an interesting
explanation for why executives want B to be so close to a right because random
walks work much better the closer B is to a now as problem solvers going to
college we learn to reduce the differences between us and our goal this
is the general American way of doing things it's also a disaster because
what's usually going on is that there are enormous Grand Canyon's that we
can't see the world is not two-dimensional it's actually three-dimensional so they're Grand
Canyon's the huge mountains and if we just plot towards the goal tell you an
interesting story Fineman was convinced to work on the atomic bomb project
because it looked like hitler was going to develop an atomic bomb and he tells
the story that he was jumping around
with everybody else when they tested the first atomic bomb and then all of a sudden they looked at each other and
realized that the war in Europe had been over for six months the sub goal had
become the goal the solution of the problem had become the problem now the
way things really work well is the bottom one in which you have to go away
from the goal until you find a superhighway superhighway is called a
powerful idea you get on the superhighway it will take you over very
close to B and lots of other interesting places and you get off not going away
from the goal in order to find the superhighway is called scientific
research it is the hardest thing to explain to potential funders why they
should fund going away from the goals in order to get these super hires in spite
of the fact that everything interesting that has happened over the last four
hundred years has been from finding the super highways here's one of my favorite
ones it's a hand axe and you notice that the one on the left is designed so that
when you hit with it you grab it from the bottom when you hit with it it also hits you the more you chop with it the
more it chops up your hand then sometime later people invented a modified hand
axe which had a blunt ER end that didn't chop up your hand as much when you chop things with it and I wonder if anybody
in this room knows what the period of time between these two hand axe
as was anybody got a guess
okay two-hundred thousand two hundred thousand years but I'm sure that in many
villages somebody was chopping with this
thing and said man this hurts I'll just
I'll just whack off the end of this thing and this is much better in the
persons chopping with it and some elder in the tribe came along and said what are you doing this person would be
ejected from the tribe immediately or burned at the stake or something so one
way of thinking about where we are is that we're essentially cave people
carrying briefcases around our brains are roughly the same brains as far as
anybody can tell us we had so long ago and whenever we act like a cave person
in face of these new contexts we lose
okay so here's the last idea how can we
get around this well in any challenge we
bring some ability or skill when the challenge and skill are pretty much
matched we have this nice condition is called flow everybody has experienced
this the time seems to pass very quickly the problem is is that the balance
between challenge and skill is a very
narrow one very chancy if the challenge is a little bit more than the skill we
start getting anxious if the skill is
more than the challenge we start getting bored and the problem is that most of
the good learning that we do is done in this place where we're in this flow State
so one of the ways we can deal with
places that are anxious is to increase safety that allows the flow area that
means we can take on more challenge than we have skill for and that allows us to
do more learning but the most important one I think the hardest one for
Americans to deal with is that what to do and we have more skill than the
challenge the answer is we have to increase our awareness we have to and
one of the ways of doing that is increasing our stead cents over what it is that we're
actually doing this is what allows us to widen out and getting get one of these aha and ahhs so if you want to get those
terrific ideas you have hiding behind your good pink ones the best weapon for
it is the one between your ears providing your that weapon is loaded
thank you [Applause]
thank you very very much dr. kay that concludes this morning session on to the
focus sessions thank you [Music]
good morning ladies and gentlemen would
you please take your seats welcome to the association's final
plenary session our presider this morning is the president of the
association dr. Jordan Cohen