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Alan Kay Decries the State of Computing
gnaremooz writes "Computer pioneer Alan Kay (DARPA in the '60s, PARC in the '70s, now HP Labs) declares 'The sad truth is that 20 years or so of commercialization have almost completely missed the point of what personal computing is about.' He believes that PCs should be tools for creativity and learning, and they are falling short."
From the Article:
The chances that in the last week or year or month you've used the computer to simulate some interesting idea is zero--but that's what it's for.
I'd have to disagree with Kay here, just because his work was with education and simulation doesn't mean that is really what computers are to be used for. They're the most unique and versatile tool ever invented by man, their purpose is whatever we choose it to be at the moment.
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
Anyone who has spoken with him personally- in person or via email- or read his words, seen his vision knows this. Alan is *the* man.
There's a great XEROX Video we've here at our uni library- "Doing with images makes symbols [videorecording] : communicating with computers," released in 1987 while Kay was a fellow with Apple. For an enthusiastic and engrossing view of what Kay thinks computers *should* be (and I'm 100% with him!) should check it out.
Also, look into Smalltalk. Alan works on Squeak Smalltalk- rather than C++ or Java- and there's a good reason for it. Smalltalk has the tendency to empower both end user and programmer. It's "open source" in a way that most slashdotters have never imagined. It's kind of like having your whole computer run Emacs, but without being stuck with some funky half-GUI half-terminal app with nothing but key commands to drive it. Squeak gives us the power to control our computing environment in a way similar to emacs, although Squeak is a lot closer to a "conventional" GUI environment than Emacs. That said, there are a lot of things about Squeak's GUI toolkit - Morphic- that are highly unconventional, but quite great to have around.
OK, enough early morning rambling from me...
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Another computer visionary with vague promises and criticisms.
Instead of doing [insert clearly-defined practical thing here], you should be doing [insert vague semi-buzzword here, like "education", or "object"] and you should be using [insert visionary's product here] to do it.
Not quite...
While people are certainly welcome to disagree with Kay's vision, he's not in the same barrel of monkey that most so-called visionarise and pundits live. Unlike most of those, he's implemented those ideas, and has been spent implementing those- in real, live, usable code- for the last 30-some years. Kay doesn't have a product, he's got nothing in a box to sell. He does have an idea to sell, though you don't pay for it with your money. He's been doing it in a very practical way for 30 years, not just making vague promises.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Of course, Alan's aim is to change the tide. Hence, his work on Squeak. The goal for him is to use computers as a tool to enhance our thinking. More power to him.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
"The chances that in the last week or year or month you've used the computer to simulate some interesting idea is zero--but that's what it's for."
Is the listener supposed to then ask a simple question like "what would you simulate?" and he would say "everything!" and the listener says "how do you do that?" and he says "by building a model of EVERYTHING!" and the listener, still not understanding what the value of "simulating everything" means, just writes him off as a kook who will research useless ideas for the rest of his life?
Does anyone else understand his vision?
Alan Kay says...
"The chances that in the last week or year or month you've used the computer to simulate some interesting idea is zero--but that's what it's for."
I disagree. Many business users use spreadsheets to "what-if". Perhaps he has a different idea of "interesting".
When I first started with computers back in the early 80's there was a lot of energy in the community. People ran BBSs, built circuit boards to attach to print heads to scan images, built weather facsimile machines, tinkered and hacked and built stuff. Those days were very enjoyable. But the only downside was that all the little hacks were for the computer. I.e., the gadgets celebrated the technology and the coolness of doing new things, but they were all about the technology itself.
Things have changed somewhat since then. There's still Linux and new experimental OSes (and BSDs too) to tinker with. Hardware is commoditized so there's not a lot of need or desire to build memory expansion boards, but people still do interesting things. However, the biggest change is that computers are now really cool tools for doing non-computer things.
I can only speak to my interests, but without computers I could not have easily played with video or recording, ray tracing, music production, math (some problems *require* computers to understand, at least in my case), etc.. The computer today is akin to what the printing press was several centuries ago. I.e., it gives some very powerful tools to individuals of modest means. So things that were only the demesne of researchers and big companies ten years ago is now available in a relatively low powered desktop system.
I'm not belittling Mr. Kay's work.. Obviously his contributions have been significant. However, the ideas that are actually expressed in this article (not the ones that were old news in 1985) seem entirely vague and "catty". He claims we haven't done anything interesting with PCs in the last week. Arrogance.
He does have a product.. He has his reputation as a visionary. In his line of work, that's more important than any software application or widget.
His example: A software package that just looks like the modern equivalent of LOGO. Interesting, sure. Probably lots of fun to play with as a child. More compelling that e-mail or Wikipedia? Please.
The article goes to great lengths to discuss how Alan Kay isn't resting on his laurels.. However, most of the comments posted here so far are allowing him to do exactly that!
I entirely disagree. Just about everyone is born creative. Watch some little kids sometimes. When they get bored they'll take whatever toys they can get their hands on and use them as props to get completely absorbed in a storyline or world that their brain makes as they go. It may not be very complicated, but kids don't yet have much to base it on.
/. is lego. When I was younger, I had a few random sets. Some spaceships, some the city, some just plain old blocks. And I made all sorts of crap. My next door neighbor had all of the sets from one of the spaceship series (including the badass monorail), but he was so obsessed with that series itself that he would just build each object according to the instructions, and sit it on the floor with all the others. He wouldn't dare take them apart, much less let me near them. The only decisions he made was which space station outpost got put next to the lunar landing pad. That jerk was pretty much the same way with all of his GI-joes too. Until I started throwing them down the stairs, he did enjoy that.
Life does a good job of teaching us to be less creative. Our culture is so full of complicated yet boring things that we have to spend most of our time doing, and so creativity can often fall by the wayside. I'm glad that I had to take all of those math classes in grade school, but every hour that I spent doing my geometry homework was one less hour I could spend playing with photoshop. Now-a-days, I've not only got work to deal with, I've also got to spend my free time paying bills, going grocery shopping, cleaning the house, trying to understand what the hell is going on with the politics in my city, state, and country... when I sit down with a pad and paper and try to design a table that I need to build, I'm too tired to think.
Sadly enough, I think things have gotten worse for kids as well. There are so many different toys, and they have such complex features, they almost take the need for creativity away. An example talked about often on
Anyways, while some people are naturally better at being creative than others, doesn't mean many people are inherently unable to be creative. Creativity is one of the defining features of our intelligence. It's what puts our minds above those of animals. Anytime you aid the creative process, you improve it. It's not a learned skill persay, it's a Re-learned one.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
The only difference is eye candy like menus, windows and whatnot.
Otherwise, it's pretty much the same, and, even when you put in particularly creative applications like Photoshop, Illustrator/Freehand, Autocad or any music composing system, you basically have "a better version of an older tool, pen and paper".
There aren't really NEW applications that are really creative; perhaps the only thing that goes close would be USENET if it wasn't swamped by the line noise...
I'm old enough to remember the early days - my first computer was a 8k PET.. While the technology was primative, computers where sold as creative devices. My PET had a built in interpreter, and it switched on straight to the command prompt. The machine, by its nature, encouraged you to get involved with programming, because it was so simple. Yes, there where word processing packages, games and the like, and you got used to loading and running these, but all the time you knew that the real fun was learning to program.
Nowadays, a Windows PC doesn't even come with any kind of programming language (not counting batch files..) and the GUI metaphor discourages automation of tasks (which was the Great Hope that computing promised..)
The internet has been converted from a facinating library to some sort of dumb TV plastered with adverts... The increasing and unfettered commercialisation of the internet is gradually making it unusable. I can't even get my site listed on Google, never mind high up the list, because Google's more interested these days in promoting commercial sites. And don't get me started on spammers (unless I've a 2x4 in my hand!)
*--BigMan--- Time flies like an arrow.. but personally I prefer a nice glass of wine!
Most people are not creative, and most hate to learn. This is a sad truth. The amount of people who like to learn new things throughout their life, or create things just for the sake of creating, is a thin sliver of the general population.
I like to do 3D computer art, and have started programming for fun again after a long lapse. Most people who know me, many of them professionals wiuth advanced degrees, can't grasp why I want to do it as they turn back to their latest Grisham lawyer epic.
The sad truth is that the state of personal computing is exatly what the market (i.e. the consumers) wanted. They want games and pr0n and free music. No about of hand wringing or high falutin' pondering is going to change that.
The other problem:
For him, "the primary task of the Internet is to connect every person to every other person."
When people say stuff like this, they are only really thinking about his friends and family, or maybe some small collection of online pals.
You really want to be connected with atrocities like stompthejews.org or purty-yung-thangs-only-mildy-related-to-yoo.xxx or microsoft.com?
Honestly, what is all this infinite connectivity going to brings us over what we have now?
And business, he says, "is basically not interested in creative uses for computers."
No, it's just not interested in what Alan Kay is interested in.
The guy is brilliant, and he's done great work, but I'm afraid he's developed the tunnelvision common to people who have had their eogs stroked (no matter how well deserved) for many years. There's some small businesses out there able to automate things that would have required a lot of tedious drudgework in past decades thanks to those "uncreative" business applications.
Sorry, Alan, but behiond all the educations and fancy learning objects, there's still a world to run, resources to move about and daily chores to be done. And we're going to use boring gray box computin' machines for it.
"pretty much everything that's believed is bullshit."
OK, now here I agree with him. :-) But he might want to apply the bullshit test to his own beliefs. I try to do it on a regular basis. It's sometimes painful to let go of a closely held belief, but if the facts do not support it, you have to dispose of it.
--- Ban humanity.
Nah, when USRobotics released the Pilot (later to become the Palm Pilot) they knew that the handwriting recognition wouldn't work well, so they required you to learn the device's alphabet rather than allowing you to use your own.
And it's not just the handwriting. On the Newton, you could enter 'lunch with Mariah' and the Newton would connect the name with that person's entry in the address book. 10 years later, my Palm still can't do that. Nor can my PC.
The personal computing revolution has stalled with the advent of the WWW. Excluding the MS virus, personal computing was making a lot of progress up until the mid 90's. Since then we've failed to truly exploit the power of both a computing platform and a means of communication.
I have to disagree. The real leap from 1995 until now has been usability and people getting connected the the internet. The number of PC's that are "out there" have increased dramatically. I'm 1995 I could talk to a few of my nerdier friends online. Now I can talk to just about everyone. Communication VIA computers has really taken off in the past 10 years. PC's over the past 15 years have come to the point where a person with minimal knowledge can use them for online communication.
I would also say we should look at the business world, where there is a PC on every desktop. It wasn't like that in the 70's or 80's. Sure, maybe the PC isn't being used for some great learning experence for the world, but it is being used so people can do their jobs better including doctors and scientists. How much do you think PC's helped with mapping the genome? It probably worked out a lot more nicely than trying to get some timesharing system on a mainframe.
Thats only true if you insist that the messages that pass between the computers have to be executable code. In the real world I don't think that is necessary or desirable.
This was actually the subject of a long conversation Uri Rabinski and I had with Alan he spoke at the Darmstat WWW conference. Alan had been pushing the idea that PDF was a better model for information interchange than HTML because in PDF the content was encapsulated with the code that interpreted it and gave it semantics. Tim Berners-Lee later joined in the conversation but did not get any further with Alan than Uri and I.
Needless to say I did not agree with this idea, and at the time it would be impossible to move PDFs arround as the core of the Web since they are typically five to ten times the size of the equivalent HTML and a fast modem was 28.8Kb/sec. But at a more fundamental level, with HTML google is possible, with PDF you are reduced to screen scraping technologies. HTML can render well to almost any output device (or rather could before being bastardized by netscape) PDF renders badly to anything other than paper the same size as the original rendering.
If you exchange declarative statements rather than programs firewalls don't represent a barrier. This is exactly what we have in the biological world (which Alan had used as analogy), cells do not accept raw DNA from the outside and run it. Viruses have to bypass these defenses.
I am not sure what Alan is up to here, the person who wrote the article clearly has a much less good idea of what Alan is up to than Alan.
Sure there are problems with most software. Word sucks, as do most HTML editors, despite all the pretty graphics sloshed into HTML there are still no good tools for producing printed output. Open source alternatives suck even worse, we get a bad copy of Word and several bad HTML editors. Same for Excel and spreadsheets.
If Wolfram had spent the last ten years doing something more important than writing a book that claims he is the modern Newton, mathematica might have gone somewhere interesting. Unfortunately it has gone from being a niche market tool for scientists to being a niche market tool for scientists and some engineers.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
He was probably just talking above the reporter's head (or what the reporter considered to be above his audience's head.) Or, he himself hasn't found the way to express what he'd like to see in terms most people would understand.
Most people do use computers primarily to simulate objects that they understand because they have physical samples of those objects (appliances, documents, etc.) in front of them in their daily life. What I took as his meaning was that the computer's ability to make manifest ideas and concepts that do not have common tangible real-world instances is commonly neglected, and should not be. In this respect he is entirely correct.
But the problem in my view is not that noone has tried to foster such uses by making computers easier to use and understand in this capacity. There have been plenty of attempts to do so, many of them in games, some in teaching languages like TURTLE. It is rather that there are few examples in real life of using manifestation of abstract objects to do something useful, or at least entertaining. Face it, most people don't subject themselves to a sit-down session with a computer unless they think they are going to get something out of it, and "modeling" intangible systems is a hard sell in this respect, especially for those who have not been taught the intellectual building blocks needed to approach such a task with any degree of confidence.
Maybe if there were a collection someplace of testimonials and explanations by those few who have managed to get a signifigant real-world benefit from doing something truly abstract it would inspire users. Some would argue that applications are that very thing, but what I'm suggesting would be more of an explanation of the human process involved -- how a person thought his way through a new or unusual application of a core technology to improve their life, rather than a spoon-fed procedural guide to doing the same thing without comprehending the thoughts behind it, which is what most applications are in the end.
A popular game that had a programming component could also break the ice by making it into entertainment, but making it popular versus all the competition would be the obstacle to that...
Someone had to do it.
Then what's wrong with LOGO?
The first contact I had with programming was LOGO at a very young age. My answer to that question is that LOGO doesn't take it far enough, doesn't provide room to grow in. Squeak does. A person- a kid or adult- can learn the basics of programming ala LOGO using Squeak. But when she does, it's not just making a turtle move around the screen with simple procedural commands, rather getting down the idea of creating objects, and then attaching actions to them. Perhaps not a huge difference on the surface, but when it comes down to learning OOP [1] it is an important distinction. Unlike LOGO, that basic, core intuitive knowledge of OOP programming can be expanded upon within the same environment, and this learner can make the step up, going from just making balls bounce around the screen to writing a simple rolodex application with the same principles and no code; then make the step to writing database driven webapps with the Seaside webapp framework and the MySQL driver, or even better, the Magma object database.
[1] Not to say that I think OOP is any sort of end-all-be-all, especially as it's imagined to be in the industry. But for someone learning to program at 15 years old right now, real knowledge of OOP would come in handy when they get their first job programming when they turn 20- OOP won't be some ancient COBOLian relic, something you've heard of but no one ever uses.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
When the Michigan Senator (D) in the (highly recommended) movie Fahrenheit 9/11 responded bluntly to the question "Why didn't you read the Patriot Act before passing it?" with the response "Sit down my son, we don't read most of the bills we pass." It was quite laughable but very chilling.
Legal ignorance is at an appalling level, even among people paid and elected to represent us. Computers are good at pattern recognition; and most people despise reading the mumbo-jumbo lawyers hide their meaning within.
Perhaps a "pocket lawyer" to help parse legal mumbo jumbo is a worthwhile thing. For most people law is a one-way street, you have to read what the IRS, city, and state send to you but you rarely have to write anything yourself. (Though Nolo and some other "mad lib" style books do a wonderful job of this).
While there are lawyers who are trying to be devious and hide their real purpose in contorted language, government agencies should have no need to do so. Require that court rulings, city councils, and any record of law be stated in English and Backus-Naur form. Rely less on the vagueries of English to preserve or hide your meaning while the OED is changing the language (bling-bling? vavavoom?) and hence changing the law through its evolution.
What depresses me is that every creative idea I have for stuff to do with my computer, seems to require vast amounts of toil, scouring through documentation, and learning how to jump through some very arbitary-seeming hoops, to get to where I want to go. That's the reason why I spend very little time being creative at my computer.
I believe people are reading WAY too much into a little one page article in a magazine directed at finance types with sprinkles of quotes from Alan Kay in it.
Some simple rules for reading anything written by a "journalist".
1. The more you know about a subject the more the journalist will get wrong.
2. The shorter the article the more will be left out and gotten wrong.
3. The more complex the subject the more will be gotten wrong regardless of article length.
So in this case we have a short article by a journalist of unknown technical credentials writing for a target audience with no technical credentials, and people are complaining that the small quotes from someone with DEEP technical credentials on a VAST subject area are bozo-y? Please. Show me an article _BY_ Alan Kay written for the ACM and then I'll pay attention. This article is just fodder for CEOs to annoy their IT shop with.
PHB: Alan Kay says we should be modeling our business so we can make more money. Get on it.
IT: I'll get right to it after I install the latest critical Windows/IE update and wipe the latest virus from all the machines on our network. (i.e. Never.)
- Jasen.
Our desktops still are essentially the same as the 1984 Macintosh. PDAs still haven't caught up with the Newton. Computers are still dumb.
Computer technology is evolving. Quickly.
Biological evolution took billions of years to get to today. Have you ever read up on Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calendar? If you were to compress the known history of the universe into a single calendar year, all of written human history would comprise the last 15 seconds on December 31!
Whether you're talking about technology or biology, you can't evolve anything too quickly, or you throw out all the accumulated wisdom in the current design. That's why birth defects and substantial changes in genetics are rare - evolve too quickly and the mortality rate climbs towards insolvency.
The QWERTY keyboard is with us, perhaps for centuries to come, even though there are "better" alternatives. But these "better" alternatives cost alot more TODAY to develop and implement than continuing with the QWERTY. So if you "know how to type", you're using a QWERTY.
To change to another keyboard, you have to throw out all the accumulated wisdom associated with QWERTY keyboards - all the trained office workers, all the existing equipment in place right now, the typing tutor software, the toys, cell phones, PDAs, etc.
And why? The QWERTY is "good enough", so we invest our resources elsewhere.
Here's another example: Joel on Software - Things You Should Never Do. In this work, Joel claims that re-writing your nest egg software is the kiss of death for a software company, for the simple fact that in even a cruddy, poorly cobbled software, there's often many man-years of embedded wisdom in there - bugs fixed, design issues resolved, special cases handled, etc.
You simply can't rebuild anything significant from scratch without tremendous cost. That's why our very sophisticated human cerebral brains are built upon the much simpler mammalian brain, which is in turn built upon the very simple lizard brain inside our heads. It's very literally three concentric sections of brain, with the lizard brain in the middle, the mamallian brain wrapped around that, and the cerebral cortex packed on around the outside!
The biological cost of rebuilding our brains to factor out the now much-antiquated lizard brain functions is simply too high to be viable, so it's never happened, and the lizard brain is simply "infrastructure" for higher development.
Look at the history of cities. You'll see the exact same pattern there... Example? Los Angeles has spent 75 years developing around the automobile, and their recent construction of subways have been extremely expensive (300 MILLION DOLLARS PER MILE) and the residual effects of the subway on local business has driven many to bankruptcy.
It's been very costly, very slow, and cost overruns are the norm.
So, when I hear somebody talk about making major changes to existing infrastructure, it's hard for me NOT to dismiss them, no matter their credentials. You simply *don't* change critical infrastructure of any kind without serious review and contemplation, and even then, you have to assume that it'd be 10x as costly and painful as you can imagine.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.