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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 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.
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!
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.
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