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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."
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.
I would think that since it's "Personal" computing, that the individual user can decide what it's all about to them. My mom uses her computer to keep in touch with me over email and instant messaging, and she trades stupid email jokes, programs, and malware with all of her friends. Those are pretty personal, non-business related uses if you ask me.
Maybe Kay should've tried to call it the Educational Computer instead of Personal computer all those years ago.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
You can't teach anyone to be creative. You either are, or are not. That said, I think there are a few useful tools to aid the creative process, writing, drawing, music, etc., but I don't believe there are many, if any, tools to enhance the creative process. Maybe computers can't do that.
Software was meant to be free.
I think Eben Moglen puts it better in this interview.
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They're the most unique and versatile tool ever invented by man, their purpose is whatever we choose it to be at the moment.
I think that's his point - they're the most unique and versatile tool ever invented, we could do anything, but what we use it for is 99% things we basically had before - business documents and simple calculations, games, video and audio replay/recording.
They could be so much more.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
The Windows PC is about as far from a home uers system as it's possible to get without also making it totally unsuitable for businesses.
In reality, the correct way to go is to step back and look at how succesful home computers worked. Take for example, the commodire 64. This had a user interface that came up in about a second, and was immediately useable. Nobody ever looked at my C64 in a confused way wondering what it does. They knew. It was obvious.
A windows PC on the other hand is a nasty complicated mess. Even the wiring needs some expertese in electronics, and then you have all the cryptic issues with drivers and operating systems. The average user doesn't want to care.
The solution is to produce a standardised simpler system. An all-in-one unit with standard components, that will plug into a TV, and starts with a BAPSIC interpreter. Apps should be loaded with a "load" command. We don't need a mouse. Those are only useful for pixel addressing. In practive they confuse the user.
Yeah, we could have a world with a few people owning computers and being creative and the rest carrying out boring, simple tasks because we're too stupid to automate them, or we could have a world where we automate all of the boring, stupid tasks and people can spend their time being creative.
Read jack phelps dot net
I don't think anyone would blow off a suggestion from Mr. Kay if has has another use. I agree that this is another vague and empty statement.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
How far have we really come in the last 30+ years of personal computing?
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. Somewhere along the way we've floundered. It's not necessarily a bad thing but think about where we could be.
Listen to the guy. He's really just asking where should we be?
Computers have made huge contributions to the art world. How can he think that we're falling short in creativity?
I work in the music field and almost all the innovation in the last 10 years has come from computers (embedded at first, PCs more recently). With Reason, you can turn out a decent tune in minutes. Live has introduced a whole new way to write and perform music. Those are my favorite examples but there are plenty more.
The film and art worlds have been equally influenced by computer technology.
Ok - I'll bite. And I'll bite for personal computing at large, rather than just as an Apple user (which I happen to be, but the below could be achieved on any platform).
The very interesting articles I've digging out recently are on how to play the clarinet. I do use my machines to write music. I quite definitely have my photo albums on the the machine. I'll add video to your list too, and DVD authoring. I'll add web authoring. I'll add accounts - not exciting, but definitely simulating ideas. I'll add communciation - email and video conferencing with friends who are at least hundred of miles away, in some cases on a different continent. In my case, I'll add development and web authoring. And yes, when circumstances allow I sit in my garden and use the 802.11g connection.
I honestly, truly, have no idea what Alan Kay is on about. Generalising the whole of computing on a business knocking out office documents is a bit poor. Then again, the article didn't have much in the way of direct quotes from Mr. Kay - perhaps his main thrust has been misunderstood?
Cheers,
Ian
yeh, replying to my own post.
Moglen was a programmer back in early the 70's. He wrote free software, not because of his ethics, but because all software was free back then. Software was a tool for users, and users were allowed to fix and improve the tools.
Anyone could contribute to the state of the art by making a small contribution to the edge.
The current proprietary regime blocks that. If you want one more feature in a proprietary word processor, you'd have to write a whole word processor first, and people won't do that. Not by themselves anyway. Abiword, Kword - and many other free projects - are proof that people will eventually get so frustrated that they will write a whole word processor.
Wiki's are a good example of what Kay says the internet should be like. I know they're not peer-to-peer, but the have the authoring bit to a t.
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Squeak/Smalltalk is just another programming language and can hardly be seen as something that would revolutionize PC use. I agree with the observation that the current state of computing has not improved much in the past twenty years. And I too think it is due to how it has been commercialized. But I do not know an easy way out.
I wouldn't say that computers have made us less intelligent, but, along with TV and other "one-way" inventions it's certainly helped a lot of people be far less creative in their day to day activities.
How many people now sit around playing computer games or watching TV rather than being creative?
Of course there's a flipside, and a lot of people (including myself) are now far more creative with computers, but I think Alan Kay's point was that very few people fit this description, and that has a lot to do with the focus from the computing industry.
Of course he might talk a little more about why this is the case, which he touches on when he mentions commercialisation, and to analyse why it's become more commercialised and what we can do about it, but either he or the journalist obviously wasn't interested in that.
you missed his point entirely.
He _knows_ it's a browser, his assertion is that HTTP should have been like WebDAV from the beginning, and that instead of writing a browser, they should have written a browser with authoring capabilities.
The trouble is, that you're looking at the world as it is now, and saying "it's obvious, this is how things should be", instead of looking back and asking yourself how things could be different....
Sure, he's not going to change anything by saying what he's saying, but that doesn't mean it's not worth saying.
Personally I pretty much agree with the overall sentiment - When I was a kid my first computer experiences were with the 8 bit home PCs of the 80s - the ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Commodore (16/+4 and 64) and Amstrad CPC - and every single one of those did far more for me in terms of encouraging my creativity than a modern PC does. Simply because they came with BASIC built in. Programming was what you _did_ and it was so easy to get started. These days the barrier to entry is much higher, and if you look at Windows, it doesn't even come with a programming language any more. At least DOS had QBasic - In fact, Dos with QBasic was almost as good as the 8bit machines...
Advanced users are users too!
I always remind myself that before the Internet stepped in, I did use my computer for creativity, especially music composition (on various "trackers" for Amiga, if you must know).
Come to think of it, it was pretty amazing given the poor technology of the times (a mere 2 MB RAM, endless floppy-swapping -- later, a "huge" 20 MB HD). The creativity of the programmers was itself amazing. They did their sound mixing routines alright, MIDI + sample synchro, and the user interface--the user interface!!--was the best thing ever.
And yet today, maybe 100 times the number of Windows PCs is out there, with 100 times the CPU power each, but I still can't find an honest tracker for my Windows machine-- when I say honest, I mean that won't crash my PC or will ask that I buy a damn compatible soundcard. I also mean "free," I mean come on, who's going to spend C-notes worth of professional sequencer software for just dabbling around!!
Dudes in the 90's, up there in Finland & other places, were swamping Europe with their trackers at a time when "electronic distribution" was a euphemism for a network of enthusiasts swapping floppies through the post and holding "copy parties" in each other's place.
Now we got the Internet for distribtion, we got fairly less fragmentation in the OS space, and you'd have thought it'd all have made it much easier?? Think again!
Sure, back then we weren't able to download Britney Spears MP3 for free... Hell, if we had, we wouldn't even have had the CPU power to decode it!! But what's the new thing there? I mean, you just listen to the same music as in the store, except cheaper...
To conclude: quit consuming pr0n and mp3's, start coding mind-opening stuff for masses to discover their own talents!
(and stop reading / posting on Slashdot too, I might add)
He is running on fumes. He did great stuff in the 1970s inventing SmallTalk, developing graphics GUIs, a formulating the "Dynabook", the early PDA. This stimulated Jobs and Gates to commercialize graphical computing and OOP-based OS's. But since then Kay hasn't really invented that much, missed "industrial-strength" OOP, missed the significance of the Web, PDAs, cellphones and other innovations. The Gore-Gates initative to make the Web available in every school and library by year 2000 did far more for children computing access than SmallTalk and eQuariums.
(Lets see if the moderators can distinguish a contrarian opinion from troll-bait.)
If you've ever read anything at all about the original Mac team at Apple, they were clearly filled with huge visions of an ultra-creative world where Joe Schmoe would use technology to empower their own creative visions.
The problem with Alan Kay is he is stuck in about 1983, waiting to release the first Mac, not realizing that time has marched on.
In short, he gave the world Smalltalk, found that the hardware of the time couldn't accomodate it, and that the tools were sub-optimal. Since then he has been chasing the same impossible dream -- digital silly putty whereby anybody can produce incredible software just by stringing objects together (a *very* Smalltalk-esque concept!).
The realities are, software is hard and most people really don't want to build their own. The other thing he always glosses over is that somebody has to build all those nice objects before someone else can string them together.
The reality is, most of the ideas he has esposed throughout his career have either 1) been tried and are being used in *some* form or 2) been tried and found to not be all that great or 3) really not compelling.
All that said, I wish he'd use his remarkable gifts and produce something. Smalltalk can't have been the only think he leaves to the technology world.
But we have to ask ourselves--is this by nature, or by nurture? Is lifelong creative drive a rare, recessive gene--or is it a potential that exists in most of us that's discouraged by both school and the workplace? If we gave people easier to use creative tools, would they retain this creativity longer?
And if creativity is TRULY only enjoyable by a minority, then isn't that minority the only subset of humanity worth wringing one's hands over?
As far as the rest of what Alan Kay I guess I mostly agree with you--he is saying that business is inherently conservative--but that's besides the point, because look at the massive amount of man power invested into open source and other non-profit endeavors by private invididuals--if the problems he describes were solvable by merely discarding business conservatism, they would have been solved already.
I think what Kay is really complaining about is that most people use computers more for communication--sending and receiving email, receiving content from major corporations--then for creation. But this shouldn't be a surprise--think about the total computing power of the billions of computers in the world, then compare that to the computing power of the billions of people in the world. Only a tiny slice of the computing powerof civilization is implemented in silicon--most is still in carbon. So, even to a programmer like me, communicating with other brains is still more valucable than communicating with machines.
What Kay misses is the naivete of computing that existed before the Internet was everyone's obsession--when everyone still felt that Computation and Simulation were still more important than Communication. In that sense, someday Kay will get his wish--computation power of silicon is growing a lot faster than human population, and perhaps even in my lifetime (though probably not Alan Kay's) silicon computation will be greater than human computation. Still, I'm not sure he'll actually like the result--I don't expect humans to have MORE opportunity for creativity once machines become capable of creativity. Unless we are actually integrated with the machines.
I think the biggest piece of bullshit was when he contrasted Microsoft Word with the Web--am I naive to think that 90% of people who would want to create a web page and have the economic means to do so are able to create a web page, or at least write a blog? Some web browsers DO have creative ability built in. The web is infested with creativity! Look at all these blogs, these amateur web comics, these open source programs, these complex CGI tricks and games (try doing that in Word, Alan!). Hell, I knew someone who credited practice from Slashdot flamewars with the 12 he got on the GRE Analytical Writing section. Even my sister, who absolutely REFUSES to ever do anything creative, insists on making a web page.
I think the biggest insight is contrasting Squek with current open source desktops. If Gnome and KDE are really about freedom, why do they have to be written in compiled languages that make it such a pain in the ass for end users to change and add features to them? Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of advanced statically typed languages, but it IS pretty cool how people can write extensions for emacs so easily. It would be cool if the same were true of all the apps on my GUI--though admittedly that would likely have performance and stability costs.
When a severely brain-damaged friend of my son gets to free himself for a few hours with Counterstrike, where he can jump and twirl and join the general melee as any other kid, I know Alan Kay is decidedly wrong.
It's a common way to describe using a PC. A write program does a "non-computer thing" - it produces a text. A defrag program does a "computer thing" - you only bother to use it to keep the machine able to run the write program. You would never bother to defrag a machine if that machine spent all its time being maintained and never did a "non-computer thing", but you would bother to run a word processor, a game, or a CAD program on a machine that never did "computer things", and might even prefer it that way.
The real distinction is between "tasks internal to the discourse of mechanical computation" vrs. "tasks with external consequences in a wider mode of discourse with particular applicability to human culture", but most people find those formulations a wee bit cumbersome.
As the paernt poster observed, a tremendous lot of early hacking was about making the computer's internal logical structures into something that could eventually do some tasks that resulted in gains to the user outside the machine environment.
The early hacker mentality tended to focus, by necessity, on "computer things", because they all needed done. Both machines and software had to survive before they could be used to accomplish anything beyond their continued survival. The average hacker thus came to think these tasks were worth doing in their own right.
This still shows up today. Comparing only genuine freeware, today I ran two programs just before going to the internet. One was a drive scanner program that displays the results in everything from a simplified bar graph to a 3-D histogram that can be independently rotated along all three axi, to a pie chart format with clever color coding. The other was a weather program that will go to a web site without my opening a full browser and give me a daily or weekly report, but it won't give me a report out to an estimated, say, 90% accuracy number of days or even tell me how many days the information source thinks that is. (And it won't do several other things I have wanted it to do at various times).
I'd rate those two programs to require comparable ingenuity and skill to produce. They demonstrate a pattern that from my experience tends to hold most of the time, although I can't put an actual number on it offhand. Colloquially, we have great tools for doing most computer things, and often not-so-great tools for doing non-computer things.
Who is John Cabal?
After more than 20 years programming my opinion is that Alan Kay is right. Those who are older enough know that there were expectatives (ie: computers will understand human languaje), now there are refinements (oh, look at that, spell-check on any text entry, wow!),
Even the most succesful idea on those years, the web, was already (and probably better) designed in the Xanadu project.
Hardware is still worse, one single schema, a single processing units, lots of memory, and a hard disk, that's all. Were are those prolog machines? I remember a small english company that build a nice small blue box able to outperform some CRAYs on graphic processing. That was creativity.
Computing has fallen by his own success, there was bussines and money to get, now big corporations are unable to do a thing but continue with the same old crap. Of course innovation is lost, the only thing that gives software an edge is that is a personal activity, that's why open source still remains. But the big picture is depressing, sofware is under MS control, and harware is under Intel directions, that's falling short friends, very very short.l
What's in a sig?
That's one way of looking at it. Another is to say that there is a lot more to commercialisation than consumers making their preferences known through a market.
Take any cultural field, and you're almost guaranteed that the commercial sector is less innovative and more populist than other sectors. That's fine, but you need the non-commercial and less commercial sectors, otherwise you're left with stagnant pap. Commercial sectors don't like risk, and their whole outlook is based on financial considerations. So it's natural that they are going to be relatively short sighted and conservative, even when it comes to something like computers.
The result? A computing industry that is almost entirely in the "commercial pap" sector, with very little non-commercial stuff going on. This means, amongst other things, not nearly as much innovation within the industry as we could have.
And since the industry has become so commercial, it's not particularly interested in looking at opportunities for enabling us to become more creative. Computer games are merely an example of a sector that, today at least, gives us next to no opportunity for creativity. They could do. The Internet is the best example - most commercial involvement is in the form of "we provide, you consume", or at the very least very cheap, shallow forms of participation. All of the really interesting participation is going on in less-commercial or non-commercial areas of the 'Net.
I'd guess that it's this problem he's talking about. It's not about forcing some idea of creativity upon the public, but changing the industry's focus from profit to enabling creativity.
Why isn't there a program that graphically represents possibilities? Every one of us has to make complex decisions, each of which has a set of factors and pros and cons. Why can't the computer take this set of factors and "map" them, allow us to attach probabilities at each level, and then graphically highlight trouble areas and predict desirable outcomes.
Things like deciding whether to carry X or Y product would be more tactile and visual, and probably more accurate than a flat spreadsheet. Hell, anything could be modelled with a standard set of conditionals, from what to wear to whether to support the death penalty. That's one of the creative things a computer would be great at - unravelling a complex knot of a problem.