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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 do not agree with the writer. I takes me a lot of creativity to find different ways to frag my friends in Battlefield 1942. Also playing battlefield teach me some nice skills for the real life. (press 9 for parachute whenever I fall out of a airplane and such)
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.
Without the PC, there are many geeks that wouldn't know the first thing about the female body. I feel that we are learning a lot!!
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.
This guy clearly does not post on or read slashdot ever. Nothing but learning and creativity here :-P
Come to think of it, basically everything I ever do with my computer involves a certain amount of learning and creativity.
Sounds like someone is lamenting their choice of employment -- just because HP is lacking in the forefront creativity department doesn't mean the last 20 years of computing development is in the toilet.
Course by the time I hit submit, I'm sure there will be 50 other posts with this exact same thread, and I'll suddenly by -1 BORING...
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
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.
1,000,000,000 windows computers on the earth, 1,000,000,000 windows computers. Take one down, replace the OS. 999,999,999 windows computers on the earth. 999,999,999 windows computers on the earth. 999,999,999 windows computers.Take one down, replace the OS. 999,999,998 windows computers on the earth. 999,999,998 windows computers on the earth. Take one down replace the OS. 999,999,997 windows computers on the earth. and so on.
Maybe we should use something other than gentoo.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
you mean it's not about patches and updates?
"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?
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
The whole computing industry can move only as fast as one company, and it's in that company's interest to move slowly. During the .com boom, the whole on-line industry moved as fast as the fastest company and we saw how much was done in just ten years. 20 years of Microsoft dominance has set the computer/software industry back 10 years. Another 20 years of dominance will allow us to only progress as much as we would otherwise in 10 years.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Indeed, the one theme Alan Kay didn't address is motivation.
The "heydey" he speaks fondly of was one in which a great deal of development was done in labs in Universities or other geeky hacker havens. There you had a culture of creativity, sharing in communities and inspiring each other to create great new things. Perhaps that culture manifested itself in the technology they created.
But now of course we have a culture that is increasingly commercialised and profit-orientated. The result? Exactly the problem he decries... technology with limited vision.
The solution, surely, is not to just hope that somebody creates some great new technology, but to try to change that culture? Putting words like creativity, community and sharing back into the corporate vocabulary would go a long way.
He should just advocate Free Software or Creative Commons or any number of other good initiatives as good solutions, rather than whining and then waxing mysterious about his vapourware, especialy if he's as great a person as he's made out to be.
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.
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.
In techie terms, he is working on an infinitely scalable system for "real-time immersive collaboration done entirely as peer-to-peer machines."
He's probably talking about Croquet which is a 3d collaborative environment developed on top of Squeak. Impressive stuff.
I agree with Kay. I also think Kay has made enormous contributions in the past. And I think that Squeak, his main project, is an enormously valuable tool. But, sadly,for all the great ideas that have gone into Squeak (and Kay's other work), I have not found the implementations he or others have produced to be very useful. Having great ideas is no good if you don't manage to implement them in ways that people can actually use.
So, we have those who do the work implementing things that real people actually use (Gnome, KDE, Sun, Microsoft, Apple, etc.), and then we have those who talk about great ideas and grand schemes, but whose implementations aren't all that useful (Kay, the various "usability gurus", etc.). The first group doesn't do enough background research and/or just likes to pretend for PR reasons that they are "innovative". The second group likes to complain about how awful things are but then just doesn't quite get their act together producing something more useful than they do.
How can we improve things? Things get better the more like Kay take actual implementations a little more seriously and people in "industry" stop reinventing the wheel. And software developers and end users need to become a bit more informed about the products they use and make better choices, instead of just buying what's popular or hip.
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
The net result of the consumerization of the PC and the internet is a landscape that only want's to hear about what can be packaged and marketed.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
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.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
His specific complaints are understandable considering his long (and illustrious) career in computer science, but the underlying thesis is simply that we (including Alan Kay) haven't even begun to appreciate what computers can do. Kay yearns for a paradigm evolution, and considers our anchored situatedness to be detrimental.
Please don't color the word "simulate" too much when reading Kay's words. To simulate is to recreate (approximate) one system in another system. Mathematics is a mode of simulation. The sole purpose of computers is simulation.
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...
RTFA, I had the impression of a man that is trapped in the wrong company.
Since active cynic Carly took over, there is no HP any more.
It's NewAgeP: No more research needed - except for how to supress printer ink refilling. Product creation sold to Intel (when she notices the chipset guys are doing well, she'd sell those poor souls to Intel too).
Corporate Culture vaporized. Business-is-adding-a-sticker attitude.
What is this guy sitting for on his chair at HP?
chess
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!
I think much of what Kay is lamenting is similar to the great - and strangely unpublicised - disappointment many pioneers of television experience.
Remember this?: television will eliminate ignorance, education will be widespread, the people will have a voice with which to communicate.
It's the 21st century, and it's "Hey, do you remember that 'leggo my Eggo' commercial?".
This is what happens when we allow commercialisation to go unchecked; in any environment - unchecked - it will consume infinitely until the environment is destroyed.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
One of the subtexts of Kay's commentary seems to be that most operating systems train you how to use them, whereas I think he would like to see the actual person make the computer perform the functions that they would like them too.
A subtle distinction, I know, but I remember helping teach a class on LOGO a long time ago (ok I was a geek at age 12), and that was the advantage of it for little kids.....they were in charge of the computer, not the other way around. I don't see that philosophy as much today in the widely distributed programs.
--- There is a man in a smiling bag.
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.
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.
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.
Dude, I use it every night to simulate a girlfriend, and that is pretty damn interesting.
Kay should take a break from all of this research BS and check out some of the great porn on the internet. He wouldn't be so down on the state of the industry then.
The purpose of a paintbrush and paint is to produce stunning art. Using a paintbrush to protect a house from the elements is missing the point.
He needs to get over himself. The PC is a tool, a toy, a weapon, a paperweight, and for some a vibrator. Use it for whatever you want.
Most people use them for little more than anchors to keep the desk from flying off into space.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
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!
The language Squeak wasn't my introduction to object-oriented programming, but having stumbled on Java I found Squeak to really be a much better object oriented learning environment. No language treats "everything" as an object despite their claims, but Squeak really comes darn close.
The Squeak programming environment along with the Korienek, Wrensch, and Dechow book were what made the idea of Object-Oriented programming really click in my brain. Even if you never program a "real" program with Squeak, the value of Squeak is that you can really learn OO principles without the baggage of a C heritage and designers who've shortcut language consistency in the name of efficiency. All are good things you may want to make the trade off for when programming a "real" program, but not things you want to short yourself on during your education.
Think of what computers have allowed us to do. Not just personal computers, all electronic computers. They are everywhere. Sure, they may be used for a lot of conveniences, but those are fantastic conveniences. Do you remember what it was like to check out at the grocery store 20 years ago? I cannot imagine doing that now. It takes minutes to run an entire cart of groceries through and pay for them. But that is consumerism, so someone may be willing to live without that. Think of the medical industry. The advances because of computers has been immense. The tools and technology that they use today is fantastic. Now you could argue that the medical system in this country is no better off, because of shortages, malpractice, etc. But you have to look at the accomplishments of the tool without passing judgement on the industry itself. I got some paint this past weekend. Computer mixed it. I drove my car to get the paint - it has a computer managing the engine system. We have a rover on Mars. Satellite images of the planet. Weather radar that you can view on the internet. Truly portable music. Everything from scientific applications to pure entertainment. Some things that could never have existed without computers.
I fully understand the need to disconnect every once in a while. But if you *really* investigate what computers have done for us, it is mind-boggling.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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 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.
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.
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.
"television will be a wonderful medium for the masses to enjoy the benefits of culture and education."
The truth is that people make any general purpose media or device do what they want to do, or relegate it to irrelevancy. What most people want is to be passively entertained (couch potatoes). Build a device that can only be used for lofty goals, and nobody will buy it.
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.
He may have (and was) a great pioneer, but these days I think he's too busy playing with *his* old toys to notice the world has changed around him. He says we mainly read the web, and yet every person posting here is *writing* the web. He has overlooked the impact of CMS systems and more importantly wiki. Why no metion of Skype, bittorrent, 3 degrees of seperation or any form of IM? Step aside old man, let the young lions continue your work or let the scales fall from your eyes.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
That's nice. I'm sure it feels good for the handicapped kid to "belong". But why stop there?! Don't you think playing an FPS falls quite short of creating art or learning new things? That's all Kay is saying. Computers could be the tool the handicapped kid needs to really -contribute- to society, not to just -belong-.
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?
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.
I found this passage from the middle captures his arguments succinctly:
Depends on the busines. Most businesses want predictable, repeatably, accurate, auditable activity done with their PCs. Accounting is an example of a business that does not WANT creativity. :-) I am assuming he's not talking about this bread-n-butter computing problems but what's done on the desktop, but he also has to remember that the desktop user also has to work in that "boring" business environment, and most jobs discourage creativity in order to "maximise efficiency".
Some jobs will benefit from creativity, and in those cases, most people feel their PCs (especially the Mac crowd) do encourage their creativity. But I can't help wonder if he's so obsessed with being creative that he's ignoring the fact some people don't need creativity in their jobs, also, if they are being creative, they don't want to be creative int he way he wants to be creative.
Here's an example of his disconnect. Maybe they're not doing it in the way Kay wants to see it done, but it's done all the time with various tools, but mostly spreadsheet based ones using plug-ins for Excel. People find the spreadsheet the most comfortable tool for modeling things and simulating their company on paper. Hell, there are some really nifty 3rd party plug-ins for Excel that can do Monte Carlo simulation on your spreadsheet data. You provide some extra information about your values, like variance, etc., and the plug-in will calculate the outcome curve of your model. And there are some really cool tools for MS Project to model how your project works!
From my perspective, modeling happens all the time and people are using their imaginations to model and work with some really nifty things. From small businesses to the home user figuring out their portfolio balance to the engineering company using their PC to model new ways of designing structures! It just might not be the way Kay wants to do it.
I think Key is confusing the way he wants to be creative and how he thinks with how everyone else should think. Berating people for not thinking like you do is, to me, the anti-thesis of creativity.
I think he's trying to say that PCs should transcend just trying to be a poor simulacrum of pen and paper. On the surface, that sounds seductive: your PC should take all that drudgery away from you leaving you free to think. Let the PC do all the thinking and work and you do all the creativity. As someone who likes to think of himself as creative, that sounds... stupid. Painters like the feel of paint on canvas. Harlan Ellison loves the effort it takes to push the keys on his mechanical typewriter. Most artists consider the "drudgery" part of the creative process. It's a challenge to your imagination that spurs you forward. The effort of collecting and working the clay is considered a key part of the pottery making process. Just going to a shop to buy the clay is considered death to the process. Being truely creative is about taking all there is inside you and expressing it. Making it "easier" is missing the point.
Kay also believes that the drudgery inhibits creativity; which it doesn't. You will be creative even if you have to use a stone and cliff face. Making it easier will not increase your creativity, nor will it improve its quality. If you want to make PCs more use
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
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.