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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.
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.
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
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?
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 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.
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
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EAT FLAMING DEATH
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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!
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.
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.
You can't teach anyone to be creative.
I don't know if that's true or not, but you can definitely teach people not to be creative. And that's just exactly what we're doing when we don't give our kids enough art, music, math, and language education.
You either are, or are not.
Maybe, but I tend to think that mostly everyone is born with a creative brain. Some kids grow up learning that it's okay and fun and good to think outside the box and are encouraged to solve their own problems in their own ways. Others grow up getting smacked for coloring outside the lines and are told not to think for themselves.
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.
I'm not sure what the differences is between "aid" and "enhance" above, but one way that computers can aid/enhance the creative process is to stop impeding it. There's probably a whole book to be written on this topic (and Kay might be the guy to do it), but in short I think that software often tends to get in the way more than it helps.
In the beginning, there were assorted ridiculous input systems such as punch cards, paper tapes, and (ha!) rows of switches. Computers weren't much fun to use, and way too expensive for most creative endeavors. (That's not to say that the pioneers of our industry weren't creative.) And then came terminals and command lines, and life was good! Much better than before, but still so expensive that you had to be a really smart and already creative college kid just to get to use one for a bit. (Read Steven Levy's "Hackers" for more on this.) Then came personal computers, which were relatively affordable and inspired all sorts of creativity.
But still, we were stuck with the command line, and you pretty much needed to learn all about "right" and "wrong" ways to do things, and if you did something "wrong" the computer normally did something unfriendly. (Note that text adventure games were wildly popular during this time, possibly because they encouraged one to explore a new world, and aside from maybe getting temporarily killed there wasn't much that you could do that was "wrong.") When GUI's first came into public consciousness with the Apple Lisa (there were others, but a normal person might actually have a shot at touching a Lisa), there was a lot of interest because with this strange new computing paradigm, you could tell the computer to do whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, and there was little that you could do that was "wrong." At $10,000, though, Lisa's were too expensive for most folk. Then the Mac came along and people loved it. It was relatively affordable, and easy to use, and people (Microsoft included) did all sorts of interesting things with it. Even with just two apps, MacWrite and MacPaint, people were transfixed for hours just playing and creating and exploring. About the worst thing you could do resulted in having to swap the floppy disk five or ten times.
These days, computers are a lot more difficult and scary to use. No, don't open that attachment! You never know, it might contain a virus. Don't plug you computer into the network if you don't know the "right" way to do it, because hackers might take over your computer. Why did you set up your document like that? You've got it all wrong. Which of these 300 different commands that do a very specific thing do you want, and in what order?
Tools which inspire creativity are simple ones which don't have a "right" and "wrong" way to use them. Tools like Logo and MacPaint and paintbrushes and drums. You get that sort of (software) tool most often in the early and middle phases of a products life, when a product is implemented enough to be useful, but before the manufacturer needs to justify the next seven updates and throws in all manner of kitchen sink features.
Friends, it's time to demand simpl
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 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.
Squeak isn't all that hard to figure out. But if you're used to having a nicely written book, you can buy one- a couple exist for Squeak specifically. But Squeak's online documentation is lacking, there's no doubt about that- especially in the area of newbie reorientation. Making apps in Squeak is different than making apps in Java, C++ or even Lisp. The environment's different for one.
:P
The basic idea for creating a program in Squeak is to open up the Class Browser. Make a new class. Code away. Depending on what your program does, you may need more than one class.
Or, you can make apps without doing it the old fashioned way. In Squeak, you can draw up your GUI, composing it with widgets out of the Morphic Toolbox, and then adding scripts. When this button is clicked, do this or that. Etc. There are some good tutorials for this newer way of making programs.
It is an (not *the*- anything can be improved) ideal environment for kids- when you've got people teaching them. People used to coding in the same form for a long time often have a hard time learning Squeak. But then again, a lot of old assembly and C hackers have a hard time doing C++ or Java without spending a lot of time thinking about how to design OO systems instead of procedural ones. But old dogs can learn new tricks.
I learned Smalltalk and Squeak on my own, teaching it to myself. I had no problem doing it. Didn't have a text book- or any book, for that matter. While there were even fewer online docs back in those days, that's where I started, but then moving to mostly exploring the system. In Smalltalk, you have the Class Browser, which allows one to browse the source code to anything in the system. I learned by example and by doing. So far, that's how I've learned every language I know, and doing it by just reading books doesn't work for me. When I wanted to know how to make a GUI, I looked at the source of the simplest built-in apps in Squeak, learning how a GUI was constructed. Then making something simple of my own, a simple Address Book. After that point, it's just a matter of checking the reference- that is, looking at the class hierarchy and for the methods that are provided.
I think some personality types don't take well to this kind of exploratory programming, prefering to learn in a more passive way. That's fine- to each her own. Squeak tends to draw folks that do like that style of learning and doing. When it's learned, it is really handy. "Learning" Java for me didn't take that long, and it's mostly a matter of having the on-line class reference handy for me to write a program. In the best case, Squeak would provide more documentation for those who learned to program the old fashioned way, but in any OSS community, no one wants to be the one to write such docs.
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.
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.
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.