Startup School 12: Alan Kay, Part II [video]
startupschool.org
startupschool.org
You mention Outlook being "Gold", while IQ is lead. Outlook seems to be something we can improve, both on a collective level, and also on an individual level. You discuss a lot how to use this Outlook to invent the future, but how can we develop our Outlook at more of a meta-level? If we want to be the people capable of looking 50 years into the future and then bringing our insights back to the present, how can we develop this skill?
I suspect the answer has something to do with reading good books and learning from people who already have great outlooks.
We are on the good side of this because we can look at history and get some sense of qualitative changes of Outlook, and we can also look at Anthropology and other behavioral sciences to get some sense of ways in which we are able to get past some of our genetic behaviors to "piggy-back" new thoughts on top of old mechanisms. Jerry Bruner used to call this "Goedelization" (which is an interesting way to look at it -- it is a kind of Turing machine idea to make more interesting machines from existing machines).
A key point is that "blue-plane explosions" like all ideas are most likely to be mediocre down to bad. Because they seem to come from the heavens, in the old days people would create religions around them; today we are expected to vet ideas very carefully before proclaiming and working on them.
Elon Musk recently has also talked about, how thought process of physical science appeals to him, because it tends to deconstruct systems into fundamental parts, and then rebuild the explanation from them, rather than using analogies.
So, I thought, that in order to imagine the progress of the next century we'd need to define sort of a lowest energy state, towards which the humanity should drift one way or another. However, I didn't have any of the fundamental pieces, and I think you just laid them down quite nicely in this lecture. Thanks Alan.
To me, I think the key is to balance the universal with the non-universal to forge progress.
One interesting connection is that in an earlier lecture Steve Huffman notes they tried categories with Reddit but reverted. Here Kay explains why.
Incidentally, someone who calls out UX issues like the absence of a map in the side entrance of the Gates building is my kind of person.
It also does not help in today's bubble economy: companies are financially engineered and few innovations and inventions get made. A Big Idea to most people now-a-days is: "A small idea that makes big profits". So your job to cut through that and inspire people is a very important one.
circle(x=time, y=-time*time, r=10)
so a render can get the information it needs but there aren't individual frames to edit.
In general, what happens to interoperability if different programs/projects represent the same things, like images and animations, very differently?
And how security could be handled in such a system? Either against a malicious or haywire programs/project?
Take a look at capability protection -- it covers most of these cases reasonably well.
However, just to make you feel better (I hope), I did do a startup in grad school (called "Creative X").
Still there a lots of ways it could play out - heaven like or hell like so maybe it's good to think about it and try stuff.
Where some kind of inner-voice says: "How do you even dare to think of that, you have no ideia how to do it...", like if only some are entitled to dream.
I'm afraid that may be the byproduct of the lack of knowledge to try to break the problem even to the smallest achievable parts, with current or near-future technology developments.
How can one tackle this? Is there a process? Should we just try to blindly find what matters/systems are involved, study them, and connect them? Because we should take responsibility for our vision.
Should we just pack our vision, display it to the world and see if it resonates on people who have knowledge in such areas required to achieve it?
Or should we simply drop it, and move on to the next one?
I.e. it's no big deal if you don't wrap your identity around it. My self criticism was all about being able to grind well enough with my colleagues to finish some of the ideas rather than my tendency to go off and have more.
As they use to say in the 60s "Keep on a truckin'"
What are some resources to learn more about the 90% of programming ideas created at PARC that did not come out? Which do you think hold the most potential for the future?
Thank you
Also, take a look at the article I wrote for Scientific American in September 1984 "Software" that talks about organizations of active objects as "tissue programming"
Fortunately, it looks like the PDF is now linked from the talk: https://www.dropbox.com/s/knngq11tzdi0tdh/Alan%20Kay%20-%20T...
I didn't. I missed where you gave the title of your handout, though of course I did hear the description and much that followed.
What enlightened times we live in, such that a student can fail to give a teacher his undivided attention not just in the classroom but at a great distance.
Thanks very much for sharing all this.
(This is not to ding you for this, but to acknowledge that you are helping to make an important point for our times.)
I've been amazed and depressed to find that CS majors in major universities have vaguely heard of Doug Engelbart but virtually none have taken the trouble to type "Engelbart" into Google and follow up on the first 5 hits. (Depressing, because we put in a lot of effort back when things were much more difficult to get most people in the world within a few typed characters and button clicks of most of the important ideas and knowledge in the world -- but ... ?????)
A critical part of that thought process was the idea of using Carl Hewitt's PLANNER ideas as the interface to objects -- that was done around 1970, and we used some of it in the first Smalltalk (72).
He reminded me of this anecdote: In an intro to Anthropology video on Stanford's YouTube channel. The professor passed out a questionnaire that included, "Why are you taking this class?". Someone wrote, "Yes". I expected that kind of response in my biz classes @ CUNY, but not @ Stanford. Especially, in an Anthropology class.
Please try to be more diligent about what you are complaining about. It's clear that I didn't mean remotely what you imply.
Why wouldn't you take the trouble to check your memory before writing the above?
I enjoyed the hell out of both videos and will be watching them again because there was so much to unpack there. I didn't send an email because it's intimidating to email someone who has affected my life in so many ways, but I will take this opportunity to thank you for your work and for sharing your ideas in these videos.