Computing is Everywhere: Bret Victor and Dynamicland [audio]
postlight.com
postlight.com
I'll give it another try.
For Dyanmicland, it seems to be the opposite, where the world may continue to break up into regions where the best minds may gather in order to collaborate together physically. On the web, a young kid in the country can start working with the best minds in our field by directly contributing to open source software, etc. In a world where physical co-presence is further levered up as a differentiated advantage for activating edges in a network of collaborators, that kid is going to be stifled.
To me, I think it's critical that any kind of physically based dynamic medium have a design which takes into account the trajectory of immersive computing tech (VR/AR/haptics/etc) and have an intent to dissolve the dependency on physical co-presence. I'm sure this has been talked about endlessly internally, and I grok the tension between this and the thesis that using your full body and physical matter in a humane space potentially lets you "think unthinkable thoughts", but I haven't heard it spoken about.
It's a multi-user interface, using objects on a table, via an overhead projector and camera.
Props for thinking out of the box, again, I guess. But a 5000 year art project that combines paper and lights? I guess I'm not seeing the relevance.
> > Right now, today, we can't see the thing, at all, that's going to be the most important 100 years from now.
> It certainly won't be software. Today, software is the dominant field of systems engineering. But before that, there were integrated circuits, and before that, discrete transistor circuits, and before that, vacuum tubes, and relays, and mechanical gears of all sorts, and on and on, back to the hand-axes. Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer was a mechanical masterpiece which no longer matters.
> I will not fix your vacuum tubes. I will not invent your Darlington pair. Any concept, technique, or tool that is specific to software engineering is guaranteed to have a short shelf life, at least on any time scale that I personally care about.
> (Which is totally fine if you're into that, but this is my ill-advised personal note, not yours, and I personally care about mattering 100 years from now.)
[1]: http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/note.ht...
If I understand his vision correctly, the paper and projector technology is just transitional, the goal is not the paper and lights you see, the goal is zero barrier-to-entry computation; smart, objects that enable and encourage collaboration and discussions enhanced by the additional insights that a computer the size of a room offers.
What groups are you referring to by the way? Are you thinking of Lighttable and Eve and the like?
I work with 40 year old ideas that are so advanced that people think it’s futuristic alien tech when they see it. Unfortunately the ideas will never be popular because of problems with culture and fundamental limitations of the median human comprehension.
So I see the achievement here as not one of technology but of creating a culturally isolated and elitist institution.
Lisp is one such idea implemented. Can you please list the other ideas, very interested to know.
Once it became a money printer I stopped telling people about it. My plan is to save a bunch of money and build an institution around it to push for influence that way.
Care to elaborate?
> median human comprehension
So we don't understand it well enough, yet?
“I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don’t really understand it.” -- Richard Feynman
https://kottke.org/17/06/if-you-cant-explain-something-in-si...
Some ideas are not easily communicated because the shared language does not provide the right constructs for it. I.e. incommensurable.
In assuming that I’m not the first nor the smartest person to approach a problem, it’s likely that someone else smarter found something useful and wrote it down in terms that I do not understand. So I built a cross domain search engine and used it to find the solutions I was after in other domains of expertise. I was then able to combine several the found solution components into a whole working solution. I used to work in search, so that was something I already knew how to do.
I’m sure we could stop inventing new things and coast for a long time by simply digging up old ideas instead of wastefully reinventing them in new domains. But people like new things... so we’re back to the people problem.
Some that come to mind:
- Homotopy Type Theory (HoTT)
- Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA)
Unless you can show me that a curated collection of such ideas exists somewhere, I won't believe that the only impediment is culture and median human comprehension.
I spend a lot of my time looking for such ideas, I found them to be incredibly scarce (unless of course I'm part of the median human comprehension that can't appreciate them).
Just yesterday I revisited his Future of Programming talk. Splendid!