Alan Kay: A Conversation with CMU Faculty and Students (2007) [video]

I'd recommend going through "Early history of Smalltalk" and "The Dream machine". First covers Kay's work and Smalltalk - how it started, what was the reasoning behind it. I'm still in progress with the second one, but it gives pretty deep dive in history of computing, covering a lot about personalities behind the field and their work.

The Innovators by Walter Isaacson and Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon are excellent.

If you are talking about the Butler Lampson talk that Alan Kay mentions, I would also be interested if anyone has found this somewhere ...

It's the internet now. It was the influence of television when I grew up. When my parents grew up it was rock music. It's a constant in history that older generations complain about younger generations. Alan Kay of course was a young free thinker in the 1960s when he and his colleagues did some great pioneering stuff. And here we see him as an older version of himself falling into the trap that many older people have fallen into before: believing that everything was better in the past.

He does have a point challenging the young people in the room that seem to be a bit challenged in grasping the notion that maybe it's not all about what will be successful in the market. People don't invent because they want to get rich but because the process of invention is just deeply satisfying in itself. Sometimes it has practical value.

There are plenty of free thinkers in this world working on all sorts of topics. Successful breakthroughs are just a function of getting these people hooked up with each other and enough funding.

The whole point of Xerox Parc was that it happened in the middle of the cold war and the US basically just removed the floodgates from any funding that had anything to do with tech. They went to the moon in the same decade that Kay was doing his thing. Xerox Parc's funding was petty cash in comparison but it was enough. People and companies were thinking big. Xerox had plenty of money and they figured that beautiful stuff could happen if they just gathered up anyone with a brain and let them do their thing. Lots of companies did that back in the day.

Computer science as a discipline did not even exist. But Xerox saw that this computer thing could be a thing for them. So they hired the smartest people they could find to figure that out. It was a very hands on, multi disciplinary team with a lot of funding and no bean counters on their back. Very similar to what you find in some well funded startups these days. I'd say Spacex might have a very similar vibe right now. Magic Leap before the investors got nervous: same thing (and actually very comparable to Xerox Parc). Google in the first ten years of its existence. Etc.

I worked for Nokia Research for a while when it was still drunk on its success with early feature and smart phones (i.e. before the iphone). They were not doing any rocket programs but we had plenty of people working on some pretty crazy shit. And some of it actually worked. Of course Nokia wasn't very good at converting their research outputs into product. Just like Xerox, they had all the right ideas and failed to capitalize on them. If you like ipads or iphones: Nokia had a touch screen Debian linux based tablet in 2005. They imagined the future, built it (as Alan Kay famously suggested), and then discarded the results in an epic bit of corporate stupidity and ineptness that still gets me angry to this day.

Of course, blue sky, industrial research labs were already declining when I worked there and they no longer really exist. But they've been replaced by well funded startups. I'm working in my third startup now. Loving it but the funding could be better (yes, we're raising: tryformation.com).

Someone who's thoughts I've been listening to for some time now is the cognitive scientist and AI researcher Joscha Bach. As far as I'm concerned he has the best model of our consciousness, life, the universe and maybe everything that I've come across. I've honestly been trying to find something substantial of his that I disagree with and I've come up short. His first Lex Fridman interview is a good start, and there's plenty of more technical talks out there too.

There's also Bret Victor who's "The Humane Representation of Thought" talk is one of my all time favourites. He hasn't seemed to be very active recently though.

I've come across Dave Ackley via Bach, and he has some really fascinating ideas about improving the nature of computing, seems to be a real outsider figure.

I'm sure there's many more brilliant and charasmatic folk out there, but we just haven't come across the the links to them yet.