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> • Knowledge dominates IQ. Henry Ford accomplished more than Leonardo da Vinci not because he was smarter, but because humanity's cumulative knowledge had given him tools and inventions Leonardo could only dream of.

This really struck a chord for me. What I got from it was that many people try to build some form of success on pure IQ and get frustrated when they are outmuscled by knowledge in the market.

I think that cuts back to Xerox PARC as well - by focussing everything on IQ, they created the knowledge that allowed Apple to be so dominant.

Where the talk falls a little bit on the obnoxious side is when Mr. Kay makes dismissive statements on how they created what others sold, just 10 or 20 years earlier. I think that ignores the enormous amount of work you have to put into connecting this knowledge that they worked out to the current state of mind that people are in.

Xerox PARC may have invented the future, but the failure of their parent company to bring that future to market shows that even with that knowledge at hand, you have quite a bit of way ahead of you.

> Xerox PARC may have invented the future, but the failure of their parent company to bring that future to market shows that even with that knowledge at hand, you have quite a bit of way ahead of you.

There are quite a few talks scattered around the web from former employees about how everything went downhill due to mismanagement.

Back in the late 90's, when I started using Oberon and digging into what was Wirth's inspiration at Xerox PARC, I discovered a new world much more interesting that what Bell Labs could offer.

However they had better luck bringing their research into the market at large, given how it all played with the universities.

>Xerox PARC may have invented the future, but the failure of their parent company to bring that future to market shows that even with that knowledge at hand, you have quite a bit of way ahead of you.

does it really matter that Xerox PARC "invented the future"? If not they, then somebody else couple years later. 10-20 years down the road it just wouldn't change a bit.

I know that it is helpful at times to realize that invention and innovation could happen in a myriad of ways, but I don't think that is a fair way of looking at things in this case, or in many cases.

Without the invention of the mouse, we might all still be using trackballs. A mouse to me is not an "A ha!" invention. I remember when I first used one that it seemed silly to move a trackball around upside-down like that.

And without laser printing, we might all still be using ribbon cartridges at work, because of time/cost concerns with inkjet.

Everything that happens can have profound effects on the future. Think of the Challenger and Columbia disasters. While it's true that the American public had somewhat lost interest in the shuttle program prior to the Challenger disaster, they didn't think of it as risky or dangerous. Think of the lives that would have been saved and how much farther along we might be in space exploration had greater precaution been taken.

>Without the invention of the mouse, we might all still be using trackballs. A mouse to me is not an "A ha!" invention.

A ha! was to me when i first time used trackball instead of mouse. It was so great, such fast and precise movements (don't remember the game though :) And if i remember correctly people with carpal tunnel get trackball instead of mouse.

>Everything that happens can have profound effects on the future. Think of the Challenger and Columbia disasters. While it's true that the American public had somewhat lost interest in the shuttle program prior to the Challenger disaster, they didn't think of it as risky or dangerous. Think of the lives that would have been saved and how much farther along we might be in space exploration had greater precaution been taken.

i come from different school of thought. Whatever number of butterflies somebody squash today, it may (and will) affect only small details of the future while the whole system's trajectory will still be in the same volume of phase space as it determined by the macro conditions (like energy constraints, etc...).

>farther along we might be in space exploration had greater precaution been taken

the technological civilizations follow typical path. A bit faster, a bit slower doesn't matter. What matters is whether given technological civilization hits a bifurcation point like all-out nuclear war or uncontrollable climate change or uncontrollable run-away genetic development or implosion into ant-colony state as result of members being "always connected" ...

You could apply this to everything in life and conclude that nothing matters. What is important is that Xerox PARC did invent many of the technologies we take for granted today. This should be celebrated along with all the other contributions that led us to the present.

>You could apply this to everything in life and conclude that nothing matters.

it matters "locally" - to individuals who invent and innovate and to ones who gets direct financial profit from it. The rest of civilization will get it anyway, at the time when civilization is ready to consume it, so details don't matter at that scale. Ancient Greeks could in theory build a steam engine [granted very low efficient] - they wouldn't have been able to put it use anyway, it would be just a curiosity like Aeolipile was.

It's probably hard to tell in most specific cases, but it can be argued that some inventions were just ready to happen (e.g. the telephone and it's race to the patent office) while others may have taken decades longer if the right genius hadn't been in the right place at the right time (Einstein's relativity perhaps?)

It matters more than locally: those invention seeded the minds of the next generations, showed them what could be possible. It's not as if Gates and Jobs didn't hear about the work done at PARC. They most likely did and it "seeded" their minds or at least primed them for their ideas. Even if they didn't do even this, they at least confirmed them that their intuitions were on the right path, and without these confirmations they maybe wouldn't have even had the courage to start their businesses.

And if the ancient Greeks would have actually built that steam engine into a useful device (even something like a powered fishing lines drawer of anything of even the slightest usefulness), I'm sure this would've completely changed the course of human history, even if they may not have found too much practical use for it. You see, once you physically build something that works and is useful (or actually implement something that can be used, in the case of software), no matter how inefficient and barely-useful it is, you actually seed and idea into the minds of all the people that see that device working or hear about it working. And that idea takes roots and very soon they will think about improving it and finding uses for it. If you just write about it in a book, even if you add building instructions and careful calculations showing that it's possible, you get at most 1% of that mind-seeding power. Most peoples minds get primed to work on improving something only after seeing something that (at least kind of) works. It's the "if we'd only tweak that and that it might just actually really work" thinking that most people can only have after seeing something physical that at least "barely kind of works". Very few people have the intelligence and imagination to get a theoretical idea and turn it into something that works, but there always some Gates or Jobs or Wozniaks that once you give them a piece of practical vision they can carry it on to something that really works.

I think that if the ancient Greeks would have build a steam engine with even the most remote practical use and would've displayed that "craftmanship" to the people instead of keeping it locked in library, the whole middle ages with all their horrors might not even have existed. Humanity might have even jumped from antiquity to industrial age directly. Maybe with a slow languish at first, before something equivalent to the printing press would have been invented to help the dissemination of knowledge, but then faster and faster.

Alan Kay posits that yes it does matter that PARC "invented the future" because there were and are very few researchers working with the opportunity mix necessary. They had five years of freedom from business concerns, tons of ambition, the right context, intelligence and inspiration. Kay claims that the extremely unique situation and persons at PARC and previously at ARPA are what gave rise to the inventions. I think he would agree with you that other people would have made similar discoveries and inventions, if only they too had the opportunity and necessary materials. From what I have heard Alan say in his speeches his perspective is that the opportunity simply does not exist today, at least not in the necessary configuration to do what PARC did.

Check out this video for a more detailed history recounted by Kay about PARC and what led up to it: http://vimeo.com/84523828

>there were and are very few researchers working with the opportunity mix necessary. They had five years of freedom from business concerns, tons of ambition, the right context, intelligence and inspiration.

A lot of Universities and research centers have the same. As most of them are, arguably, not a PARC may be these conditions aren't important? On the other side, we do have a lot of R&D coming out of Universities and research centers, so may be PARC isn't important?

i may sound like trolling, but i did listen live to Alan Kay once and honestly got more confused and got more questions as a result :)

University research is not free from business concerns either---the phrase "publish or perish" exists for a reason.

Right at the start, Kay pointed out that the innovation to get from Alto to Macintosh took more work than inventing the Alto. I don't think he was ignoring that. His point might be that someone was bound to do the innovation, but it took very deliberate choices for PARC to situate themselves where the invention was possible.

Good point. I would still say that the route "from Alto to Macintosh" is thinking more in IQ terms and that the full path, Alto to Macintosh to market, is frequently underestimated. I had a feeling that while Kay may have appreciated the first half, the second half was rather absent in his talk and he kept presenting it as though the software they built was sold ten years later by somebody else. For example saying that Microsoft took Bravo and sold Word.

What Microsoft did was hire Charles Simonyi in order to productize the research into Word

"Knowledge dominates IQ" - along this lines, recently I have come to accept the idea "Speed dominates IQ":

To explain it briefly, some one who can build fast and deploy can learn more as they come into contact with unknown-unknowns sooner and more often.

Contrast this with someone with a huge IQ who thinks about things a ton, and builds really clever first solutions which breaks on first contact with reality/market.

Running forward blindly does not help in research. During the talk, Alan even talks about this in the context of learning about the past to be able to come up with new ideas in the future.

True: failing fast only works well if you're failing at the right things, and learning from them.

On the other hand, there's a tendency with some people who "knows too much" to dismiss ideas that have existed for a while, even though it hasn't been widely disseminated.

Sometimes running forwards blindly, while ignoring all the reasons not to do something is what finally gets innovations out to people.

It get this at the moment. We have something new that the old hands say can't be done. We've proven it in the lab to our satisfaction and those that "know" just shake their heads. They do want more detail though.

It is fun to take methods that are 80 years old and update them with new technology and have them outperform the state of the art.

Yup, in computing, there often is the situation where in 60ies or so they already figured out the proper way to solve some particular problem, but noted that is impractical due to the unimaginably huge resources required (such as gigabytes of storage or CPU comparable to a modern smartphone); while the 'state of art' of that problem is based on directions that were known to be strictly limited, but could be practically implemented given the hardware limitations of the time.

That reminds me of the idea that "The world is its own best model", credited to Rodney Brooks. Basically rather than having an intelligent agent rely upon a complex predictive model of its environment to explore the actions it can take a better/faster/simpler approach might be to actually interact with the environment and see what works - "intelligence without representation".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Brooks

A crude precursor to the ideas in the Alto can be seen in the mother of all demos with Doug Engelbart imho.

I meant to include a reference to Ted Nelson's "It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC", which has been featured here before:

http://fixyt.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU

Thank you!

Thank you. Nelson does a great job enumerating the limitations of PARC's vision and the capabilities absent from PARC's work.

After being exposed to PARC's self-congratulatory self-promotion for decades, Nelson's history is a breath of fresh air.

This is not to devalue what PARC accomplished, but that its accomplishments must be taken in perspective.

It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC is also on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU

Doug Engelbart > Alan Kay > Steve Jobs > ?

eh, Engelbart > Kay > Bret Victor

> The majority acts based on group acceptance, not on the merits of an idea. Extroversion vs. introversion.

This is extremely important to realize. Eventually your [art|research] will take you beyond what people are comfortable with, and it doesn't mean you're wrong. It is hard, though.

Quite.

I'm exploring some areas at the moment generally outside the "general acceptance field", and it's uncomfortable. I find that when I run across others, especially others I know, who are expressing similar concerns, or better, are reaching conclusions similar to mine, that I'm strongly reassured.

I think you missed one of his crucial points. That is that we live in a waking dream. That our day-to-day understanding of what is real and normal is a fiction.