12 ms·

Some excerpts from recent Alan Kay emails

337 points by dasmoth 9y ago

evaneykelen 9y ago
The name Licklider is mentioned a couple of times. Recently I read a fascinating account of his work. Great read for those who want to know more about the history of computing and the internet: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FIPHEXM/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FIPHEXM/
tzahola 9y ago
>Socrates didn't charge for "education" because when you are in business, the "customer starts to become right". Whereas in education, the customer is generally "not right". Very important takeaway!
- weinzierl 9y ago
  The whole paragraph is gold: > Socrates didn't charge for "education" because when you are in business, the "customer starts to become right". Whereas in education, the customer is generally "not right". Marketeers are catering to what people want, educators are trying to deal with what they think people need (and this is often not at all what they want). Part of Montessori's genius was to realize early that children want to get fluent in their surrounding environs and culture, and this can be really powerful if one embeds what they need in the environs and culture. This is so true on so many levels. Schools and university came to mind immediately. For me, the most striking fit is to educational articles and blog posts on the web. When the www was young it was full of stuff that catered my intellectual curiosity. Nowadays content creation is driven by keyword research, search volume and CPC. After three paragraphs I usually know this will end in a call to action. Not that there wouldn't be any interesting stuff out there, but it is drowned in a sea of ever repeating trivialities.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    Remember when Google was useful to find good stuff faster instead of driving what should be there ?
    - jononor 9y ago
      I remember that when I started googling, I would often go to page 2,3,4,5 to find what I wanted. These days I never go past the first page. I actually had to check now that there was still a page switcher... What changed the most? How good I am at formulating a query? What kind of information I'm looking for? How good Google is at curating the first page? How much information is available? Sure hope its not that my queries are more trivial, or that my preferences for answers favors simpler,easier ones... Thankfully I still get lost on Wikipedia (and Youtube), in a kind of what-is-all-this-I-need-to-know-more learning spree.
      - agumonkey 9y ago
        A bunch of factor: - we became impatient if not lazy - google does a huge job at parsing complex queries - the content is more organized in itself (html semantic markup, meaningful css classes, etc etc) The other day I tried a tails/tor and .. i cant recall.. ipfs probably. This network is bare, so bare I felt excited just like the 56K days. It quickly went bad because there's a huge % of bad / crazy content, but still I felt entering a more interesting territory as a visitor.
      - forapurpose 9y ago
        > Thankfully I still get lost on Wikipedia (and Youtube), in a kind of what-is-all-this-I-need-to-know-more learning spree. I know what you mean, but should we be thankful? Learning is stimulating, but are we just indulging in it with little or negative results because we are acquiring misinformation?
    - weinzierl 9y ago
      Yes, absolutely. I use DuckDuckGo and it feels a lot like the early Google. The only thing I still use Google for is local searches, like opening hours, this is where the filter bubble shines.
      - jacksmith21006 9y ago
        Find DDG like early Google days in that a bit harder to find things where today Google will have it in the first page. Google has got to a point where it is just amazing how accurate it is. Suspect part of it is also me and knowing how to phrase searches. Bit that just does not work to the same level on DDG.
  - sitkack 9y ago
    The web now presents mainly economic activity and validation of currently held opinion. When we were both younger, the web and I, the ideas and opinions expressed by it were on a wider spectrum. It feels like it went from 4:2:2 down to a 32 color fixed pastel palette.
- bawana 9y ago
  and this is whats happening in medicine. it's going from an activity where the doctor and patient are trying to 'learn' about an illness to a business where the 'client' must be pleased by the 'provider'. The concept of allopathic medicine would never have been invented in our day and age.
  - thanatropism 9y ago
    The "concept" of allopathic medicine was invented by homeopaths.
quantumofmalice 9y ago
> Most don't think of the resources in our centuries as actually part of a human-made garden via inventions and cooperation, and that the garden has to be maintained and renewed. Just right.
imrehg 9y ago
Makes me wonder, what could we do, or what could current organizations do to recreate that environment of research and creativity in today's (and tomorrow's) world? Also, what do you do in your own life (if any) to create that sort context that is conductive to this kind of creativity?
- osullivj 9y ago
  Committees impose compromises and conditions on funding, so govt or public company money won't work, as Kay points out. It must be pvt money, like the Medicis funding the renaissance. Something like the Gates Foundation. It could be a prestige project for Bezos or Zuck.
  - ricardobeat 9y ago
    Isn't this framing of for-profit (prestige is a kind of profit) part of the problem he describes?
  - discreteevent 9y ago
    DARPA was government though
    - MaysonL 9y ago
      And DARPA is nowhere near as good as ARPA was.
- Joeri 9y ago
  The recipe from the article should still work: Hire a bunch of smart people, give them advance funding for 5 years without strings attached, tell them to build the future without specifying what that means. From a personal view I have plenty of ideas for things never built before, but I lack the time and energy to do it after hours and I can almost never fit it into the scope of my professional work. Sometimes this makes me sad.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
signa11 9y ago
> An example of the vision was Licklider's "The destiny of computers is to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for all humans, pervasively networked world-wide". This vision does not state what the amplification is like or how you might be able to network everyone in the world. i am going through licklider's 'the dream machine' book. it is quite long, and dense but ties together lots of individual threads (for me at least) that were kind of floating loose otherwise. i had known about luminaries in the field (and their work) specifically, licklider, shannon, norbert-weiner, cerf and kahn, metcalfe, von neumann, vannaver bush (to name a few) but this book brings them together. interestingly though, licklider's background was in psychology, as opposed to ee/maths. did we lose some of the diversity of perspective ? another book, that i found to be pretty good is 'the idea factory', it complements the 'dream machine' book quite well. edit-001 : fmt changes, and added reference to another book.
- taylorwc 9y ago
  I’m currently reading this book as well, having come across it on Alan Kay’s reading list[0]. It’s definitely worth reading, and the diversity of thought and interest surrounding that time does seem to be in contrast to today’s environment. [0] http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp
- baq 9y ago
  > interestingly though, licklider's background was in psychology, as opposed to ee/maths. did we lose some of the diversity of perspective ? The answer to this question is almost right in the emails: the focus of funding research switched from visionary work of defining problem space to exploration of solution space. Engineers are people who are educated, perhaps sometimes predisposed, to solve problems, not find problems worth solving.
- chubot 9y ago
  Hm I posted an eerily similar comment to this yesterday morning on lobste.rs: https://lobste.rs/s/i9s39q/best_books_you_have_read_2017#c_zgtzc9 https://lobste.rs/s/i9s39q/best_books_you_have_read_2017#c_z... It looks like you made at least four of the same points that I did.
chauhankiran 9y ago
> set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. Demand golden coins from the geese rather than eggs. Demand platinum rather than gold. Require that the geese make plans and explain just how they will make the eggs that will be laid. Etc. -- I have seen these types of situations so many times while project implementation.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
ridewinter 9y ago
What if a stepping stone to UBI was a basic income to everyone that’s demonstrated some technical aptitude? If scientists and engineers didn’t have to work for, say Zuckerberg, to survive and instead because they genuinely wanted to collaborate, maybe the tech giants wouldn’t be so disproportionately powerful. And creativity in the tech world would skyrocket.
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  A basic income with restrictions is basically a job . UBI needs to apply to everyone to work.
  - ridewinter 9y ago
    Agreed that UBI for everyone is the ultimate goal. But basic income for all engineers and scientists could be more politically palatable in the US and have quicker results.
- CuriousSkeptic 9y ago
  No need to comstrain our self to engineers. There are probably lots, and lots, of people that would produce more value on their own agenda.
  - dreamache 9y ago
    And there would be plenty more that would produce far less.
    - xtian 9y ago
      Is that a fact or a fear?
      - dreamache 9y ago
        "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." UBI has a lot wrong with it, but I'll just start and end with a first principle: Taxation is theft and therefore, government and UBI are immoral. I advocate for freedom and consent, especially as it pertains to economics. The income I earn through producing goods and services that I exchange voluntarily with other individuals should be mine to keep; all of it. Anything less is not freedom and certainly not consent.
sgentle 9y ago
What this makes me wonder is, if the problem is not enough funding for visionary work, or more accurately that modern funders misunderstand how and why to find visionary work, then what will change their minds? Because I feel like I've read a few of these posts, watched similar talks, and I nod along and agree every time. Only problem is, I'm not a wealthy benefactor, director of a research institute, or a business exec with control of discretionary R&D funding. Where do those people hang out, what would convince them like this post convinces me, and is anyone working on that?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- auggierose 9y ago
  I think it is hard to get people to understand what they do not understand yet, actually what they have opposing experiences to. It seems to me making money is easy if you a) work hard b) are extremely goal driven (and obviously you need to be sufficiently smart). Now this seems to be working in research too, where the extremely goal driven part means you focus on publishing research papers in prestigious places. I think it is working in research (given for example that some of the papers in conferences like POPL are just great). Of course you won't hear from those instances where it is not working (until it does). The problem is you somehow have to decide who to give money to, and you cannot possibly know who carries a vision inside of them that they are actually able to realise given enough funding and time.
pdkl95 9y ago
> The destiny of computers is to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for all humans, pervasively networked world-wide". This vision does not state what the amplification is like or how you might be able to network everyone in the world. That's a vision that recognizes the value in creating tools, not constrained solutions for the current problem. Freedom can be frightening[1], but letting people explore what is possible with your new tool sometimes leads to unexpected uses and the occasional paradigm-shifting discovery. [1] (with apologies to DHH[2]) If we give people unconstrained tools, they might change the String class to shoot out fireworks at inappropriate time! [2] https://vimeo.com/17420638#t=27m27s https://vimeo.com/17420638#t=27m27s
cateye 9y ago
It is a very difficult narrative. Mainly because while reading it, I had to think constantly about survivorship bias and appeal to authority. Would I really read this if it was written by a 20 year old without a track record? Or how many Alan Key's are out there that completely failed and would prescribe a totally different approach and attribute the cause and effect on other factors? I also totally get the point of funding problem finding versus funding business plans that are full of bullshit and pretend to have a risk free solution with a play book that just needs some money to execute it linearly step-by-step. So, for that part it is written very well and the point is clear. Another topic is: would all kind of innovations really emerge if the funding mechanism was radically different in the last 20 years? Would we see all kinds of big leaps or was ARPA-Parc just a serendipity moment that couldn't be repeated no matter what the funding structure was?
- api 9y ago
  On your second point -- namely why does Juicero get funded and qualitative innovation doesn't -- I think it comes down to the still very real weight given to subjective alpha-primate-ness in business decision making. On two occasions I've had VC types (in one case post-beer) tell me they almost never fund anyone who doesn't have (paraphrasing) "presence" or "a reality distortion field" etc. I would have assumed it to be subconscious but these comments convinced me that it's a conscious explicit bias in at least some cases. This is a really outstanding book on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet:_The_Power_of_Introverts_in_a_World_That_Can%27t_Stop_Talking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet:_The_Power_of_Introverts... Put enough weaponized extroversion and alpha primate signaling behind it and you can get people to invest in millions in absolute BS. You can also over-inflate the value of something real to stratospheric degrees. See also: Uber. On the other hand if you have an underspoken introvert try to sell something outstanding, the majority of businesspeople will not pay attention. I have seen a case where a meek soft-spoken woman tried to pitch a mobile startup with outstanding user base growth, revenue, and cash efficiency numbers and got yawns. She wasn't asking for much. This was seed stage stuff and these were crazy amazing numbers. In the same pitch fest the investor panel perked up for a number of vapid pre-revenue proposals backed by more extroverted alpha personalities. I don't think it was just sexism since one of these was also a woman. (I suspect some sexism is actually this bias since it may be tougher for women to play the alpha primate card with men.) Most innovators ("artists") are more on the introvert end of the spectrum. Edit: this may be rational for funding things that rely heavily on in-person salesmanship, but it's applied broadly. Edit #2: another reason this may be rational for VCs is that they are only thinking about their cash-out. They may be looking for people who can pump the value of the company's stock to later investors more than people who can actually deliver lasting value. The company's product is its stock, not its product.
jasonkostempski 9y ago
Are the full emails availabe somewhere?
Jyaif 9y ago
Is the underlying assumption behind this text is that less innovation is happening right now? Are the billions poured in AI not counting?
- paulsutter 9y ago
  Particularly considering that most of the AI work is openly published (companies averse to publishing have difficulty hiring in AI)
- hashmal 9y ago
  The assumption is (I believe) that innovation is better when it's not goal-oriented. Currently much of the funding goes to projects that have a clear path to results, but finding that path is a prerequisite, and is not funded.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Are the billions poured in AI not counting? Unless there are any great results, no, they are not. Tons of research money where poured into AI in the 60s-70s too, and when it got nowhere great, it all folded in the so-called "AI winter".
- bboreham 9y ago
  The comparison is with an environment where the mouse, windowing and Ethernet were created. Billions poured into AI have produced some interesting tricks but little that changed the entire world of computing in the way those things have.
  - Jyaif 9y ago
    That's funny you should mention "the mouse, windowing and Ethernet", because in the last 5 years the majority of people have stop using all 3 of those (thanks to mobile). So that takes care of the "little that changed the entire world of computing" argument. Yes, billions have been poured into AI and we still have no strong AI. That just shows that it's a problem that is way more complicated that inventing the concept of a pointing device, making computers talk to each other, or having applications show something on a screen that isn't text. The people in the 80s weren't smarter (or dumber) than the people of today, there were just a lot of low hanging fruits back then.
roi 9y ago
The thing is that Licklider's vision of computers as "interactive intellectual amplifiers for all humans, pervasively networked world-wide" has already come to pass, and created huge economies of scale and exponential pressures for compatibility and conformity that didn't exist before. In the 1970's a few dozen brilliant people could create a completely new and self-contained computer system because the entire computing world was tiny and fragmented. there wasn't the imperative to be compatible to all-pervasive standards (even IBM's dominance in business was being challenged by the minis). These day if you want to create a new computer system that people will use you need at the minimum to provide a networking stack and a functional web browser, some emulation or compatibility system to support legacy software that people rely on, device drivers for a huge range of hardware, etc. All this not only takes a huge amount of work, it also punctures the design integrity of your system, making it into a huge mountain of compatibility hacks before you even start on your own new concepts. But the deadliest enemy of innovation is the mental inertia of masses of users with a long history of interacting with computers. They are no longer the blank slates who have never seen a computer you had in the 70's. Even in the realm of art people realized that the romantic or modernistic model of artistic revolution that Kay invokes is untenable and retreated into postmodernism.
- panic 9y ago
  > All this not only takes a huge amount of work, it also punctures the design integrity of your system, making it into a huge mountain of compatibility hacks before you even start on your own new concepts. One possible approach that doesn't require writing a full compatibility layer is virtualization. Run your new system alongside a mature system like Linux, then rig it up so windows can appear inside whatever new environment you come up with. You do still need to write the code to send events and get pixel buffers, but it seems like much less work overall.
  - mkl 9y ago
    Then you're constrained by the existing window and input systems, which probably makes many interesting new concepts impossible to implement. I don't know an alternative except to do everything new within one window, which would be at least as bad.
pixelmonkey 9y ago
There's an interesting book on the topic discussed in these emails, entitled "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned": http://amzn.to/2CtIrRR http://amzn.to/2CtIrRR There's a YouTube talk by the author on the subject here: https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI The rough idea is this: - creativity often arises by stumbling around in a problem space, or in operating "randomly" under an artificially-imposed constraint - modern life is obsessed with metrics and goal-setting, and this has extended into creative pursuits including science, research, and business - sometimes, short-term focus on the goal defeats the goal-given aims (see e.g. shareholder value focus) - the authors point out that when they were researching artificial intelligence, they discovered that systems that focused too much on an explicitly-coded "objective" would end up producing lackluster results, but systems that did more "playful" exploration within a problem space produced more creative results - using this backdrop, the authors suggest perhaps innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort and is instead driven by serendipitous discovery and playful creativity I found the ideas compelling, as I do find Kay's description of the "art" behind research.
- mathattack 9y ago
  This is the difference between Research(which Kay excelled at) and Development and Commercialization (which he didn’t). Both are important. The latter requires focus, discipline and deadlines.
  - pbowyer 9y ago
    Have you any references to the Development and Commercialization he didn't excel at? I know of Kay by name, but not his life story.
    - username223 9y ago
      He was a Xerox PARC guy back in the Smalltalk days, when they developed incredibly expensive systems that never really sold. In the 2000s, he was still griping about how everything was worse than PARC in the 1970s. I haven't paid much attention to him since then.
jancsika 9y ago
> Parc was "effectively non-profit" because of our agreement with Xerox, which also included the ability to publish our results in public writings (this was a constant battle with Xerox). Parc was "effectively non-profit" because there was no way to collect or monetize reams of user data like there is today. If there had been, either Kay wouldn't have gotten that agreement or Parc would have been much more selective about what constituted "results." For example: how many companies have solved the talk-to-our-computers-and-our-computers-talk-back problem now?
- marshray 9y ago
  > there was no way to collect or monetize reams of user data like there is today Xerox was at the time the world leader in handling literal reams. A huge portion of data processing was related to managing customer data, mailing lists, etc.
  - jancsika 9y ago
    I'm talking about a different type of user data-- what would be input into things like visual programming languages and devices that Alan Kay talks about-- Grail, light pen inputs, etc. I assume what Kay is talking about is the ability to publish insights, data, and specifications for the languages and UIs that were being developed at the time. So when you see Kay doing user studies working with kids, the stuff he made public was the actual research on what was learned about human-computer interaction during that time, languages used, developed, etc. It wasn't the position of the kids' eye, fingerprint of their typing patterns, mouse movement patterns, etc. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I've never seen anything Kay wrote from the 70s or 80s that discussed the implications of mining user data on such an enormous and regular basis as is currently done. And I doubt Xerox itself thought of that category of user data as being valuable outside of research, or in any way significant the way "customer data, mailing lists, etc." were. But today, that user data is assumed to be valuable and can cheaply be collected and monetized. So even if some Parc-like team exists today, the results will be practically locked-down to keep a competitive advantage over others. Or it will make much smaller strides with specific goals in mind-- like Mozilla with Rust. Or it will clone and improve upon existing proprietary technology and make it available to the public-- like GNU. It's a bit like reading someone wax nostalgic about Bitcoin's initial bootstrapping mechanism and complaining that today's altcoins don't put enough emphasis on distributing the tokens to people who aren't speculators. That's fine as a description of a problem, but its a fairly toothless observation in terms of solving the problem. Distributing tokens when nearly nobody is watching is a completely different problem from distributing them when everyone is not only watching but also speculating. Similarly, having a research team do work that is a pubic good when nobody thinks the data generated is something that can be directly monetized is a completely different problem from trying to do the same when the greater part of the economy depends on everybody watching, collecting, and monetizing the data that your software/hardware generates.
mr_tristan 9y ago
Another way of thinking about this is that large companies have basically decided that executing optimally is more important than necessarily creating huge leaps themselves. They can just focus on making money, create a sizable amount of cash, and acquire new technology. I'm sure there's a cultural effect here as well. Seems like there are fewer large companies that are willing to just let technologists "muck around for a bit" swinging for the fences without some kind of goal. But, I just wonder, if VC-funded startups are where new tech grows, we end up just focusing on incremental improvements, instead of potential large leaps.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  > Seems like there are fewer large companies that are willing to just let technologists "muck around for a bit" I wonder if this is true. Many of the major computer industry companies have labs: Google, Microsoft, IBM ... (Apple? Facebook? Amazon?) I wonder if it's more or less than before.
  - pmcjones 9y ago
    Much less than before.
  - madhadron 9y ago
    Compared to Bell Labs or PARC, these are purely applied labs.
    - forapurpose 9y ago
      Thanks. Do you know of any source that talks about this issue (applied vs basic in the major corporate labs) and on a somewhat sophisticated level?
dang 9y ago
For anyone who hasn't run across this, Alan has shown up on HN periodically, and the resulting post history is just astonishingly rich: https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=alankay1 https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=alankay1. Threaded conversations at https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alankay1 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alankay1. If you read the threads you'll see that he has frequently continued conversations long after the submission dropped off the HN front page, and many topics have gotten developed further than one usually sees. HN's archives are full of gold and for me this one of the more obvious veins of it. If anyone wants to spend some time aggregating and collating these writings, as the OP has done from emails, I would see about getting YC to fund the effort, subject to Alan's permission of course. Email hn@ycombinator.com if you're interested.
- jarmitage 9y ago
  Emailed! Great idea.
- ontouchstart 9y ago
  Thanks for pointing it out. I did a search in my mailbox and found a small branch of a huge discussion thread tree 555 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958781 Perhaps we can build a "systemland" in some way.
- crispinb 9y ago
  Irony of ironies!
  - crispinb 9y ago
    [This bit of pointless & unexplained snark would have been deleted or edited had I revisited in time]
mitchtbaum 9y ago
I have intimately enjoyed the work of Engelbart, Kay, Nelson, Victor, etc over these years. They make computer history meaningful and believable.
Jare 9y ago
This bit "An important part of any art is for the artists to escape the "part of the present that is the past", and for most artists, this is delicate because the present is so everywhere and loud and interruptive. For individual contributors, a good ploy is to disappear for a while" reminded me of John Carmack explaining in his .plans how he would go off and seclude himself for a couple of weeks to start a new iteration of the id technology.
chubot 9y ago
Does anyone know what happened to HARC ? It was announced in May 2016, with Alan Kay's involvement and Bret Victor's: http://blog.ycombinator.com/harc/ http://blog.ycombinator.com/harc/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11679680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11679680 In September "eleVR" said it was leaving YC research: http://elevr.com/elevr-leaving-ycr/ http://elevr.com/elevr-leaving-ycr/ I presume these e-mail excerpts are inspired by the end of HARC too? What happened? In the thread about first year reports a couple months ago, someone suspects that funding has ended too. Also, Bret Victor's work and name are conspicuously missing from the first year reports. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15564072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15564072 https://harc.ycr.org/reports/ https://harc.ycr.org/reports/
- ontouchstart 9y ago
  > Unfortunately, a combination of forces in the world make nonprofit long-term research a tough sell right now. It doesn’t matter how good we are at what we do. Everyone is overextended trying to solve all the world’s problems at once, and we’re in the unpopular space of being neither for-profit nor directly and immediately philanthropic. http://elevr.com/elevr-leaving-ycr/ http://elevr.com/elevr-leaving-ycr/
  - chubot 9y ago
    I read that (and linked it), but I'm more interested in YC's side of the story. How long do they commit to funding for? How do they evaluate when to continue funding? What do they consider "success"? A year and change is incredibly short for basic research. If at the outset you only planned for a year of funding, then you can't expect any results. It's almost wasted money. So I think that something happened to make them discontinue the funding.
- j_s 9y ago
  Discussion of September "leaving" announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15162957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15162957
- ontouchstart 9y ago

337 points by dasmoth 9y ago

The name Licklider is mentioned a couple of times. Recently I read a fascinating account of his work. Great read for those who want to know more about the history of computing and the internet: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FIPHEXM/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FIPHEXM/

tzahola 9y ago

>Socrates didn't charge for "education" because when you are in business, the "customer starts to become right". Whereas in education, the customer is generally "not right". Very important takeaway!

weinzierl 9y ago
The whole paragraph is gold: > Socrates didn't charge for "education" because when you are in business, the "customer starts to become right". Whereas in education, the customer is generally "not right". Marketeers are catering to what people want, educators are trying to deal with what they think people need (and this is often not at all what they want). Part of Montessori's genius was to realize early that children want to get fluent in their surrounding environs and culture, and this can be really powerful if one embeds what they need in the environs and culture. This is so true on so many levels. Schools and university came to mind immediately. For me, the most striking fit is to educational articles and blog posts on the web. When the www was young it was full of stuff that catered my intellectual curiosity. Nowadays content creation is driven by keyword research, search volume and CPC. After three paragraphs I usually know this will end in a call to action. Not that there wouldn't be any interesting stuff out there, but it is drowned in a sea of ever repeating trivialities.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  Remember when Google was useful to find good stuff faster instead of driving what should be there ?
  - jononor 9y ago
    I remember that when I started googling, I would often go to page 2,3,4,5 to find what I wanted. These days I never go past the first page. I actually had to check now that there was still a page switcher... What changed the most? How good I am at formulating a query? What kind of information I'm looking for? How good Google is at curating the first page? How much information is available? Sure hope its not that my queries are more trivial, or that my preferences for answers favors simpler,easier ones... Thankfully I still get lost on Wikipedia (and Youtube), in a kind of what-is-all-this-I-need-to-know-more learning spree.
    - agumonkey 9y ago
      A bunch of factor: - we became impatient if not lazy - google does a huge job at parsing complex queries - the content is more organized in itself (html semantic markup, meaningful css classes, etc etc) The other day I tried a tails/tor and .. i cant recall.. ipfs probably. This network is bare, so bare I felt excited just like the 56K days. It quickly went bad because there's a huge % of bad / crazy content, but still I felt entering a more interesting territory as a visitor.
    - forapurpose 9y ago
      > Thankfully I still get lost on Wikipedia (and Youtube), in a kind of what-is-all-this-I-need-to-know-more learning spree. I know what you mean, but should we be thankful? Learning is stimulating, but are we just indulging in it with little or negative results because we are acquiring misinformation?
  - weinzierl 9y ago
    Yes, absolutely. I use DuckDuckGo and it feels a lot like the early Google. The only thing I still use Google for is local searches, like opening hours, this is where the filter bubble shines.
    - jacksmith21006 9y ago
      Find DDG like early Google days in that a bit harder to find things where today Google will have it in the first page. Google has got to a point where it is just amazing how accurate it is. Suspect part of it is also me and knowing how to phrase searches. Bit that just does not work to the same level on DDG.
- sitkack 9y ago
  The web now presents mainly economic activity and validation of currently held opinion. When we were both younger, the web and I, the ideas and opinions expressed by it were on a wider spectrum. It feels like it went from 4:2:2 down to a 32 color fixed pastel palette.
bawana 9y ago
and this is whats happening in medicine. it's going from an activity where the doctor and patient are trying to 'learn' about an illness to a business where the 'client' must be pleased by the 'provider'. The concept of allopathic medicine would never have been invented in our day and age.
- thanatropism 9y ago
  The "concept" of allopathic medicine was invented by homeopaths.

quantumofmalice 9y ago

> Most don't think of the resources in our centuries as actually part of a human-made garden via inventions and cooperation, and that the garden has to be maintained and renewed. Just right.

imrehg 9y ago

Makes me wonder, what could we do, or what could current organizations do to recreate that environment of research and creativity in today's (and tomorrow's) world? Also, what do you do in your own life (if any) to create that sort context that is conductive to this kind of creativity?

osullivj 9y ago
Committees impose compromises and conditions on funding, so govt or public company money won't work, as Kay points out. It must be pvt money, like the Medicis funding the renaissance. Something like the Gates Foundation. It could be a prestige project for Bezos or Zuck.
- ricardobeat 9y ago
  Isn't this framing of for-profit (prestige is a kind of profit) part of the problem he describes?
- discreteevent 9y ago
  DARPA was government though
  - MaysonL 9y ago
    And DARPA is nowhere near as good as ARPA was.
Joeri 9y ago
The recipe from the article should still work: Hire a bunch of smart people, give them advance funding for 5 years without strings attached, tell them to build the future without specifying what that means. From a personal view I have plenty of ideas for things never built before, but I lack the time and energy to do it after hours and I can almost never fit it into the scope of my professional work. Sometimes this makes me sad.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

signa11 9y ago

> An example of the vision was Licklider's "The destiny of computers is to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for all humans, pervasively networked world-wide". This vision does not state what the amplification is like or how you might be able to network everyone in the world. i am going through licklider's 'the dream machine' book. it is quite long, and dense but ties together lots of individual threads (for me at least) that were kind of floating loose otherwise. i had known about luminaries in the field (and their work) specifically, licklider, shannon, norbert-weiner, cerf and kahn, metcalfe, von neumann, vannaver bush (to name a few) but this book brings them together. interestingly though, licklider's background was in psychology, as opposed to ee/maths. did we lose some of the diversity of perspective ? another book, that i found to be pretty good is 'the idea factory', it complements the 'dream machine' book quite well. edit-001 : fmt changes, and added reference to another book.

taylorwc 9y ago
I’m currently reading this book as well, having come across it on Alan Kay’s reading list[0]. It’s definitely worth reading, and the diversity of thought and interest surrounding that time does seem to be in contrast to today’s environment. [0] http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp
baq 9y ago
> interestingly though, licklider's background was in psychology, as opposed to ee/maths. did we lose some of the diversity of perspective ? The answer to this question is almost right in the emails: the focus of funding research switched from visionary work of defining problem space to exploration of solution space. Engineers are people who are educated, perhaps sometimes predisposed, to solve problems, not find problems worth solving.
chubot 9y ago
Hm I posted an eerily similar comment to this yesterday morning on lobste.rs: https://lobste.rs/s/i9s39q/best_books_you_have_read_2017#c_zgtzc9 https://lobste.rs/s/i9s39q/best_books_you_have_read_2017#c_z... It looks like you made at least four of the same points that I did.

chauhankiran 9y ago

> set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. Demand golden coins from the geese rather than eggs. Demand platinum rather than gold. Require that the geese make plans and explain just how they will make the eggs that will be laid. Etc. -- I have seen these types of situations so many times while project implementation.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

ridewinter 9y ago

What if a stepping stone to UBI was a basic income to everyone that’s demonstrated some technical aptitude? If scientists and engineers didn’t have to work for, say Zuckerberg, to survive and instead because they genuinely wanted to collaborate, maybe the tech giants wouldn’t be so disproportionately powerful. And creativity in the tech world would skyrocket.

zitterbewegung 9y ago
A basic income with restrictions is basically a job . UBI needs to apply to everyone to work.
- ridewinter 9y ago
  Agreed that UBI for everyone is the ultimate goal. But basic income for all engineers and scientists could be more politically palatable in the US and have quicker results.
CuriousSkeptic 9y ago
No need to comstrain our self to engineers. There are probably lots, and lots, of people that would produce more value on their own agenda.
- dreamache 9y ago
  And there would be plenty more that would produce far less.
  - xtian 9y ago
    Is that a fact or a fear?
    - dreamache 9y ago
      "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." UBI has a lot wrong with it, but I'll just start and end with a first principle: Taxation is theft and therefore, government and UBI are immoral. I advocate for freedom and consent, especially as it pertains to economics. The income I earn through producing goods and services that I exchange voluntarily with other individuals should be mine to keep; all of it. Anything less is not freedom and certainly not consent.

sgentle 9y ago

What this makes me wonder is, if the problem is not enough funding for visionary work, or more accurately that modern funders misunderstand how and why to find visionary work, then what will change their minds? Because I feel like I've read a few of these posts, watched similar talks, and I nod along and agree every time. Only problem is, I'm not a wealthy benefactor, director of a research institute, or a business exec with control of discretionary R&D funding. Where do those people hang out, what would convince them like this post convinces me, and is anyone working on that?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
auggierose 9y ago
I think it is hard to get people to understand what they do not understand yet, actually what they have opposing experiences to. It seems to me making money is easy if you a) work hard b) are extremely goal driven (and obviously you need to be sufficiently smart). Now this seems to be working in research too, where the extremely goal driven part means you focus on publishing research papers in prestigious places. I think it is working in research (given for example that some of the papers in conferences like POPL are just great). Of course you won't hear from those instances where it is not working (until it does). The problem is you somehow have to decide who to give money to, and you cannot possibly know who carries a vision inside of them that they are actually able to realise given enough funding and time.

pdkl95 9y ago

> The destiny of computers is to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for all humans, pervasively networked world-wide". This vision does not state what the amplification is like or how you might be able to network everyone in the world. That's a vision that recognizes the value in creating tools, not constrained solutions for the current problem. Freedom can be frightening[1], but letting people explore what is possible with your new tool sometimes leads to unexpected uses and the occasional paradigm-shifting discovery. [1] (with apologies to DHH[2]) If we give people unconstrained tools, they might change the String class to shoot out fireworks at inappropriate time! [2] https://vimeo.com/17420638#t=27m27s https://vimeo.com/17420638#t=27m27s

cateye 9y ago

It is a very difficult narrative. Mainly because while reading it, I had to think constantly about survivorship bias and appeal to authority. Would I really read this if it was written by a 20 year old without a track record? Or how many Alan Key's are out there that completely failed and would prescribe a totally different approach and attribute the cause and effect on other factors? I also totally get the point of funding problem finding versus funding business plans that are full of bullshit and pretend to have a risk free solution with a play book that just needs some money to execute it linearly step-by-step. So, for that part it is written very well and the point is clear. Another topic is: would all kind of innovations really emerge if the funding mechanism was radically different in the last 20 years? Would we see all kinds of big leaps or was ARPA-Parc just a serendipity moment that couldn't be repeated no matter what the funding structure was?

api 9y ago
On your second point -- namely why does Juicero get funded and qualitative innovation doesn't -- I think it comes down to the still very real weight given to subjective alpha-primate-ness in business decision making. On two occasions I've had VC types (in one case post-beer) tell me they almost never fund anyone who doesn't have (paraphrasing) "presence" or "a reality distortion field" etc. I would have assumed it to be subconscious but these comments convinced me that it's a conscious explicit bias in at least some cases. This is a really outstanding book on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet:_The_Power_of_Introverts_in_a_World_That_Can%27t_Stop_Talking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet:_The_Power_of_Introverts... Put enough weaponized extroversion and alpha primate signaling behind it and you can get people to invest in millions in absolute BS. You can also over-inflate the value of something real to stratospheric degrees. See also: Uber. On the other hand if you have an underspoken introvert try to sell something outstanding, the majority of businesspeople will not pay attention. I have seen a case where a meek soft-spoken woman tried to pitch a mobile startup with outstanding user base growth, revenue, and cash efficiency numbers and got yawns. She wasn't asking for much. This was seed stage stuff and these were crazy amazing numbers. In the same pitch fest the investor panel perked up for a number of vapid pre-revenue proposals backed by more extroverted alpha personalities. I don't think it was just sexism since one of these was also a woman. (I suspect some sexism is actually this bias since it may be tougher for women to play the alpha primate card with men.) Most innovators ("artists") are more on the introvert end of the spectrum. Edit: this may be rational for funding things that rely heavily on in-person salesmanship, but it's applied broadly. Edit #2: another reason this may be rational for VCs is that they are only thinking about their cash-out. They may be looking for people who can pump the value of the company's stock to later investors more than people who can actually deliver lasting value. The company's product is its stock, not its product.

jasonkostempski 9y ago

Are the full emails availabe somewhere?

Jyaif 9y ago

Is the underlying assumption behind this text is that less innovation is happening right now? Are the billions poured in AI not counting?

paulsutter 9y ago
Particularly considering that most of the AI work is openly published (companies averse to publishing have difficulty hiring in AI)
hashmal 9y ago
The assumption is (I believe) that innovation is better when it's not goal-oriented. Currently much of the funding goes to projects that have a clear path to results, but finding that path is a prerequisite, and is not funded.
coldtea 9y ago
>Are the billions poured in AI not counting? Unless there are any great results, no, they are not. Tons of research money where poured into AI in the 60s-70s too, and when it got nowhere great, it all folded in the so-called "AI winter".
bboreham 9y ago
The comparison is with an environment where the mouse, windowing and Ethernet were created. Billions poured into AI have produced some interesting tricks but little that changed the entire world of computing in the way those things have.
- Jyaif 9y ago
  That's funny you should mention "the mouse, windowing and Ethernet", because in the last 5 years the majority of people have stop using all 3 of those (thanks to mobile). So that takes care of the "little that changed the entire world of computing" argument. Yes, billions have been poured into AI and we still have no strong AI. That just shows that it's a problem that is way more complicated that inventing the concept of a pointing device, making computers talk to each other, or having applications show something on a screen that isn't text. The people in the 80s weren't smarter (or dumber) than the people of today, there were just a lot of low hanging fruits back then.

roi 9y ago

The thing is that Licklider's vision of computers as "interactive intellectual amplifiers for all humans, pervasively networked world-wide" has already come to pass, and created huge economies of scale and exponential pressures for compatibility and conformity that didn't exist before. In the 1970's a few dozen brilliant people could create a completely new and self-contained computer system because the entire computing world was tiny and fragmented. there wasn't the imperative to be compatible to all-pervasive standards (even IBM's dominance in business was being challenged by the minis). These day if you want to create a new computer system that people will use you need at the minimum to provide a networking stack and a functional web browser, some emulation or compatibility system to support legacy software that people rely on, device drivers for a huge range of hardware, etc. All this not only takes a huge amount of work, it also punctures the design integrity of your system, making it into a huge mountain of compatibility hacks before you even start on your own new concepts. But the deadliest enemy of innovation is the mental inertia of masses of users with a long history of interacting with computers. They are no longer the blank slates who have never seen a computer you had in the 70's. Even in the realm of art people realized that the romantic or modernistic model of artistic revolution that Kay invokes is untenable and retreated into postmodernism.

panic 9y ago
> All this not only takes a huge amount of work, it also punctures the design integrity of your system, making it into a huge mountain of compatibility hacks before you even start on your own new concepts. One possible approach that doesn't require writing a full compatibility layer is virtualization. Run your new system alongside a mature system like Linux, then rig it up so windows can appear inside whatever new environment you come up with. You do still need to write the code to send events and get pixel buffers, but it seems like much less work overall.
- mkl 9y ago
  Then you're constrained by the existing window and input systems, which probably makes many interesting new concepts impossible to implement. I don't know an alternative except to do everything new within one window, which would be at least as bad.

pixelmonkey 9y ago

There's an interesting book on the topic discussed in these emails, entitled "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned": http://amzn.to/2CtIrRR http://amzn.to/2CtIrRR There's a YouTube talk by the author on the subject here: https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI The rough idea is this: - creativity often arises by stumbling around in a problem space, or in operating "randomly" under an artificially-imposed constraint - modern life is obsessed with metrics and goal-setting, and this has extended into creative pursuits including science, research, and business - sometimes, short-term focus on the goal defeats the goal-given aims (see e.g. shareholder value focus) - the authors point out that when they were researching artificial intelligence, they discovered that systems that focused too much on an explicitly-coded "objective" would end up producing lackluster results, but systems that did more "playful" exploration within a problem space produced more creative results - using this backdrop, the authors suggest perhaps innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort and is instead driven by serendipitous discovery and playful creativity I found the ideas compelling, as I do find Kay's description of the "art" behind research.

mathattack 9y ago
This is the difference between Research(which Kay excelled at) and Development and Commercialization (which he didn’t). Both are important. The latter requires focus, discipline and deadlines.
- pbowyer 9y ago
  Have you any references to the Development and Commercialization he didn't excel at? I know of Kay by name, but not his life story.
  - username223 9y ago
    He was a Xerox PARC guy back in the Smalltalk days, when they developed incredibly expensive systems that never really sold. In the 2000s, he was still griping about how everything was worse than PARC in the 1970s. I haven't paid much attention to him since then.

jancsika 9y ago

> Parc was "effectively non-profit" because of our agreement with Xerox, which also included the ability to publish our results in public writings (this was a constant battle with Xerox). Parc was "effectively non-profit" because there was no way to collect or monetize reams of user data like there is today. If there had been, either Kay wouldn't have gotten that agreement or Parc would have been much more selective about what constituted "results." For example: how many companies have solved the talk-to-our-computers-and-our-computers-talk-back problem now?

marshray 9y ago
> there was no way to collect or monetize reams of user data like there is today Xerox was at the time the world leader in handling literal reams. A huge portion of data processing was related to managing customer data, mailing lists, etc.
- jancsika 9y ago
  I'm talking about a different type of user data-- what would be input into things like visual programming languages and devices that Alan Kay talks about-- Grail, light pen inputs, etc. I assume what Kay is talking about is the ability to publish insights, data, and specifications for the languages and UIs that were being developed at the time. So when you see Kay doing user studies working with kids, the stuff he made public was the actual research on what was learned about human-computer interaction during that time, languages used, developed, etc. It wasn't the position of the kids' eye, fingerprint of their typing patterns, mouse movement patterns, etc. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I've never seen anything Kay wrote from the 70s or 80s that discussed the implications of mining user data on such an enormous and regular basis as is currently done. And I doubt Xerox itself thought of that category of user data as being valuable outside of research, or in any way significant the way "customer data, mailing lists, etc." were. But today, that user data is assumed to be valuable and can cheaply be collected and monetized. So even if some Parc-like team exists today, the results will be practically locked-down to keep a competitive advantage over others. Or it will make much smaller strides with specific goals in mind-- like Mozilla with Rust. Or it will clone and improve upon existing proprietary technology and make it available to the public-- like GNU. It's a bit like reading someone wax nostalgic about Bitcoin's initial bootstrapping mechanism and complaining that today's altcoins don't put enough emphasis on distributing the tokens to people who aren't speculators. That's fine as a description of a problem, but its a fairly toothless observation in terms of solving the problem. Distributing tokens when nearly nobody is watching is a completely different problem from distributing them when everyone is not only watching but also speculating. Similarly, having a research team do work that is a pubic good when nobody thinks the data generated is something that can be directly monetized is a completely different problem from trying to do the same when the greater part of the economy depends on everybody watching, collecting, and monetizing the data that your software/hardware generates.

mr_tristan 9y ago

Another way of thinking about this is that large companies have basically decided that executing optimally is more important than necessarily creating huge leaps themselves. They can just focus on making money, create a sizable amount of cash, and acquire new technology. I'm sure there's a cultural effect here as well. Seems like there are fewer large companies that are willing to just let technologists "muck around for a bit" swinging for the fences without some kind of goal. But, I just wonder, if VC-funded startups are where new tech grows, we end up just focusing on incremental improvements, instead of potential large leaps.

forapurpose 9y ago
> Seems like there are fewer large companies that are willing to just let technologists "muck around for a bit" I wonder if this is true. Many of the major computer industry companies have labs: Google, Microsoft, IBM ... (Apple? Facebook? Amazon?) I wonder if it's more or less than before.
- pmcjones 9y ago
  Much less than before.
- madhadron 9y ago
  Compared to Bell Labs or PARC, these are purely applied labs.
  - forapurpose 9y ago
    Thanks. Do you know of any source that talks about this issue (applied vs basic in the major corporate labs) and on a somewhat sophisticated level?

dang 9y ago

For anyone who hasn't run across this, Alan has shown up on HN periodically, and the resulting post history is just astonishingly rich: https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=alankay1 https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=alankay1. Threaded conversations at https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alankay1 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alankay1. If you read the threads you'll see that he has frequently continued conversations long after the submission dropped off the HN front page, and many topics have gotten developed further than one usually sees. HN's archives are full of gold and for me this one of the more obvious veins of it. If anyone wants to spend some time aggregating and collating these writings, as the OP has done from emails, I would see about getting YC to fund the effort, subject to Alan's permission of course. Email hn@ycombinator.com if you're interested.

jarmitage 9y ago
Emailed! Great idea.
ontouchstart 9y ago
Thanks for pointing it out. I did a search in my mailbox and found a small branch of a huge discussion thread tree 555 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958781 Perhaps we can build a "systemland" in some way.
crispinb 9y ago
Irony of ironies!
- crispinb 9y ago
  [This bit of pointless & unexplained snark would have been deleted or edited had I revisited in time]

mitchtbaum 9y ago

I have intimately enjoyed the work of Engelbart, Kay, Nelson, Victor, etc over these years. They make computer history meaningful and believable.

Jare 9y ago

This bit "An important part of any art is for the artists to escape the "part of the present that is the past", and for most artists, this is delicate because the present is so everywhere and loud and interruptive. For individual contributors, a good ploy is to disappear for a while" reminded me of John Carmack explaining in his .plans how he would go off and seclude himself for a couple of weeks to start a new iteration of the id technology.

chubot 9y ago

Does anyone know what happened to HARC ? It was announced in May 2016, with Alan Kay's involvement and Bret Victor's: http://blog.ycombinator.com/harc/ http://blog.ycombinator.com/harc/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11679680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11679680 In September "eleVR" said it was leaving YC research: http://elevr.com/elevr-leaving-ycr/ http://elevr.com/elevr-leaving-ycr/ I presume these e-mail excerpts are inspired by the end of HARC too? What happened? In the thread about first year reports a couple months ago, someone suspects that funding has ended too. Also, Bret Victor's work and name are conspicuously missing from the first year reports. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15564072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15564072 https://harc.ycr.org/reports/ https://harc.ycr.org/reports/

ontouchstart 9y ago
> Unfortunately, a combination of forces in the world make nonprofit long-term research a tough sell right now. It doesn’t matter how good we are at what we do. Everyone is overextended trying to solve all the world’s problems at once, and we’re in the unpopular space of being neither for-profit nor directly and immediately philanthropic. http://elevr.com/elevr-leaving-ycr/ http://elevr.com/elevr-leaving-ycr/
- chubot 9y ago
  I read that (and linked it), but I'm more interested in YC's side of the story. How long do they commit to funding for? How do they evaluate when to continue funding? What do they consider "success"? A year and change is incredibly short for basic research. If at the outset you only planned for a year of funding, then you can't expect any results. It's almost wasted money. So I think that something happened to make them discontinue the funding.
j_s 9y ago
Discussion of September "leaving" announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15162957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15162957
ontouchstart 9y ago