10 ms·

Alan Kay at Demo: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental

249 points by corysama 13y ago

corysama 13y ago
For ideas on how to make non-incremental progress in technology, check out Kay's earlier talk "Programming and Scaling" http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/ http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/
- straws 13y ago
  This is a great talk in a completely unwatchable format. Here are links to mp4s of the video: http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_1_podcast.mp4 http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_... http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_2_podcast.mp4 http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_... http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_3_podcast.mp4 http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_... http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_4_podcast.mp4 http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_...
revorad 13y ago
The talk starts at 2:42 - http://youtu.be/gTAghAJcO1o?t=2m42s http://youtu.be/gTAghAJcO1o?t=2m42s
Roritharr 13y ago
Wow, he really comes of as obnoxious. Yes what was done in Xerox Parc was really amazing and cool, but can you please contain your ego atleast a little? This talk sounds basically like him explaining to everybody in detail how awesome his achievements are. EDIT: The best point is where he explains with charts that 80% of people are basically sheeple...
- cliveowen 13y ago
  At first glance it might come off as hubris, but it's actually just a way of separating what we now know as technology (consumer technology) which is mostly just incremental from the other kind of technology which is innovative and profoundly transformative. When he talks about the research that went on at the Parc back in the 70s it's not to show his accomplishments but to show the difference between commercial products addressed to the masses and touted as technological breakthroughs and real breakthroughs that happen way before the mass production and slowly make their way into society and bring about enormous changes and wealth.
LazerBear 13y ago
This is very relevant to something I'm trying to build right now, thank you for sharing!
jal278 13y ago
A practical suggestion Kay makes is that one way to brainstorm start-ups is to think of technological amplifiers for human universals [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Universals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Universals
- Geee 13y ago
  Those are kind of strange, but struck a chord because I have been myself trying to discover these fundamentals which make us human and which most of technology is 'amplifying' (by Kay's terms). For example, music is not on that list which I personally think is one of the most important fundamental and which a lot of technology is built upon. Nor is communication, which is another fundamental and also a driver of a lot of technology. Maybe I'm thinking in a bit different terms, though.
  - andrewflnr 13y ago
    I think Alan Kay put communication in his list. I don't think music is quite universal, certainly not uniformly and not the way we experience it now. He mentioned harmony theory as a notable non-universal, while almost any music you hear today makes extensive use of harmony.
cliveowen 13y ago
Thank you for posting this, the best quote so far has been this: "Prior to the 18th century virtually everyone on the planet died in the same world they were born into". This is a realization I never had, we take progress for granted but it's a precious thing actually.
- DonGateley 13y ago
  Which is why I think the idea of change itself was an invention. Up until roughly that point in history people didn't apply themselves to change because they didn't even have the concept as it came to be understood. Things progressed so glacially for so long simply because, from experience, nothing other than stasis could be imagined, not because we were any dumber. Change was the key innovation for change. Occasionally I wonder if it wasn't an inherently fatal discovery. One wonders how many other such "basic" concepts there might be that remain hidden from view.
semiel 13y ago
One of the problems I've been struggling with lately is how to arrange for this sort of work, while still allowing the researchers to make a living. Governments and large corporations seem to have by and large lost interest in funding it, and a small company doesn't have the resources to make it sustainable. How do we solve this?
- calibraxis 13y ago
  Activism is one way. David Graeber discusses this very topic. (Article: http://thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars http://thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars and video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QgSJkk1tng http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QgSJkk1tng) Neoliberalism since the 70's is a well-known culprit, but he also discusses the corporatization of universities — stifling managerialist bureaucracies.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  Get lucky and score a position in a forward thinking research lab? Having a PhD helps, but there are plenty of constraints in most research labs also.
- justin66 13y ago
  > Governments and large corporations seem to have by and large lost interest in funding it, and a small company doesn't have the resources to make it sustainable. How do we solve this? Educating people as to where their tax dollars are going is always a good start. The average joe has some very, very odd ideas about the federal budget and how money is allocated. Personal favorites: the way many people complain about how much we spend on foreign aid. Ask such a person how much we ought spend as a percentage of the budget and the figure will very often represent a massive increase over what we spend now, since we don't spend much at all. Or the way many people literally cannot wrap their heads around how much war costs. A couple of years ago an expert came out and pointed out that we spent more than $20 billion on air conditioning for our military every year in Afghanistan when you include road maintenance and fuel trucks and so on. He was a former general who had been involved in logistics but many people needed to just assume he was full of it, since that's more than we spend every year on fucking NASA. The trouble I see is that if you were a politician and you went around with the charts and visual aids a businessman would use to give a briefing and convey that info... you'd look like Ross Perot. So I guess he just ruined it for everybody.
MrQuincle 13y ago
Perhaps he's a tad obnoxious, but he says some interesting things. - think of the future, than reason backwards - use Moore's law in reverse - an introvert character can be helpful in coming up with real inventions - be interested in new ideas for the sake of them being new, not because they are useful now, or accepted, or understandable - it seems good to sell stuff that can be instantly used, people however, like many other things. they might for example like to learning or get skilled. the bike example is one. but also the piano. or the skateboard. At least, this is what I tried to grasp from it. :-)
Zigurd 13y ago
A lot of his talk was wasted on irrelevant complaining about lack of capex in R&D. That's only partly correct. Any one of us can afford to rent a crazy amount of computing power and storage on demand. Pfft. In short, skip the first 20 minutes. He's being a grumpy old man. In the second part, he's a pissed-off genius and revolutionary.
- dropit_sphere 13y ago
  Sure, but do they have money to live on while they're experimenting?
  - Zigurd 13y ago
    His argument that 5 year timespans are minimal for invention is on target, but that's opex, even when you are cash flow negative. Where he is wrong is that you need large equipment capex for invention. Unless you are building a novel special purpose computing device, like an giant FPGA cryptocurrency miner, you really don't need more than $5k capex per coder for anything anymore, and renting Web-scale power is cheap.
- nkuttler 13y ago
  Computing power and storage makes the computer of the future? If you think like that, "new" things can only come from storing more data and processing it in new ways. That seems rather limiting... Off the top of my head, I'd expect the "computer" of the future to know a lot more about my immediate surroundings. That means sensors, not big data, computing power and storage are useless. Can I get sensors that are 20 years ahead of the stuff that's mass-produced today? Maybe, but it's certainly not something I can rent for cheap.
dredmorbius 13y ago
The core idea of non-incremental progress: Xerox PARC accomplished what it did in large part by forcing technology 15 years into the future. The Alto, of which PARC built around 2000, mostly for its own staff, cost about $85,000 in present dollars. What it provided exceeded the general market personal computing capabilities of the late 1980s. This enabled the "twelve and a half" inventions from PARC which Kay claims have created over $30 trillion in generated wealth, at a cost of around $10-12 million/year. Kay also distinguishes "invention" (what PARC did) -- as fundamental research, from "innovation" (what Apple did) -- as product development. Other topics: • Learning curves (people, especially marketers, hate them) • "New" vs. "News". News tells familiar stories in an established context. "New" is invisible, learning, and change. • The majority acts based on group acceptance, not on the merits of an idea. Extroversion vs. introversion. • There are "human universals" -- themes people accept automatically, without marketing, as opposed to non-universals, which have to be taught. • 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. • Tyranny of the present.
- adsr 13y ago
  A crude precursor to the ideas in the Alto can be seen in the mother of all demos with Doug Engelbart imho.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    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 http://fixyt.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU
    - calibraxis 13y ago
      Thank you!
    - tod222 13y ago
      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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU
bitwize 13y ago
When Tetsuya Mizuguchi left Sega to form Q Entertainment, he and his team started work on the famous puzzle game Lumines. Their stated goal was to create a game that was merely half a step forward, as opposed to their previous game, Rez, which was two steps forward -- and didn't do well at market. Smalltalk was at least two steps forward, probably much more than that. The critical thing that put it well into the future was the fact that it made the boundary between users and programmers even more porous. I'm sure many of you have heard the stories of teenagers sitting down to an Alto and writing their own circuit design software in Smalltalk. That kind of power -- turning ordinary people into masters of these powerful machines easily and efficiently -- is just the sort of revolution originally desired and promised us by the first microcomputer marketers. But of course it didn't do well at market at first, so we had to settle for the thing that was merely half a step forward -- the Macintosh.
- dropit_sphere 13y ago
  You might enjoy this segment from Game Theory about how innovative games don't do well: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxhs-GLE29Q http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxhs-GLE29Q
  - mattgreenrocks 13y ago
    Great discussion of this concept, thank you!
- ExpiredLink 13y ago
  You assume that you/we can know the direction of 'forward'. I very much doubt that. > Smalltalk was at least two steps forward ... then Smalltalk would be a major programming language today.
neel8986 13y ago
Though a bit obnoxious i really liked the talk. Alan talked about 2007. If we look back it was the time when first iphone was announced. We all knew that in a timespan of seven years the processor will be much faster( Now it is almost 20 times faster)., connectivity will be faster, it will have better display and better sensors. But still none of the application that exists today (except games and animations maybe) take all this improvement into consideration. We are still stuck in old ideas of messaging app, photo sharing app, maps and news aggregators. I believe all those apps could have been conceived back in 2007. No one thought about any new use cases which can take use of the improved hardware. In fact some of the noble concepts like shazm or word lens were conceived 4-5 years back. Now we are stuck at a time where giants of internet are just struggling to squeeze few more bytes of information from user in sake of making more money from adds. It is difficult to believe after 7 years of first smartphone the most talked about event this year was a messaging app being acquired for 19 billion!! I think hardware engineers push the limits by going to any extent to make moore's law true. But we software guys fails to appreciate what is going to come in future
- fidotron 13y ago
  This is the underappreciated part. I'm not sure computing is going to have a major revolution, unless we see a massive AI breakthrough. The reason is that the amount of computing power available for a few watts and tens of dollars today now vastly exceeds any idea of what to do with it. With all the data in the cloud stuff the limitations are storage related (i.e. just the time to read data off disk), and the use of the CPUs is really fairly low compared to how long they sit around waiting. Post iPhone is the best example, because all that's really happened is a (much needed) improvement in the underlying networks and a shake up of the business side of the ecosystem, but very little of this stuff that is actually used wasn't available before. There was a gold rush, but I think history is going to judge that era quite harshly in terms of lack of real progress.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - neel8986 13y ago
kashkhan 13y ago
Anyone have a link to the Q&A after the talk?
kev009 13y ago
I know this is really trivial, but I found the extended music intro and his unamused reaction quite comical. Over-analyzing, it's a juxtaposition to parts of his talk.
rafeed 13y ago
Firstly, I enjoyed his talk. It was pretty insightful into the ways so many businesses and corporations today think, and how we've lost track of building the future. However, there's one thing that really bugged me about his talk. It basically boils down to the fact that you have to take into consideration Moore's Law and have to pay a hefty sum to make any useful invention by paying for the technologies that are 10-15 years ahead of its time to do anything useful for the next 30 years. How does one "invent" in his terms today without the equity that he refers to which you need?
- w1ntermute 13y ago
  Also, Moore's law might be applicable to computing hardware, but it isn't necessarily generalizable to other sorts of inventions.
exratione 13y ago
Allow me to put forward a historical analogy: standing in 2014 and arguing a case for gentle future changes in [pick your field here] over the next few decades, based on the past few decades, is something like standing in 1885 or so and arguing that speed and convenience of passenger travel will steadily and gently increase in the decades ahead. The gentleman prognosticator of the mid-1880s could look back at steady progress in the operating speed of railways and similar improvement in steamships throughout the 19th century. He would be aware of the prototyping of various forms of engine that promised to allow carriages to reliably proceed at the pace of trains, and the first frail airships that could manage a fair pace in flight - though by no means the equal of speed by rail. Like our present era, however, the end of the 19th century was a time of very rapid progress and invention in comparison to the past. In such ages trends are broken and exceeded. Thus within twenty years of the first crudely powered and fragile airships, heavier than air flight launched in earnest: a revolutionary change in travel brought on by the blossoming of a completely new branch of applied technology. By the late 1920s, the aircraft of the first airlines consistently flew four to five times as fast as the operating speed of trains in 1880, and new lines of travel could be set up for a fraction of the cost of a railway. Little in the way of incrementalism there: instead a great and sweeping improvement accomplished across a few decades and through the introduction of a completely new approach to the problem.
forgotprevpass 13y ago
At 15:00, he mentions research on the efficiency of gestures done in the 60's. Does anyone know what he's referring to?
- ozten 13y ago
  Sketchpad by Ivan Sutherland in 1963, would be one. It allows one to draw CAD drawings, convert drawn letters into labels, etc in a more natural way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad
  - jecel 13y ago
    Besides the Sketchpad, Alan always mentions Grail (GRAphic Input Language), designed by Thomas Ellis and programmed by Gabriel Groner and others at the Rand Corporation. That was from 1964. As far as I know, Alan also greatly admires the work done at MIT in the 1970s like http://www.paulmckevitt.com/cre333/papers/putthatthere.pdf http://www.paulmckevitt.com/cre333/papers/putthatthere.pdf
leoc 13y ago
It's amusing that the same optical illusion has been discussed by Michael Abrash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-2dQoeqVVo#t=453 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-2dQoeqVVo#t=453 and Alan Kay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o#t=1534 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o#t=1534 in talks on very different topics recently. > Thomas Paine said in Common Sense, instead of having the king be the law, why, we can have the law be the king. That was one of the biggest shifts, large scale shifts in history because he realised "hey, we can design a better society than tradition has and we can put it into law; so, we're just going to invert thousands of years of beliefs". Pfft, tell that to the 13th-century Venetians: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf . Constitutionalism isn't that new an idea.
andreyf 13y ago
Stephen Wolfram's demo he referred to doesn't appear to be up yet, but this one from a couple weeks back is pretty sweet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik
- purpletoned 13y ago
  It seems to be up now at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzYmO20N6MY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzYmO20N6MY.
sAuronas 13y ago
Playing Wayne Gretzky: 30 years we will (ought to) have cars that repel over the surface by a bioether [sic], possible emitted from the street - which have become (replaced as) linear parks that vehicles float over and never crash. Because of all the new park area, some kids in the suburbs (because they will be park rich) will invent a new game that stretches over a mile that involves more imagination than football, basketball and soccer - combined. That was an awesome video. C++ == Guitar Hero
athst 13y ago
This is a great excuse for buying the nicest computer possible - I need to compute in the future!
xxcode 13y ago
Hacker News is the epitome of short term thinking, with projects like 'weekend projects' etc.
oskarth 13y ago
For an alternative and cynical view of Xerox PARC, have a look at Ted Nelson's Computers for Cynics 2 - It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC (15 minutes video): http://fixyt.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU http://fixyt.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU
norswap 13y ago
Totally tangential, but that intro music segment with Alan Key just looking around is total comedy gold. Ah, those cheesy conf organizers...
queensnake 13y ago
That 'universals' guy seems actually to be Donald Brown, and his book is 'Human Universals'. http://www.amazon.com/Human-Universals-Donald-Brown/dp/007008209X http://www.amazon.com/Human-Universals-Donald-Brown/dp/00700... The book is expensive, here's a list: http://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm http://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm

249 points by corysama 13y ago

For ideas on how to make non-incremental progress in technology, check out Kay's earlier talk "Programming and Scaling" http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/ http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/

straws 13y ago
This is a great talk in a completely unwatchable format. Here are links to mp4s of the video: http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_1_podcast.mp4 http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_... http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_2_podcast.mp4 http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_... http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_3_podcast.mp4 http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_... http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_4_podcast.mp4 http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_...

revorad 13y ago

The talk starts at 2:42 - http://youtu.be/gTAghAJcO1o?t=2m42s http://youtu.be/gTAghAJcO1o?t=2m42s

Roritharr 13y ago

Wow, he really comes of as obnoxious. Yes what was done in Xerox Parc was really amazing and cool, but can you please contain your ego atleast a little? This talk sounds basically like him explaining to everybody in detail how awesome his achievements are. EDIT: The best point is where he explains with charts that 80% of people are basically sheeple...

cliveowen 13y ago
At first glance it might come off as hubris, but it's actually just a way of separating what we now know as technology (consumer technology) which is mostly just incremental from the other kind of technology which is innovative and profoundly transformative. When he talks about the research that went on at the Parc back in the 70s it's not to show his accomplishments but to show the difference between commercial products addressed to the masses and touted as technological breakthroughs and real breakthroughs that happen way before the mass production and slowly make their way into society and bring about enormous changes and wealth.

LazerBear 13y ago

This is very relevant to something I'm trying to build right now, thank you for sharing!

jal278 13y ago

A practical suggestion Kay makes is that one way to brainstorm start-ups is to think of technological amplifiers for human universals [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Universals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Universals

Geee 13y ago
Those are kind of strange, but struck a chord because I have been myself trying to discover these fundamentals which make us human and which most of technology is 'amplifying' (by Kay's terms). For example, music is not on that list which I personally think is one of the most important fundamental and which a lot of technology is built upon. Nor is communication, which is another fundamental and also a driver of a lot of technology. Maybe I'm thinking in a bit different terms, though.
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  I think Alan Kay put communication in his list. I don't think music is quite universal, certainly not uniformly and not the way we experience it now. He mentioned harmony theory as a notable non-universal, while almost any music you hear today makes extensive use of harmony.

cliveowen 13y ago

Thank you for posting this, the best quote so far has been this: "Prior to the 18th century virtually everyone on the planet died in the same world they were born into". This is a realization I never had, we take progress for granted but it's a precious thing actually.

DonGateley 13y ago
Which is why I think the idea of change itself was an invention. Up until roughly that point in history people didn't apply themselves to change because they didn't even have the concept as it came to be understood. Things progressed so glacially for so long simply because, from experience, nothing other than stasis could be imagined, not because we were any dumber. Change was the key innovation for change. Occasionally I wonder if it wasn't an inherently fatal discovery. One wonders how many other such "basic" concepts there might be that remain hidden from view.

semiel 13y ago

One of the problems I've been struggling with lately is how to arrange for this sort of work, while still allowing the researchers to make a living. Governments and large corporations seem to have by and large lost interest in funding it, and a small company doesn't have the resources to make it sustainable. How do we solve this?

calibraxis 13y ago
Activism is one way. David Graeber discusses this very topic. (Article: http://thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars http://thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars and video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QgSJkk1tng http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QgSJkk1tng) Neoliberalism since the 70's is a well-known culprit, but he also discusses the corporatization of universities — stifling managerialist bureaucracies.
seanmcdirmid 13y ago
Get lucky and score a position in a forward thinking research lab? Having a PhD helps, but there are plenty of constraints in most research labs also.
justin66 13y ago
> Governments and large corporations seem to have by and large lost interest in funding it, and a small company doesn't have the resources to make it sustainable. How do we solve this? Educating people as to where their tax dollars are going is always a good start. The average joe has some very, very odd ideas about the federal budget and how money is allocated. Personal favorites: the way many people complain about how much we spend on foreign aid. Ask such a person how much we ought spend as a percentage of the budget and the figure will very often represent a massive increase over what we spend now, since we don't spend much at all. Or the way many people literally cannot wrap their heads around how much war costs. A couple of years ago an expert came out and pointed out that we spent more than $20 billion on air conditioning for our military every year in Afghanistan when you include road maintenance and fuel trucks and so on. He was a former general who had been involved in logistics but many people needed to just assume he was full of it, since that's more than we spend every year on fucking NASA. The trouble I see is that if you were a politician and you went around with the charts and visual aids a businessman would use to give a briefing and convey that info... you'd look like Ross Perot. So I guess he just ruined it for everybody.

MrQuincle 13y ago

Perhaps he's a tad obnoxious, but he says some interesting things. - think of the future, than reason backwards - use Moore's law in reverse - an introvert character can be helpful in coming up with real inventions - be interested in new ideas for the sake of them being new, not because they are useful now, or accepted, or understandable - it seems good to sell stuff that can be instantly used, people however, like many other things. they might for example like to learning or get skilled. the bike example is one. but also the piano. or the skateboard. At least, this is what I tried to grasp from it. :-)

Zigurd 13y ago

A lot of his talk was wasted on irrelevant complaining about lack of capex in R&D. That's only partly correct. Any one of us can afford to rent a crazy amount of computing power and storage on demand. Pfft. In short, skip the first 20 minutes. He's being a grumpy old man. In the second part, he's a pissed-off genius and revolutionary.

dropit_sphere 13y ago
Sure, but do they have money to live on while they're experimenting?
- Zigurd 13y ago
  His argument that 5 year timespans are minimal for invention is on target, but that's opex, even when you are cash flow negative. Where he is wrong is that you need large equipment capex for invention. Unless you are building a novel special purpose computing device, like an giant FPGA cryptocurrency miner, you really don't need more than $5k capex per coder for anything anymore, and renting Web-scale power is cheap.
nkuttler 13y ago
Computing power and storage makes the computer of the future? If you think like that, "new" things can only come from storing more data and processing it in new ways. That seems rather limiting... Off the top of my head, I'd expect the "computer" of the future to know a lot more about my immediate surroundings. That means sensors, not big data, computing power and storage are useless. Can I get sensors that are 20 years ahead of the stuff that's mass-produced today? Maybe, but it's certainly not something I can rent for cheap.

dredmorbius 13y ago

The core idea of non-incremental progress: Xerox PARC accomplished what it did in large part by forcing technology 15 years into the future. The Alto, of which PARC built around 2000, mostly for its own staff, cost about $85,000 in present dollars. What it provided exceeded the general market personal computing capabilities of the late 1980s. This enabled the "twelve and a half" inventions from PARC which Kay claims have created over $30 trillion in generated wealth, at a cost of around $10-12 million/year. Kay also distinguishes "invention" (what PARC did) -- as fundamental research, from "innovation" (what Apple did) -- as product development. Other topics: • Learning curves (people, especially marketers, hate them) • "New" vs. "News". News tells familiar stories in an established context. "New" is invisible, learning, and change. • The majority acts based on group acceptance, not on the merits of an idea. Extroversion vs. introversion. • There are "human universals" -- themes people accept automatically, without marketing, as opposed to non-universals, which have to be taught. • 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. • Tyranny of the present.

adsr 13y ago
A crude precursor to the ideas in the Alto can be seen in the mother of all demos with Doug Engelbart imho.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  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 http://fixyt.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU
  - calibraxis 13y ago
    Thank you!
  - tod222 13y ago
    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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU

bitwize 13y ago

When Tetsuya Mizuguchi left Sega to form Q Entertainment, he and his team started work on the famous puzzle game Lumines. Their stated goal was to create a game that was merely half a step forward, as opposed to their previous game, Rez, which was two steps forward -- and didn't do well at market. Smalltalk was at least two steps forward, probably much more than that. The critical thing that put it well into the future was the fact that it made the boundary between users and programmers even more porous. I'm sure many of you have heard the stories of teenagers sitting down to an Alto and writing their own circuit design software in Smalltalk. That kind of power -- turning ordinary people into masters of these powerful machines easily and efficiently -- is just the sort of revolution originally desired and promised us by the first microcomputer marketers. But of course it didn't do well at market at first, so we had to settle for the thing that was merely half a step forward -- the Macintosh.

dropit_sphere 13y ago
You might enjoy this segment from Game Theory about how innovative games don't do well: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxhs-GLE29Q http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxhs-GLE29Q
- mattgreenrocks 13y ago
  Great discussion of this concept, thank you!
ExpiredLink 13y ago
You assume that you/we can know the direction of 'forward'. I very much doubt that. > Smalltalk was at least two steps forward ... then Smalltalk would be a major programming language today.

neel8986 13y ago

Though a bit obnoxious i really liked the talk. Alan talked about 2007. If we look back it was the time when first iphone was announced. We all knew that in a timespan of seven years the processor will be much faster( Now it is almost 20 times faster)., connectivity will be faster, it will have better display and better sensors. But still none of the application that exists today (except games and animations maybe) take all this improvement into consideration. We are still stuck in old ideas of messaging app, photo sharing app, maps and news aggregators. I believe all those apps could have been conceived back in 2007. No one thought about any new use cases which can take use of the improved hardware. In fact some of the noble concepts like shazm or word lens were conceived 4-5 years back. Now we are stuck at a time where giants of internet are just struggling to squeeze few more bytes of information from user in sake of making more money from adds. It is difficult to believe after 7 years of first smartphone the most talked about event this year was a messaging app being acquired for 19 billion!! I think hardware engineers push the limits by going to any extent to make moore's law true. But we software guys fails to appreciate what is going to come in future

fidotron 13y ago
This is the underappreciated part. I'm not sure computing is going to have a major revolution, unless we see a massive AI breakthrough. The reason is that the amount of computing power available for a few watts and tens of dollars today now vastly exceeds any idea of what to do with it. With all the data in the cloud stuff the limitations are storage related (i.e. just the time to read data off disk), and the use of the CPUs is really fairly low compared to how long they sit around waiting. Post iPhone is the best example, because all that's really happened is a (much needed) improvement in the underlying networks and a shake up of the business side of the ecosystem, but very little of this stuff that is actually used wasn't available before. There was a gold rush, but I think history is going to judge that era quite harshly in terms of lack of real progress.
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- neel8986 13y ago

kashkhan 13y ago

Anyone have a link to the Q&A after the talk?

kev009 13y ago

I know this is really trivial, but I found the extended music intro and his unamused reaction quite comical. Over-analyzing, it's a juxtaposition to parts of his talk.

rafeed 13y ago

Firstly, I enjoyed his talk. It was pretty insightful into the ways so many businesses and corporations today think, and how we've lost track of building the future. However, there's one thing that really bugged me about his talk. It basically boils down to the fact that you have to take into consideration Moore's Law and have to pay a hefty sum to make any useful invention by paying for the technologies that are 10-15 years ahead of its time to do anything useful for the next 30 years. How does one "invent" in his terms today without the equity that he refers to which you need?

w1ntermute 13y ago
Also, Moore's law might be applicable to computing hardware, but it isn't necessarily generalizable to other sorts of inventions.

exratione 13y ago

Allow me to put forward a historical analogy: standing in 2014 and arguing a case for gentle future changes in [pick your field here] over the next few decades, based on the past few decades, is something like standing in 1885 or so and arguing that speed and convenience of passenger travel will steadily and gently increase in the decades ahead. The gentleman prognosticator of the mid-1880s could look back at steady progress in the operating speed of railways and similar improvement in steamships throughout the 19th century. He would be aware of the prototyping of various forms of engine that promised to allow carriages to reliably proceed at the pace of trains, and the first frail airships that could manage a fair pace in flight - though by no means the equal of speed by rail. Like our present era, however, the end of the 19th century was a time of very rapid progress and invention in comparison to the past. In such ages trends are broken and exceeded. Thus within twenty years of the first crudely powered and fragile airships, heavier than air flight launched in earnest: a revolutionary change in travel brought on by the blossoming of a completely new branch of applied technology. By the late 1920s, the aircraft of the first airlines consistently flew four to five times as fast as the operating speed of trains in 1880, and new lines of travel could be set up for a fraction of the cost of a railway. Little in the way of incrementalism there: instead a great and sweeping improvement accomplished across a few decades and through the introduction of a completely new approach to the problem.

forgotprevpass 13y ago

At 15:00, he mentions research on the efficiency of gestures done in the 60's. Does anyone know what he's referring to?

ozten 13y ago
Sketchpad by Ivan Sutherland in 1963, would be one. It allows one to draw CAD drawings, convert drawn letters into labels, etc in a more natural way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad
- jecel 13y ago
  Besides the Sketchpad, Alan always mentions Grail (GRAphic Input Language), designed by Thomas Ellis and programmed by Gabriel Groner and others at the Rand Corporation. That was from 1964. As far as I know, Alan also greatly admires the work done at MIT in the 1970s like http://www.paulmckevitt.com/cre333/papers/putthatthere.pdf http://www.paulmckevitt.com/cre333/papers/putthatthere.pdf

leoc 13y ago

It's amusing that the same optical illusion has been discussed by Michael Abrash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-2dQoeqVVo#t=453 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-2dQoeqVVo#t=453 and Alan Kay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o#t=1534 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o#t=1534 in talks on very different topics recently. > Thomas Paine said in Common Sense, instead of having the king be the law, why, we can have the law be the king. That was one of the biggest shifts, large scale shifts in history because he realised "hey, we can design a better society than tradition has and we can put it into law; so, we're just going to invert thousands of years of beliefs". Pfft, tell that to the 13th-century Venetians: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf . Constitutionalism isn't that new an idea.

andreyf 13y ago

Stephen Wolfram's demo he referred to doesn't appear to be up yet, but this one from a couple weeks back is pretty sweet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik

purpletoned 13y ago
It seems to be up now at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzYmO20N6MY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzYmO20N6MY.

sAuronas 13y ago

Playing Wayne Gretzky: 30 years we will (ought to) have cars that repel over the surface by a bioether [sic], possible emitted from the street - which have become (replaced as) linear parks that vehicles float over and never crash. Because of all the new park area, some kids in the suburbs (because they will be park rich) will invent a new game that stretches over a mile that involves more imagination than football, basketball and soccer - combined. That was an awesome video. C++ == Guitar Hero

athst 13y ago

This is a great excuse for buying the nicest computer possible - I need to compute in the future!

xxcode 13y ago

Hacker News is the epitome of short term thinking, with projects like 'weekend projects' etc.

oskarth 13y ago

For an alternative and cynical view of Xerox PARC, have a look at Ted Nelson's Computers for Cynics 2 - It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC (15 minutes video): http://fixyt.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU http://fixyt.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU

norswap 13y ago

Totally tangential, but that intro music segment with Alan Key just looking around is total comedy gold. Ah, those cheesy conf organizers...

queensnake 13y ago

That 'universals' guy seems actually to be Donald Brown, and his book is 'Human Universals'. http://www.amazon.com/Human-Universals-Donald-Brown/dp/007008209X http://www.amazon.com/Human-Universals-Donald-Brown/dp/00700... The book is expensive, here's a list: http://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm http://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm