(2017-09-17) Kay The Father Of Mobile Computing Is Not Impressed

Brian Merchant interviews Alan Kay: The Father Of Mobile Computing Is Not Impressed. What’s interesting is the next thing to look at: What are the non-universals that are particularly interesting and powerful? They were things like agriculture, reading and writing, deductive mathematics, empirical science (math and science), equal rights. These inventions are almost always harder to learn, because we’re less genetically predisposed.

Kay was one of the earliest advocates, back in the days of hulking gray mainframes, for using the computer as a dynamic instrument of learning and creativity. It took imagination like his to drive the computer into the public’s hands. The finest distillation of that imagination was the Dynabook.

Kay believes nothing has yet been produced that fulfills the original specs for the Dynabook, including the iPhone and the iPad.

Last year, during the course of my reporting of my book about the iPhone, The One Device, we sat for a lengthy interview—what follows is an edited version of that conversation.

The iPhone Illusion, And The Complicated Man Behind It

there was already an iPad... and some marketing decision got them to try for the iPhone first.

One of the things Neil Postman wrote in one of his earlier books was saying, “Look, there are a thousand forces trying to get hold of people’s minds, particularly children’s minds.” So, one of the major things that schools should be charged with, is to teach children to be media guerrillas—that’s what we call them.

Just take a look, what was Steve Jobs saying before they threw him out, and what was he saying after he came back? The big slogan at Apple, when I went there, I think it was “Wheels for the Mind.” But when he came back, I don’t know exactly what he was trying to do, because having that kind of conversation with him was not easy. But I think he was trying to show everybody that he was, goddammit, a kickass business man and, by the way, Bill Gates, watch out. So, you take that mind and have that mind decide to do that problem, and you don’t care about the other stuff. What are you going to do? You’ve got to be a consumer products company. That’s what he started doing.

I talked to Steve on the phone [about adding a standard pen and penholder].

And he says, “Well, people lose their pens.” And I said, “Well, have a place to put it.”

So, what that is is, marketing people reacting to something that a competitor is doing and ignoring the fact that vastly smarter people than them, almost 50 years ago now, figured out what the thing needed.

Steve was perfectly aware of the Dynabook. That was one of the reasons he wanted me to come to Apple. There was even some effort towards it before the board threw him out.

But then, what you’ve got is a gazillion people exploiting all this technology that was invented in the ARPA/PARC community, and most of them are not even curious. You have Tim Berners-Lee, [the inventor of the World Wide Web] who was a physicist, who knew he would be thrown out of physics if he didn’t know what Newton did. He didn’t check to find out that there was a Douglas Engelbart.

And so, his conception of the World Wide Web was infinitely tinier and weaker and terrible. His thing was simple enough with other unsophisticated people to wind up becoming a de facto standard, which we’re still suffering from.

Years ago, this anthropologist Donald Brown wrote a book called Human Universals. This was just gathering up what generations of anthropologists had gleaned from studying thousands of traditional societies.

What’s interesting is the next thing to look at: What are the non-universals that are particularly interesting and powerful? They were things like agriculture, reading and writing, deductive mathematics, empirical science, equal rights. These inventions are almost always harder to learn, because we’re less genetically predisposed.

The telephone became a success in the late 19th century. And why? Well, at Western Union’s board meeting, in 1895, they said, “No sane person would conduct business through such a contrivance,” because we already had telegrams that were written records, right? For business, [the telegram] is a really great thing because you’ve got records of what people are saying to each other and all that stuff. But the problem is, the telephone was an amplification of a human universal, which means you don’t have to learn how to use it, which means it’s just going to completely triumph over anything that requires you to learn something.

by the way, chat and tweeting? Remove that, because the utterances are so small, they’re basically transliterations of oral

Putting a writing system into an oral society doesn’t actually do it, doesn’t change them. It requires something more, because the thing that’s important about writing and how it changes the thinking of the civilization is the literate aspects of it, the structure and the thought, in various ways.

If you read Marshall McLuhan, the first thing you realize is: Wow, if we could make something like a printing press—but its content is the next level of dealing with complexity, beyond what we could do with prose and written-down mathematics and stuff like that—we can actually create a media environment that the acclimation to [which], just like the acclimation to the printing press, would be another level of thought. (Thinking Tools)

How To Teach For The 21st Century

if you look at educator Maria Montessori’s first two books, both were really important. Education was like the third thing she got good at. She was the first woman in Italy to have a medical degree. Her undergraduate degree was in engineering. She was also one of the two or three leading experts in anthropology in Italy. So when she got into education, you had a mind far, far beyond almost anybody who’s ever really thought about it.

She was the one who, early on, got onto this idea that we’re driven genetically to learn the culture around us.

If you really want them to learn, if you want them all to learn, it can’t be like choosing a musical instrument because you’re interested in it. Everybody learns their culture, because it’s in the form of a culture, and that trumps any particular interest we have.

I got into thinking about personal computing from a child’s point of view, because of an encounter with Seymour Papert, the Logo [programming language] guy in the ’60s.

One of the things he was doing was taking something that pretty much everybody who knew computers and math all knew, but had never thought about, in terms of children.

there are things about the way the child’s mind works that, if you just took that into account seriously—and Papert did and only a few other people did—back then, you could immediately invent a mathematics that was real mathematics and perfectly suited for them.

In sports they do this all the time. In music, they do it all the time. The idea is, you never let the child do something that isn’t the real thing—but you have to work your ass off to figure out what the real thing is in the context of the way their minds are working at that developmental level.

When I saw what Papert was doing, while I recognized it immediately, it had just never occurred to me. And then that nanosecond I realized this is what McLuhan was talking about. This is what Montessori was talking about. This thing is the equivalent of the Montessori school.

Papert had the great metaphor. He said, “Look if you want to learn French, don’t take it in fifth or sixth grade. Go to France, because everything that makes learning French reasonable, and everything that helps learning French, is in France. If you want to do it in the United States, make a France.” This is equivalent to what Montessori was saying: If you want to live in the 21st century, you’d better embody it.

How Stupid Is It, Versus How Accepted

I was already doing a desktop computer in 1968. That was my thesis project and I just finished it to get my PhD. I did my little Dynabook cartoon

this was just like two years before going to PARC. I finished my PhD. I started thinking about this. I said, “If we’re gonna do a personal computer”—and that’s what I wanted PARC to do and that’s what we wound up doing [with the Alto]—”the children have to be completely full-fledged users of this thing.”

Think about what this means in the context of say, a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad. They aren’t full-fledged users. They’re just television watchers of different kinds.

The iPhone is basically giving one little keyhole and if you do something wrong, you actually go back out and start the app over again.

It’s about as stupid as you can get. But how successful is the iPhone? It’s about as successful as you can get, so that matches you up with something that is the logical equivalent of television in our time.

We can eliminate the learning curve for reading by getting rid of reading and going to recordings. That’s basically what they’re doing: Basically, let’s revert back to a pre-tool time.

a saying I made up at PARC was, “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.” They’ve got simple things being simple and they have complex things being impossible, so that’s wrong

If you think of Black Swan possibilities in a populous age where most people have managed to get by without being educated… because, in order to make education more user-friendly, they managed to forget about the changes in people’s brains that are supposed to happen. On the other hand, nobody who’s in my business is other than an optimist. I’m still plugging away on education.

Machines For Teaching How To Think

It’s been an idea in the ARPA/PARC community—which hasn’t been funded since 1980 or so, but a lot of us are still alive—one of the ideas was that in personal computing, what you really need is some form of mentor that’s an integral part of the user interface.

FC: Something like a digital assistant? (Intelligent Software Assistant)

AK: It’s something just like the GUI, which I had a lot to do with designing. I did that, more or less, as a somewhat disappointed reaction to realizing AI is just a hard problem

if you look at that first paper, besides the comment about touch-screen displays, there was a side comment saying that one of the first pieces of software that an individual will write on their personal computer will be something that will suppress advertising. No, we read McLuhan. No, it wasn’t that we didn’t understand the potential pitfalls, because Christ, we had 500 years of the printing press and we had the television, we had McLuhan. The problem was that what needed to be done to deal with the next legal drug wasn’t done.

if you’ve read Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, but you should look at it. A lot of us is what he calls System 1. There’s a whole bunch of stuff in there that is primarily to deal with the need to make real-time judgments, to make judgments in a couple of neural cycles. The only way you can do that is by matching against memories. It’s not cognitive.

And it’s so divorced from what we call a System 2, which is the cognitive, slower system that can tell a person what’s going to happen.

So in order to do some real learning of complicated thinking, like calculus, you have to train or amuse it—you have to train parts of System 1 to be the atoms, the bricks of thought that the slower system is going to do. It’s not an easy thing to do, and you won’t find it in most teachers’ manuals, on how to go about doing this stuff.

And unfortunately, System 1 is the thing that gets trained by the media (MSM).

I think any of kind of rational thinking on this stuff for a lot of people is not going to get you any further than the typical experiments of behavioral economists these days. Because this is System 1 versus System 2. If I’m a diabetic, I’m not getting any candy bars, but if you put a candy bar in front of a diabetic who has sugar cravings, most of them are going to take it, and rationalize it. I think that is where you’re in real trouble in terms of media.