However, just to make you feel better (I hope), I did do a startup in grad school (called "Creative X").
Fortunately, it looks like the PDF is now linked from the talk: https://www.dropbox.com/s/knngq11tzdi0tdh/Alan%20Kay%20-%20T...
I didn't. I missed where you gave the title of your handout, though of course I did hear the description and much that followed.
What enlightened times we live in, such that a student can fail to give a teacher his undivided attention not just in the classroom but at a great distance.
Thanks very much for sharing all this.
He reminded me of this anecdote: In an intro to Anthropology video on Stanford's YouTube channel. The professor passed out a questionnaire that included, "Why are you taking this class?". Someone wrote, "Yes". I expected that kind of response in my biz classes @ CUNY, but not @ Stanford. Especially, in an Anthropology class.
Please try to be more diligent about what you are complaining about. It's clear that I didn't mean remotely what you imply.
Why wouldn't you take the trouble to check your memory before writing the above?
You mention Outlook being "Gold", while IQ is lead. Outlook seems to be something we can improve, both on a collective level, and also on an individual level. You discuss a lot how to use this Outlook to invent the future, but how can we develop our Outlook at more of a meta-level? If we want to be the people capable of looking 50 years into the future and then bringing our insights back to the present, how can we develop this skill?
I suspect the answer has something to do with reading good books and learning from people who already have great outlooks.
We are on the good side of this because we can look at history and get some sense of qualitative changes of Outlook, and we can also look at Anthropology and other behavioral sciences to get some sense of ways in which we are able to get past some of our genetic behaviors to "piggy-back" new thoughts on top of old mechanisms. Jerry Bruner used to call this "Goedelization" (which is an interesting way to look at it -- it is a kind of Turing machine idea to make more interesting machines from existing machines).
A key point is that "blue-plane explosions" like all ideas are most likely to be mediocre down to bad. Because they seem to come from the heavens, in the old days people would create religions around them; today we are expected to vet ideas very carefully before proclaiming and working on them.
Elon Musk recently has also talked about, how thought process of physical science appeals to him, because it tends to deconstruct systems into fundamental parts, and then rebuild the explanation from them, rather than using analogies.
So, I thought, that in order to imagine the progress of the next century we'd need to define sort of a lowest energy state, towards which the humanity should drift one way or another. However, I didn't have any of the fundamental pieces, and I think you just laid them down quite nicely in this lecture. Thanks Alan.
To me, I think the key is to balance the universal with the non-universal to forge progress.
One interesting connection is that in an earlier lecture Steve Huffman notes they tried categories with Reddit but reverted. Here Kay explains why.
Incidentally, someone who calls out UX issues like the absence of a map in the side entrance of the Gates building is my kind of person.
circle(x=time, y=-time*time, r=10)
so a render can get the information it needs but there aren't individual frames to edit.
In general, what happens to interoperability if different programs/projects represent the same things, like images and animations, very differently?
And how security could be handled in such a system? Either against a malicious or haywire programs/project?
Take a look at capability protection -- it covers most of these cases reasonably well.
Still there a lots of ways it could play out - heaven like or hell like so maybe it's good to think about it and try stuff.
Also, take a look at the article I wrote for Scientific American in September 1984 "Software" that talks about organizations of active objects as "tissue programming"
A critical part of that thought process was the idea of using Carl Hewitt's PLANNER ideas as the interface to objects -- that was done around 1970, and we used some of it in the first Smalltalk (72).
What are some resources to learn more about the 90% of programming ideas created at PARC that did not come out? Which do you think hold the most potential for the future?
Thank you
