How To Live In The Future And Bring It Back To Others / Alan Kay
Rules from Alan Kay, J. Licklider, Bob Taylor, Ivan Sutherland, Doug Engelbart
“We cannot learn to see until we admit we are blind.”
“Pick ideas worth spending your life on.”
“If you want to make money, don’t make a startup, start an industry.”
Alan Kay led one of the very few epicenters of mankind’s innovation. After contributing to Silicon Valley with 8.5 inventions, including the Internet and Personal Computer, he shares how to live in the future and bring it back to others.
Smart people fail because a POV gives +80 IQ points. For instance, Richard Hamming also emphasized the priority of POV: re-structure the projects so your obstacles become the targets defining your new endeavor, and as a byproduct, your initial goals are also achieved.
Position yourself where someone will pass you to shoot on goal. That’s what Alan meant when he popularized Gretzky’s “Go to where the puck will be”.
ARPA Parc Funded By Xerox
In 5 years, 25 people, driven solely by J.Licklider’s vision of “man-computer symbiosis“ and funded with an equivalent of just $10M/year invented 8.5 groundbreaking technologies: the personal computer, graphical user interface, object-oriented programming, laptop, laser printer, PostScript font, Ethernet, peer-peer & client-server architectures, and approximately 50% of the Internet.
The returns from these inventions exceed $40 trillion. Xerox used only Laser Printer, yielding a 25,000% return on the money spent on PARC. After PARC, there have been hardly any inventions in 40 years, or, as Alan Kay put it, it was just “scaling and Angry Birds”.
“The most ‘interesting thing’ has been the contrast between exploitation of (our) inventions vs. the almost complete lack of curiosity in the process that produced them”
How Do You Do What Is Actually Needed?
To build WIAN solutions, you must escape the tyranny of the present. If you live in the present, your ideas derive from it, and therefore, are incremental.
Project Moore’s Law 30 years into the future. If you spend a lot of money today, you can build a computer that others will possess 15 years from now (It should cost approximately $130k/unit if you produce a thousand) It will take you over 5 years to develop software for it. When this software is ready, you will have a substantial prototype of what will be ubiquitous 30 years from today. But you will possess it decades earlier. Then, you create hardware for your software.
“Better” Is Not Good Enough.
PARC / ARPA Rules:
The goodness of founders is key
Set cosmic-scale romantic visions, not mere goals.
Organize a community, not just a group of projects. Fund people, not merely ideas. Fund problem finding, not just solving.
PARC’s community started 30 years before the 8.5 inventions. When, for the very first time in the history of the U.S., many great researchers started to work together on radar at MIT. Out of that 3-year collaboration, 7 Nobel Prizes were awarded. ARPA research followed the radar. And 8 years after ARPA’s launch, PARC was started as a branch of ARPA, funded by Xerox.
Benchmarks: Fail 90%+ of the time, or you're aiming too low
Only the absolutely top people should undertake creative work. They do what they do because they are sure they must, not motivated by money or prestige.
Focus on milestones, not deadlines.
Nurture new talent. Rotate directors: they should onboard successors during the last 30% of their cycle.
Separate responsibility and control. Those who build are not responsible for finances or politics, and vice versa.
Forego peer review.
Foster a pink WIAN-level communication culture. Avoid mere exchanges of opinions. Instead, engage in deep discussions about ideas without personal attacks. Argue for clarity, not to win.
If a you can build new tools to achieve your goals, then you must.
The builders of the Empire State created new tools because “…this is going to present unusual problems. Ordinary building equipment won’t be worth a damn on it,” said the builder managing 3,400 people who finished a skyscraper from scratch in 400 days almost 100 years ago.
This is all good but it lacks one thing-- criticality. What if, "the computer revolution happened and it was just disappointing and there isn't a, "big lesson" to learn?" What if the personal computer, despite the idealism of the ARPA community was, in reality not a, "meta-medium" but a, "interactive television?" What if that's, "not a bad thing?" I love Alan Kay so much but sometimes this kind of thing ends up bordering on religion.
It's worth noting-- the most, "paradigm changing" invention in the last 1000 years (outside of indoor plumbing and anti-biotics) was an incremental improvement in the speed of casting moveable type (Gutenberg). It may be possible that incremental improvement is more important than we're thinking. John Dewey already anticipated all the Papert, Piaget, Montessori, ect... stuff before the turn of the last century.
The, "computer revolution" probably will have nothing to do with computers but how human cultures, "facilitates a conversation with itself." This isn't a new idea and you don't need computers to achieve something like, "near universal conceptual literacy" in societies. We need to teach people to read before they can, "meta-program read" and we need to give people, "a reason" to read before they'll ever get to a kind of, "meta conceptual literacy founded on Baconian (critical) Science."
Also-- Power Laws. 99% of people aren't, "part of the conversation." This is a WAY bigger deal than, "what tools we happen to be using at the present or in the next few decades." We need to be reading Thucydides and Plutarch. We need to improve our moral and organizational selves before computing becomes something beyond itself.