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.
> • 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.
This really struck a chord for me. What I got from it was that many people try to build some form of success on pure IQ and get frustrated when they are outmuscled by knowledge in the market.
I think that cuts back to Xerox PARC as well - by focussing everything on IQ, they created the knowledge that allowed Apple to be so dominant.
Where the talk falls a little bit on the obnoxious side is when Mr. Kay makes dismissive statements on how they created what others sold, just 10 or 20 years earlier. I think that ignores the enormous amount of work you have to put into connecting this knowledge that they worked out to the current state of mind that people are in.
Xerox PARC may have invented the future, but the failure of their parent company to bring that future to market shows that even with that knowledge at hand, you have quite a bit of way ahead of you.
"Knowledge dominates IQ" - along this lines, recently I have come to accept the idea "Speed dominates IQ":
To explain it briefly, some one who can build fast and deploy can learn more as they come into contact with unknown-unknowns sooner and more often.
Contrast this with someone with a huge IQ who thinks about things a ton, and builds really clever first solutions which breaks on first contact with reality/market.
> The majority acts based on group acceptance, not on the merits of an idea. Extroversion vs. introversion.
This is extremely important to realize. Eventually your [art|research] will take you beyond what people are comfortable with, and it doesn't mean you're wrong. It is hard, though.
I think you missed one of his crucial points. That is that we live in a waking dream. That our day-to-day understanding of what is real and normal is a fiction.
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.
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
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.
Consider that in 2007, the iPhone was already effectively the result of years of waiting. In '99/2000, there was already touch screen PDAs with apps and various limited networking functionality, and phone functionality at least as early as 2002 (possibly earlier, I don't remember), and a few tablets had started making their appearance (both laptops + touch, as well as "proper" tablets). But they were all massively hamstrung by hardware (the first generation Palm's had less than 1/1000th the memory of many current smartphones; monochrome low res displays, and resistive touch)
Arguably, even in '99, the idea itself was old - those of us working on stuff like that then, were looking back at Star Trek and other SF, and it was just the feeling that it was an idea whose time had finally come.
Apple's genius with the iPhone and iPad, was realising its time had not come, and waiting and refining their design until the basic underlying hardware "caught up" and they could provide a product suitable for "normal users". Everyone else got to make the expensive mistakes; most of the companies involved are no longer around, or pulled out of that market before Apple made its entry.
Sometimes ideas are just not right yet, and spending time trying to force the issue is likely to fail because the end result will be massively compromised.
But sometimes the ideas are just not right yet also because the public has not "caught up". It's not just that software developers must figure this out, but end users must have caught up enough that the new ideas fit into their world view.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
Neoliberalism since the 70's is a well-known culprit, but he also discusses the corporatization of universities — stifling managerialist bureaucracies.
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.
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.
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. :-)
> 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".
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.
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?
[+] [-] dredmorbius|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] skore|12 years ago|reply
This really struck a chord for me. What I got from it was that many people try to build some form of success on pure IQ and get frustrated when they are outmuscled by knowledge in the market.
I think that cuts back to Xerox PARC as well - by focussing everything on IQ, they created the knowledge that allowed Apple to be so dominant.
Where the talk falls a little bit on the obnoxious side is when Mr. Kay makes dismissive statements on how they created what others sold, just 10 or 20 years earlier. I think that ignores the enormous amount of work you have to put into connecting this knowledge that they worked out to the current state of mind that people are in.
Xerox PARC may have invented the future, but the failure of their parent company to bring that future to market shows that even with that knowledge at hand, you have quite a bit of way ahead of you.
[+] [-] bluishgreen|12 years ago|reply
To explain it briefly, some one who can build fast and deploy can learn more as they come into contact with unknown-unknowns sooner and more often.
Contrast this with someone with a huge IQ who thinks about things a ton, and builds really clever first solutions which breaks on first contact with reality/market.
[+] [-] adsr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattgreenrocks|12 years ago|reply
This is extremely important to realize. Eventually your [art|research] will take you beyond what people are comfortable with, and it doesn't mean you're wrong. It is hard, though.
[+] [-] eikenberry|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitwize|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxhs-GLE29Q
[+] [-] ExpiredLink|12 years ago|reply
> Smalltalk was at least two steps forward
... then Smalltalk would be a major programming language today.
[+] [-] neel8986|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fidotron|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vidarh|12 years ago|reply
Arguably, even in '99, the idea itself was old - those of us working on stuff like that then, were looking back at Star Trek and other SF, and it was just the feeling that it was an idea whose time had finally come.
Apple's genius with the iPhone and iPad, was realising its time had not come, and waiting and refining their design until the basic underlying hardware "caught up" and they could provide a product suitable for "normal users". Everyone else got to make the expensive mistakes; most of the companies involved are no longer around, or pulled out of that market before Apple made its entry.
Sometimes ideas are just not right yet, and spending time trying to force the issue is likely to fail because the end result will be massively compromised.
But sometimes the ideas are just not right yet also because the public has not "caught up". It's not just that software developers must figure this out, but end users must have caught up enough that the new ideas fit into their world view.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stephencanon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exratione|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] corysama|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] straws|12 years ago|reply
http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_...
http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_...
http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_...
http://stream.hpi.uni-potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_...
[+] [-] jal278|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Universals
[+] [-] Geee|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] semiel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justin66|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] calibraxis|12 years ago|reply
Neoliberalism since the 70's is a well-known culprit, but he also discusses the corporatization of universities — stifling managerialist bureaucracies.
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cliveowen|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonGateley|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MrQuincle|12 years ago|reply
- 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. :-)
[+] [-] xxcode|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leoc|12 years ago|reply
> 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 . Constitutionalism isn't that new an idea.
[+] [-] forgotprevpass|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ozten|12 years ago|reply
It allows one to draw CAD drawings, convert drawn letters into labels, etc in a more natural way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad
[+] [-] andreyf|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] purpletoned|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] athst|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sAuronas|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] revorad|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kashkhan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rafeed|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] w1ntermute|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] queensnake|12 years ago|reply
The book is expensive, here's a list:
http://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm
[+] [-] norswap|12 years ago|reply