
Alan Kay: Is it too late to create a healthy future? [video] - tosh
https://videocast.nih.gov/Summary.asp?Live=28442&bhcp=1
======
jimmy1
> "It's not doing more of what we are doing and it means if we've done things
> with technology, for example, that have gotten us into a bit of a pickle,
> doing more things with technology at the same level of thinking is probably
> going to make things worse."

Boy if I could shout this from the rooftops to all the AI "luminaries" or
people that think AI is going to deliver us to some utopian future where work
is now unnecessary and we are all free to "chase our passions" (and along with
it, this junk notion that UBI is somehow now fundamentally required to
continue society), I would. This wisdom is greatly needed for all the current
"future techies" out there.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I don't know if AI luminaries advocating certain utopia exist. Pretty much all
reasonable voices I've seen about AI in the past decade either dismissed it
entirely, or advocated caution, arguing that it's a small chance of utopia if
we do it right, and high chance of destroying humanity.

As for UBI, it's one way of addressing the fact that our civilization is
mature enough to abandon the concept of having to work to be able to live (not
to mention, non-bullshit jobs are steadily disappearing).

~~~
crispinb
> our civilization is mature enough to abandon the concept of having to work
> to be able to live

Or at least make the concept universal. It's been alive and well for the
ruling classes for centuries.

~~~
shanghaiaway
The ruling class works too. They rule.

~~~
crispinb
Some do, some don't, in my experience (there are many scions of the ruling
class who choose to do little).

But that's all irrelevant in any case, because the issue in question here
wasn't working or not-working, but _having_ to work to be permitted to live.
Most of us have to. The ruling classes don't.

~~~
shanghaiaway
Rulers have to work to maintain or expand, otherwise they decline.

------
bsaul
There's always the same things i find disturbing in every alan kay notes i've
seen recently : it's often a bunch of anecdotal (yet interesting) data put
together that don't give the impression of making the talk move forward. The
general idea is often pretty vague. it doesn't go much beyond general. There's
always those tiny bits of self promotion (mentioning Xerox Parc inventing
everything we have today), like someone that feels that his work has been
underappreciated and lacks peer recognition.

It's like one of those general public TED inspirational talk except it tries
to disguise itself as a scientific or philosophic one.

I always end up looking at the first 20 minutes because the anecdotes are
entertaining in themselves, then i realize the talk doesn't go anywhere, and i
go back to work.

(and then i go back to reading again the wikipedia page about alan kay to try
to remember what made him so famous).

PS : as a comparison, i think Bret Victor talks are immensely more
interesting. They also mention general use of computers today, make you think
about it quite deeply, inspire you to try new things, and actually
_demonstrate_ something new every time. And you never hear him mention his
work at Apple.

~~~
3rdAccount
I have a lot of respect for Alan Kay, but know what you mean. Either I'm too
dumb to understand much of what he's trying to convey due to historical and
technical ignorance or lack of intelligence, his communication skills leave
room to be desired, his talks are just hot air (I don't believe this), or
human language isn't the best medium for conveying his impressive and large
scale ideas.

I've seen people ask him great questions (or at least I thought they were) and
they only got a riddle in reply. That's only acceptable if you're a dragon or
a hobbit in my opinion.

Instead, I'd like to see a short an concise summary of his ideas of where we
are, what we're doing wrong, where we could improve...etc.

It would certainly be interesting to see a future where hardware is built to
run a Smalltalk os natively and you have full control all the way down, but he
would probably say that I'm missing the point.

~~~
mikekchar
> I've seen people ask him great questions (or at least I thought they were)
> and they only got a riddle in reply. That's only acceptable if you're a
> dragon or a hobbit in my opinion.

Looking back on a lot of Alan Kay's writing, I've noticed that when he was
young he tended to write extremely long winded explanations of what he was
trying to do. As he got older, the explanations got more terse. Now he doesn't
explain at all: he just asks a related question. In my mind, I don't think
this is by accident.

I've been starting to go in the same direction. I'm prone to writing extremely
expansive replies to questions (just see my posting history here ;-) ). Some
people read it, but most will not. I found that while I lose some fidelity
with a more terse answer, I get better traction from shorter answers. However,
the audience I add by making my answers more digestible tends to interpret the
answers literally -- meaning that they don't think past what I've written.

So I started wondering if replying with questions as Alan Kay seems to do now
would be useful. It certainly has its advantages. Although it goes in the
opposite direction of increasing your audience, if you feel that most people
aren't going to "get it" anyway, perhaps that's not necessarily a loss. It
also is a cue to say, "This is a complex issue and you need to go back and
look at some fundamentals before you can understand the answer". Those people
who aren't willing to do that, probably aren't willing to put the work into
understanding the answer anyway. And finally, in the very likely case that _my
answer_ is not actually very good, asking a question instead allows the person
to formulate a better answer than I can come up with. This latter bit is
especially worth thinking about, I think.

But I've resisted doing that as it is certainly intimidating and in some ways
makes you look like a jerk ;-). BTW, I recently read some of his comments on
what it means to be "object oriented" and I tried my best to build a system
based on what he said. The results were extremely illuminating for me. Whether
or not it matches his view, I found that working hard on puzzling out his
comments took me in valuable directions that I had not considered before.

~~~
spindle
I agree ... and could we see the system you mention in your last paragraph,
please, or hear more about it?

~~~
mikekchar
I hate to link to my unfinished work, but here goes :-)

I started out by deciding to write a blog post. Here is my rambling second
draft: [https://github.com/ygt-
mikekchar/oojs/blob/master/oojs.org#r...](https://github.com/ygt-
mikekchar/oojs/blob/master/oojs.org#re-examining-object-oriented-programming-
with-javascript)

However, as I was writing this blog post, it became obvious to me that I
needed something better than Shape/Rectangle toy explanations. I needed to
build something real. So I decided to build a test framework.

Here it is:
[https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy](https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy)

I wrote a quick explanation of the design I was using here:
[https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy/blob/master/design.md](https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy/blob/master/design.md)
You can read that first if you just want to see what I was doing and don't
want the long winded explanation of how I got there from the blog post.

While I was writing this code, I decided to make a coding standard for myself
because sometimes it helps to add constraints to examine how things are
working. The coding standard is here:
[https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy/blob/master/coding_standa...](https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy/blob/master/coding_standard.md)

I suppose TL;DR: Objects should not represent ADTs. Instead they hold state.
The object is really a collection of operations on that state (bundled
together to give you better cohesion). The state is encapsulated in the object
and should be inaccessible except through the operations. Objects should
probably be immutable as well -- especially as it enforces that encapsulation.
The best way to think about it is that the object itself is a monad (and it
literally is). The methods on the object are functions that you would normally
pass to bind. The "." that does the dispatch is essentially bind. I found that
I never actually reached for subclass polymorphism (even though it was easy to
implement). Instead I used essentially traits and I think this is in keeping
with the modern idea that OO should encourage composition over inheritance.

Why do this instead of FP? Well, as you can see, my code is really FP with "FP
Objects". I think the thing I liked about this is the idea that the objects
created a nice abstraction for cohesive code. It's not _that_ different than
type classes (and I always think it's funny that type classes are usually
implemented with virtual function tables). However, it is slightly more
restricted in terms of generic functions. In a system without static type
checking, I think it's easier to reason about this code. YMMV.

In the end, I found this way of programming _very_ enjoyable. The code is
still quite crufty, so please don't judge me ;-) I was just writing it to
explore the ideas. It's not production code.

I considered going on and finishing Testy and possibly building something else
with that style of programming, but it turns out that all current
implementations of JS are quite inefficient when using closures (and may even
leak memory!), so I decided to work on something else.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to fire away.

------
Theodores
According to Alan Kay's talk less than a quarter of one percent of people are
conscientious objectors when push comes to shove. That certainly limits the
possibilities of the future. Despite literacy and history being studied very
few dare to be a Daniel.

~~~
drawkbox
With any production/consumer scenario it is usually 1 to 1000 or more ratio.
Content producers and people that interact rather than lurk are a 1 to 1000 or
more. This here article probably thousands view it, and only a trickle
comment, some participate, others mostly observe. This ratio also shows up in
conversions, customer purchases and more.

The fact is most of human existence is observing, studying, thinking,
following, viewing existing knowledge while very few interact or create new
production or are producing at one time on one subject or concentration,
though we all are the 1s for something.

The key is when you are that 1 to the 1000s or more is to be real, truthful,
provide value, wisdom, entertainment and be interesting and that can draw in
more 1s to an eventual critical mass and success or world changing paths. The
trickle of small change eventually reaches critical mass but growing slowly,
in similar conversion rates that start to compound.

Humans are a differentiation machine, they follow along the paths of the
branches of success or current realities and at a certain point differentiate
themselves by forging a new path, others then weigh the pros and cons and
sometimes that path becomes a main branch, but new branches take risk,
dedication, resources and creativity, as well as convincing others to follow.

The bright side way to look at it is, there is always a quarter of one percent
of people that are conscientious objectors, speak up, make change, innovate,
produce, create or more all the time.

~~~
Hextinium
I find anecdotally that someone usually has something that they are the 1/1000
over. For some people it's comment threads or sharing articles with friends
but somewhere they fall into a 1/1000 category where they put their creative
effort. Not to say that there is a large amount of people that will read your
comment and not respond.

The other thing that may be the case is the overview effect which was recently
brought up, it may take 40-50 seconds to read a post but if it takes everyone
10 minutes to write a post then even if everyone on HN spend a quarter of
their time writing posts you would still get the 1/100 ratio. Just food for
the thought.

------
nayuki
* Funny name coincidence between the organization NIH (National Institutes of Health) and the notion of NIH (Not Invented Here). Because this lecture is all about reinventing computing paradigms.

* The video works fine in Google Chrome, but in Mozilla Firefox it seems to force the Adobe Flash player. Not cool.

~~~
ASalazarMX
Works fine for me, no Flash.

Firefox 63 on Windows, DNT enabled, uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger
extensions.

~~~
icebraining
Curious; I'm also on 63 (though on Linux) and it is showing Flash here. Though
I do have the plugin enabled, so maybe it defaults to it in that case.

~~~
arendtio
Linux + FF 62.0.3 seems to work just fine.

------
justaaron
this is mindblowingly good.

------
petermcneeley
I love Alan Kay but a significant portion of this talk is TEDx-like garbage:
The wars, revolutions, and genocides of the past are about power not mental
health. Conscientious objectors also not by default good people.

If you define most people as mentally ill what does that say about your own
diagnosis. The human brain has been selected (in an evolutionary way) and its
errors if they exist at all are likely going to be related to its unnatural
environment.

His example with the dentist and the plastic is actually just an example of
skin in the game. The dentist doesn't have the skin in the game, the patient
does, so the patient notices.

Sure older educated people could help the next generation but given the
financial inter-generational put they have participated in I think its obvious
how much they actually care about the future. As the thought leader of their
time said "Its not me who will die, its the world that will end."

~~~
blueprint
You make the big assumption that such "mental illness" lies in a fault in the
brain. Have rates of mental illness remained the same in all categories in the
last 500 years?

When we don't know something, we ought not to operate as if we believe
conclusions made on the basis of what we have not confirmed.

~~~
soared
>we ought not to operate as if we believe conclusions made on the basis of
what we have not confirmed.

What?

~~~
wallace_f
"Dont form generalizations or conclusions based on what you dont know."

------
lisper
Needs a [video] tag.

Also: the non-click-baity title is "Is it too late to create the future?" (The
answer, by Betteridge's law of headlines [1], is of course "no".)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

~~~
excalibur
Thank you for that link. Betteridge's law should probably be formulated to
have criteria beyond "Does it end in a question mark?" A quick scan of the
current CNN headlines turns up the following:

* Why is this star MLB pitcher being ignored? (N/A)

* Who do you think should be CNN Hero of the Year? (N/A)

* What's behind Whitey Bulger's death? (N/A)

* Facebook is pivoting. Will users follow? (No!)

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's almost a 100%-accurate heuristic if you change the criterion to "Does the
headline end with a yes-or-no question?".

------
nine_k
What irks me in the title is the "the". As if there's only one possible
future, "the future", and if we can't attain it, we're toast.

If past teaches us anything, it is that possible futures are many, our
understanding of what's possible is fluid, and predicting and planning future
is hard.

~~~
lainga
In this case, the choice might be practical, as _futures_ are generally taken
to be financial instruments in the US.

~~~
lgessler
I have trouble imagining a sentence where a speaker would truly have
difficulty disambiguating the two senses. People rarely have trouble
disambiguating even incredibly homophonous words like set, run, or bank.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I have trouble imagining such sentence where a speaker _wouldn 't_ think it's
about banking. "Futures" plural referring to time is something I've only seen
in incredibly nerdy phrases, like "set of all possible futures".

------
aizatto
I haven’t watched the video, but I’d love to know what other peoples answer to
the question on is.

> Is it too late to create a healthy future?

Thoughts?

Personally I don’t think so.

Creating a healthy future, depends on defining what is unhealthy (within
reason, this is also subjective).

Providing context and teaching people/our children why we think it is
unhealthy.

Letting them decide on their own.

