
Alan Kay at Demo: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental - corysama
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o
======
dredmorbius
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.

• Tyranny of the present.

~~~
skore
> • 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.

~~~
trhway
>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.

does it really matter that Xerox PARC "invented the future"? If not they, then
somebody else couple years later. 10-20 years down the road it just wouldn't
change a bit.

~~~
epayne
Alan Kay posits that yes it does matter that PARC "invented the future"
because there were and are very few researchers working with the opportunity
mix necessary. They had five years of freedom from business concerns, tons of
ambition, the right context, intelligence and inspiration. Kay claims that the
extremely unique situation and persons at PARC and previously at ARPA are what
gave rise to the inventions. I think he would agree with you that other people
would have made similar discoveries and inventions, if only they too had the
opportunity and necessary materials. From what I have heard Alan say in his
speeches his perspective is that the opportunity simply does not exist today,
at least not in the necessary configuration to do what PARC did.

Check out this video for a more detailed history recounted by Kay about PARC
and what led up to it: [http://vimeo.com/84523828](http://vimeo.com/84523828)

~~~
trhway
>there were and are very few researchers working with the opportunity mix
necessary. They had five years of freedom from business concerns, tons of
ambition, the right context, intelligence and inspiration.

A lot of Universities and research centers have the same. As most of them are,
arguably, not a PARC may be these conditions aren't important? On the other
side, we do have a lot of R&D coming out of Universities and research centers,
so may be PARC isn't important?

i may sound like trolling, but i did listen live to Alan Kay once and honestly
got more confused and got more questions as a result :)

~~~
dropit_sphere
University research is not free from business concerns either---the phrase
"publish or perish" exists for a reason.

------
bitwize
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.

~~~
dropit_sphere
You might enjoy this segment from Game Theory about how innovative games don't
do well:

[http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxhs-GLE29Q](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxhs-
GLE29Q)

~~~
mattgreenrocks
Great discussion of this concept, thank you!

------
neel8986
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

~~~
vidarh
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.

~~~
eurleif
>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.

Aren't you forgetting that Apple made the Newton?

------
exratione
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.

------
corysama
For ideas on how to make non-incremental progress in technology, check out
Kay's earlier talk "Programming and Scaling" [http://www.tele-
task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/](http://www.tele-
task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/)

~~~
straws
This is a great talk in a completely unwatchable format. Here are links to
mp4s of the video:

[http://stream.hpi.uni-
potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_...](http://stream.hpi.uni-
potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_1_podcast.mp4)

[http://stream.hpi.uni-
potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_...](http://stream.hpi.uni-
potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_2_podcast.mp4)

[http://stream.hpi.uni-
potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_...](http://stream.hpi.uni-
potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_3_podcast.mp4)

[http://stream.hpi.uni-
potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_...](http://stream.hpi.uni-
potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_4_podcast.mp4)

------
jal278
A practical suggestion Kay makes is that one way to brainstorm start-ups is to
think of technological amplifiers for human universals [1]

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Universals](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Universals)

~~~
Geee
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.

~~~
andrewflnr
I think Alan Kay put communication in his list. I don't think music is quite
universal, certainly not uniformly and not the way we experience it now. He
mentioned harmony theory as a notable non-universal, while almost any music
you hear today makes extensive use of harmony.

------
semiel
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?

~~~
justin66
> 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.

~~~
leoc
The UK is just launching something to address this:
[https://twitter.com/MattChorley/status/451773213497118720/](https://twitter.com/MattChorley/status/451773213497118720/)
I expect it would be more difficult to do something similar for the US given
the wedding-cake of federal, state and local taxes.

~~~
bjelkeman-again
Got some other reference? That link isn't working and my mobile makes it hard
to fix the link.

~~~
leoc
The link WFM, but try [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2596059/Where-
taxes-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2596059/Where-taxes-REALLY-
spent-24million-workers-sent-statements-showing-22-goes-benefits.html) ?

------
cliveowen
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.

~~~
DonGateley
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.

------
MrQuincle
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. :-)

------
xxcode
Hacker News is the epitome of short term thinking, with projects like 'weekend
projects' etc.

------
leoc
It's amusing that the same optical illusion has been discussed by Michael
Abrash
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-2dQoeqVVo#t=453](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-2dQoeqVVo#t=453)
and Alan Kay
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o#t=1534](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o#t=1534)
in talks on very different topics recently.

> 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](http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf)
. Constitutionalism isn't that new an idea.

------
forgotprevpass
At 15:00, he mentions research on the efficiency of gestures done in the 60's.
Does anyone know what he's referring to?

~~~
ozten
Sketchpad by Ivan Sutherland in 1963, would be one.

It allows one to draw CAD drawings, convert drawn letters into labels, etc in
a more natural way.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad)

~~~
jecel
Besides the Sketchpad, Alan always mentions Grail (GRAphic Input Language),
designed by Thomas Ellis and programmed by Gabriel Groner and others at the
Rand Corporation. That was from 1964.

As far as I know, Alan also greatly admires the work done at MIT in the 1970s
like
[http://www.paulmckevitt.com/cre333/papers/putthatthere.pdf](http://www.paulmckevitt.com/cre333/papers/putthatthere.pdf)

------
andreyf
Stephen Wolfram's demo he referred to doesn't appear to be up yet, but this
one from a couple weeks back is pretty sweet:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik)

~~~
purpletoned
It seems to be up now at
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzYmO20N6MY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzYmO20N6MY).

------
athst
This is a great excuse for buying the nicest computer possible - I need to
compute in the future!

------
sAuronas
Playing Wayne Gretzky:

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
The talk starts at 2:42 -
[http://youtu.be/gTAghAJcO1o?t=2m42s](http://youtu.be/gTAghAJcO1o?t=2m42s)

------
kashkhan
Anyone have a link to the Q&A after the talk?

------
rafeed
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?

~~~
w1ntermute
Also, Moore's law might be applicable to computing hardware, but it isn't
necessarily generalizable to other sorts of inventions.

------
queensnake
That 'universals' guy seems actually to be Donald Brown, and his book is
'Human Universals'. [http://www.amazon.com/Human-Universals-Donald-
Brown/dp/00700...](http://www.amazon.com/Human-Universals-Donald-
Brown/dp/007008209X)

The book is expensive, here's a list:

[http://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm](http://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm)

------
norswap
Totally tangential, but that intro music segment with Alan Key just looking
around is total comedy gold. Ah, those cheesy conf organizers...

------
oskarth
For an alternative and cynical view of Xerox PARC, have a look at Ted Nelson's
_Computers for Cynics 2 - It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC_ (15 minutes video):

[http://fixyt.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU](http://fixyt.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU)

------
kev009
I know this is really trivial, but I found the extended music intro and his
unamused reaction quite comical. Over-analyzing, it's a juxtaposition to parts
of his talk.

------
LazerBear
This is very relevant to something I'm trying to build right now, thank you
for sharing!

------
Zigurd
A lot of his talk was wasted on irrelevant complaining about lack of capex in
R&D. That's only partly correct. Any one of us can afford to rent a crazy
amount of computing power and storage on demand. Pfft.

In short, skip the first 20 minutes. He's being a grumpy old man. In the
second part, he's a pissed-off genius and revolutionary.

~~~
dropit_sphere
Sure, but do they have money to live on while they're experimenting?

~~~
Zigurd
His argument that 5 year timespans are minimal for invention is on target, but
that's opex, even when you are cash flow negative. Where he is wrong is that
you need large equipment capex for invention. Unless you are building a novel
special purpose computing device, like an giant FPGA cryptocurrency miner, you
really don't need more than $5k capex per coder for anything anymore, and
renting Web-scale power is cheap.

------
Roritharr
Wow, he really comes of as obnoxious.

Yes what was done in Xerox Parc was really amazing and cool, but can you
please contain your ego atleast a little?

This talk sounds basically like him explaining to everybody in detail how
awesome his achievements are.

EDIT: The best point is where he explains with charts that 80% of people are
basically sheeple...

~~~
cliveowen
At first glance it might come off as hubris, but it's actually just a way of
separating what we now know as technology (consumer technology) which is
mostly just incremental from the other kind of technology which is innovative
and profoundly transformative.

When he talks about the research that went on at the Parc back in the 70s it's
not to show his accomplishments but to show the difference between commercial
products addressed to the masses and touted as technological breakthroughs and
real breakthroughs that happen way before the mass production and slowly make
their way into society and bring about enormous changes and wealth.

