Some excerpts from recent Alan Kay emails
There's an interesting book on the topic discussed in these emails, entitled "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned":
There's a YouTube talk by the author on the subject here:
The rough idea is this:
- creativity often arises by stumbling around in a problem space, or in operating "randomly" under an artificially-imposed constraint
- modern life is obsessed with metrics and goal-setting, and this has extended into creative pursuits including science, research, and business
- sometimes, short-term focus on the goal defeats the goal-given aims (see e.g. shareholder value focus)
- the authors point out that when they were researching artificial intelligence, they discovered that systems that focused too much on an explicitly-coded "objective" would end up producing lackluster results, but systems that did more "playful" exploration within a problem space produced more creative results
- using this backdrop, the authors suggest perhaps innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort and is instead driven by serendipitous discovery and playful creativity
I found the ideas compelling, as I do find Kay's description of the "art" behind research.
For anyone who hasn't run across this, Alan has shown up on HN periodically, and the resulting post history is just astonishingly rich: https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=alankay1. Threaded conversations at https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alankay1.
If you read the threads you'll see that he has frequently continued conversations long after the submission dropped off the HN front page, and many topics have gotten developed further than one usually sees. HN's archives are full of gold and for me this one of the more obvious veins of it.
If anyone wants to spend some time aggregating and collating these writings, as the OP has done from emails, I would see about getting YC to fund the effort, subject to Alan's permission of course. Email hn@ycombinator.com if you're interested.
>Socrates didn't charge for "education" because when you are in business, the "customer starts to become right". Whereas in education, the customer is generally "not right".
Very important takeaway!
The thing is that Licklider's vision of computers as "interactive intellectual amplifiers for all humans, pervasively networked world-wide" has already come to pass, and created huge economies of scale and exponential pressures for compatibility and conformity that didn't exist before.
In the 1970's a few dozen brilliant people could create a completely new and self-contained computer system because the entire computing world was tiny and fragmented. there wasn't the imperative to be compatible to all-pervasive standards (even IBM's dominance in business was being challenged by the minis).
These day if you want to create a new computer system that people will use you need at the minimum to provide a networking stack and a functional web browser, some emulation or compatibility system to support legacy software that people rely on, device drivers for a huge range of hardware, etc. All this not only takes a huge amount of work, it also punctures the design integrity of your system, making it into a huge mountain of compatibility hacks before you even start on your own new concepts. But the deadliest enemy of innovation is the mental inertia of masses of users with a long history of interacting with computers. They are no longer the blank slates who have never seen a computer you had in the 70's.
Even in the realm of art people realized that the romantic or modernistic model of artistic revolution that Kay invokes is untenable and retreated into postmodernism.
Does anyone know what happened to HARC ? It was announced in May 2016, with Alan Kay's involvement and Bret Victor's:
http://blog.ycombinator.com/harc/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11679680
In September "eleVR" said it was leaving YC research:
http://elevr.com/elevr-leaving-ycr/
I presume these e-mail excerpts are inspired by the end of HARC too? What happened?
In the thread about first year reports a couple months ago, someone suspects that funding has ended too. Also, Bret Victor's work and name are conspicuously missing from the first year reports.
> An example of the vision was Licklider's "The destiny of computers is to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for all humans, pervasively networked world-wide". This vision does not state what the amplification is like or how you might be able to network everyone in the world.
i am going through licklider's 'the dream machine' book. it is quite long, and dense but ties together lots of individual threads (for me at least) that were kind of floating loose otherwise. i had known about luminaries in the field (and their work) specifically, licklider, shannon, norbert-weiner, cerf and kahn, metcalfe, von neumann, vannaver bush (to name a few) but this book brings them together.
interestingly though, licklider's background was in psychology, as opposed to ee/maths. did we lose some of the diversity of perspective ?
another book, that i found to be pretty good is 'the idea factory', it complements the 'dream machine' book quite well.
edit-001 : fmt changes, and added reference to another book.
The name Licklider is mentioned a couple of times. Recently I read a fascinating account of his work. Great read for those who want to know more about the history of computing and the internet: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FIPHEXM/
> The destiny of computers is to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for all humans, pervasively networked world-wide". This vision does not state what the amplification is like or how you might be able to network everyone in the world.
That's a vision that recognizes the value in creating tools, not constrained solutions for the current problem. Freedom can be frightening[1], but letting people explore what is possible with your new tool sometimes leads to unexpected uses and the occasional paradigm-shifting discovery.
[1] (with apologies to DHH[2]) If we give people unconstrained tools, they might change the String class to shoot out fireworks at inappropriate time!
Another way of thinking about this is that large companies have basically decided that executing optimally is more important than necessarily creating huge leaps themselves. They can just focus on making money, create a sizable amount of cash, and acquire new technology.
I'm sure there's a cultural effect here as well. Seems like there are fewer large companies that are willing to just let technologists "muck around for a bit" swinging for the fences without some kind of goal.
But, I just wonder, if VC-funded startups are where new tech grows, we end up just focusing on incremental improvements, instead of potential large leaps.
What this makes me wonder is, if the problem is not enough funding for visionary work, or more accurately that modern funders misunderstand how and why to find visionary work, then what will change their minds?
Because I feel like I've read a few of these posts, watched similar talks, and I nod along and agree every time. Only problem is, I'm not a wealthy benefactor, director of a research institute, or a business exec with control of discretionary R&D funding.
Where do those people hang out, what would convince them like this post convinces me, and is anyone working on that?
> set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. Demand golden coins from the geese rather than eggs. Demand platinum rather than gold. Require that the geese make plans and explain just how they will make the eggs that will be laid. Etc.
-- I have seen these types of situations so many times while project implementation.
Is the underlying assumption behind this text is that less innovation is happening right now? Are the billions poured in AI not counting?
Makes me wonder, what could we do, or what could current organizations do to recreate that environment of research and creativity in today's (and tomorrow's) world? Also, what do you do in your own life (if any) to create that sort context that is conductive to this kind of creativity?
> Parc was "effectively non-profit" because of our agreement with Xerox, which also included the ability to publish our results in public writings (this was a constant battle with Xerox).
Parc was "effectively non-profit" because there was no way to collect or monetize reams of user data like there is today. If there had been, either Kay wouldn't have gotten that agreement or Parc would have been much more selective about what constituted "results."
For example: how many companies have solved the talk-to-our-computers-and-our-computers-talk-back problem now?
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This bit
"An important part of any art is for the artists to escape the "part of the present that is the past", and for most artists, this is delicate because the present is so everywhere and loud and interruptive. For individual contributors, a good ploy is to disappear for a while"
reminded me of John Carmack explaining in his .plans how he would go off and seclude himself for a couple of weeks to start a new iteration of the id technology.
I have intimately enjoyed the work of Engelbart, Kay, Nelson, Victor, etc over these years. They make computer history meaningful and believable.
It is a very difficult narrative. Mainly because while reading it, I had to think constantly about survivorship bias and appeal to authority. Would I really read this if it was written by a 20 year old without a track record? Or how many Alan Key's are out there that completely failed and would prescribe a totally different approach and attribute the cause and effect on other factors?
I also totally get the point of funding problem finding versus funding business plans that are full of bullshit and pretend to have a risk free solution with a play book that just needs some money to execute it linearly step-by-step. So, for that part it is written very well and the point is clear.
Another topic is: would all kind of innovations really emerge if the funding mechanism was radically different in the last 20 years? Would we see all kinds of big leaps or was ARPA-Parc just a serendipity moment that couldn't be repeated no matter what the funding structure was?
Are the full emails availabe somewhere?
> Most don't think of the resources in our centuries as actually part of a human-made garden via inventions and cooperation, and that the garden has to be maintained and renewed.
Just right.
What if a stepping stone to UBI was a basic income to everyone that’s demonstrated some technical aptitude? If scientists and engineers didn’t have to work for, say Zuckerberg, to survive and instead because they genuinely wanted to collaborate, maybe the tech giants wouldn’t be so disproportionately powerful. And creativity in the tech world would skyrocket.