The ad layout on mobile makes this article unreadable on my phone to the point of rage quitting halfway through or so. How appropriate somehow...

Elon didn't wait, he just made it happen

Just today I read that VPRI fonc mailing list was shutting down because they shifted focus onto other area (communication design or something like that). A YC incubator thing IIRC.

YC HARC - harc.ycr.org

Hey, the FONC mailing list isn't shutting down! It's just moving! It's now hosted at MIT instead of VPRI. It's located here:

http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/fonclist

rather than the wheels for the mind that Steve Jobs envisioned.

Proper quote, for those confused:

"I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list....That didn't look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle and a man on a bicycle blew the condor away. That's what a computer is to me: the computer is the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”

oblig. Bikes need road infrastructure, or at the very least, a path cleared of trees/underbrush (though less efficient). Condors don't.

I found it interesting that in an HN discussion about how to auto-update comments Alan Kay said, "How about a little model of time in a GUI?"[1] It ties into when he said of smartphone apps, "It's painful to see people using billions of devices that have forgot that undo is a good idea." [2]

It made me think about how things like Redux (or even just Google Drive revision history) where you can 'time travel' through state can be more important for UI than we realize sometimes.

1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940472

2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6JC_W9F8-g&t=40m30s

It is painful that most desktop apps never even got branching undo/redo.

I find it interesting that Google Docs also doeen't have branching undo. There is no way to revert a commit, you can only go back in time. And there is no blame.

I loved the article by the way. The future of writing should be version controlled Juniper notebooks. Next step for GitLab is to build a cloud IDE to bring that closer.

Google Docs has blame by looking at the history of changes in the file, although I will admit that it is not the most obvious.

Most non-technical people I know have trouble with "simple" undo-redo and copy-paste ; this would only make it harder for them.

Toys vs tools. I want paying my electric bill to by trivial. If I'm doing real work, I want all the power software can give me.

I can forgive my retired grandmother for not getting copy and paste. A professional however, should constantly strive to improve their mastery of their tools.

So what? It shouldn't be too difficult to implement three states of userspace and have it be selected upon login:

- Novice - Advanced - Expert

'Novice' gives you simple 'undo'. 'Advanced' gives you 'undo' with history. And 'Expert' gives you branching. For example... For file-managers this could be made so, that the novice gets something like the Finder or WindowsExplorer. Basically a file-browser, that handles its pane contents as a document. 'Advanced' gives you tabs, rearrangable layouts (dual-pane) and some more configuration. 'Expert' gives you fully configurable menus and toolbars, integrated with the hosts generic scripting host. Etc.

I'd heard vim does, but when the situation came where I needed it, it turned out I'm fine with just moving back in time.

If, like Alan Kay, you think we need a major overhaul in software construction and are in the San Francisco Bay Area, let me know. I'm part of a group that meets on Saturdays once a month and we work on side research projects toward that end. My email is in my profile.

If anyone in the Boston area is interested in whiteboarding high-skill software development environments in the context of 2018/2019 hardware, I'd be interested. So: continuous speech recognition; hand tracking, controllers, and haptic exoskeletons, but still keyboards; HMDs with 30+ px/deg, and eye tracking, but still screens.

Dynabook was a nice vision. As always, society executed poorly, and failed to realize much of the potential of its technologies. No doubt that will happen again with VR/AR. For example, there's a toxic cauldron of patents brewing. Screens and keyboards and mice, have had a good half-century run. And GUIs, and personal local hardware. But perhaps time to shift focus.

When you say society always executes poorly, what alternative social reality are you comparing it with?

I don't understand - are you suggesting the only way to know you could have done something better, is to see someone else doing the same thing for comparison? That's certainly one way. Others include... all the ways you evaluate the execution of a company or project, when you don't have a direct competitor to compare it with, no?

It's clear from the interview that Kay thinks mobile computing isn't where it should be. But I haven't studied the DynaBook. Does anyone know exactly what Kay thinks is needed, in order to realize his dream?

I found a few such things in the article:

- more-discoverable undo

- some sort of AI-based virtual assistant

- a stylus and holder, and presumably input methods and applications that are better suited for that stylus

- something nebulous about having warning labels and being designed for the higher-order cognitive centers of our brains

more-discoverable undo

I think he wanted more discoverable everything, the undo was just used as a particularly bad example on the iPhone.

He wants the world to be more discoverable, to modify our very culture so that learning is easy (an example he gave was with math, so it's not just a small, 'smart' percentage of the population who actually gets it, but everyone absorbs it from a young age).

In the end i think he, like many intellectuals, overestimate people's interest in learning.

Aka you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

actually I'd argue he understands the problem pretty well. He talks about needing to offer something SO compelling they cannot help but interface with it, in spite of their desire for things that do not push them.

I'm not sure if there's a problem at all. Learning how to do anything is much easier today than ever. Just type "how to do X" in google, and you will probably see a nice YouTube video, or a tutorial. If you get stuck, there are online forums with people willing to help for free, 24/7.

Has the number of people who want to learn decreased? If so, was it because of iPhones/iPads?

It's not a problem. It's a way things can be better.

When I do that I constantly think why is it so difficult to learn things? Why do I need to look at least 3 different sources just to confirm that they are not bullshitting me?

After learning one thing related to the topic I want to learn I still have 99 to learn but I don't even know what those 99 things are. So basically I'm learning through dumb luck. Yes the reason is that I haven't reached the magical "bootstrap knowledge" where you have enough information in your head to just look up the things I don't know.

Those youtube videos are nice and all but they will barely teach you anything, they are easy to consume low quality crap for lazy people. I know that because I'm one of them.

The fundamental problem is still the same. Discoverability sucks. I still have to ask someone who is more knowledgeable than me. So why not let the AI do that task?

What's missing in today's software is described by the field of End User Development, the ability for normal people to craft new software artifacts without the need to learn a formal programming language.

For most people, using computers means being force-feed a selection of existing applications; and most applications are pro- consumption, which is favoured by the media companies.

App stores (and the Linux repositories that preceded them) were a significant advance for the public, as they allowed common people top be able to find tools to cover their needs; previous to that, only power users were able to tune the computer to their needs.

However, non-developers still depend on the capabilities put in there by the developers, and can't fine-tune their behaviour.

the ability for normal people to craft new software artifacts without the need to learn a formal programming language.

The problem with that is that normal people often have formal requirements that software has to meet in order to be useful.

Therefore I think the secret to end-user programming is not to be less formal. It's to be less complete or less general - DSLs.

But at that point you could legitimately ask whether it's programming at all or just configuration and what was actually achieved compared to the status quo.

the ability for normal people to craft new software artifacts without the need to learn a formal programming language.

The problem is not programming. It's conceiving. You can get 8 years old kids to do pretty advanced imperative algorithms with scratch. What's hard is to get people to write down in a blank sheet what they actually want to do (mostly because you think you want something and then when you've got this thing you notice you actually wanted something a bit different).

You don't need to be able to write down in a blank sheet what you actually want to do if you don't need someone else to do what you want to do.

Software developers aren't special in this sense - even when writing our own software we can't do what you want. This is why "scratching your own itch" is so much easier than the alternative. You reduce the "is this what I really want?" loop by an order of magnitude by cutting out most of the people from the process.

I think the first step we can take toward "software artifacts" is modularization.

If each piece of functionality is a discrete module, the entire platform suddenly becomes both malleable and stable.

The best way to accomplish modularization is by using a functional design.

You seem to be describing the ideas underlying smalltalk, which uses the word 'objects' instead of 'discrete modules'. Every piece of functionality is an object - any object can talk to any other objects, etc.

If you're proposing something different, can you contrast your ideas with smalltalk style OOP?

I think that currently the best example of modular code is Haskell.

Functions and Functors/Monads can be used to express the most elegant abstraction over data that I am aware of.

In Haskell, you can write a program that uses maps/folds/etc, your program is suddenly able to use any kind of Monad-derived data type.

Everything is discrete, since everything that isn't purely functional is wrapped in a Monad.

most elegant abstraction over data

This may be. We should also step back consider if building functional abstractions over data is a good way for modelling all of computation itself? Or something like 'smaller virtual computers all the way down' (i.e. smalltalk) is a better model? Decomposing a thing into the smaller things of the same kind seems cleaner from a certain perspective, at least.

In Haskell, higher level functions can be composed from other functions, which is very clean. But the state isn't inside the function (like it is for a real computer), so it doesn't model a computer completely in my mind - it models one aspect (the transformation).

Another perspective is thinking about building large scale systems and coupling of modules (how do you abstract over data from a third party library where you don't have the source code?). I kind of get smalltalk's answer here (an object scales up to become a distributable module), but I don't know if there is a good answer in a full Haskell based world.

(BTW, I'm not saying one is better, I'm still thinking these things through.)

The other neat thing about modular and functional programming is that since modules/functions are discrete, you can drop in any replacement you want to, without the rest of the codebase even noticing (except during the build process).

As a real example, you can use Haskell's Foreign Function Interface (FFI) to call C functions, and wrap C structs. The rest of your Haskell code doesn't even need to know about it. You can use the same interface with a variety of languages in place of C. Rust even has a specific compiler option for generating C-compatible shared object/dll files.

For all the respect and admiration I have for Alan Kay, I think he's often showing a lot of bad faith.

His ideal vision is always described in very abstract terms. If he took the care to write it down precisely, what it should look like, I'm sure there would be hundreds eager to build it for him. Of course, part of it is "design principles". But then do some common use cases.

When the abstraction meets reality we get comments like "the iPad should have a pen". Which is really an interesting observation, but doesn't quite rill the crowd like the abstract impressive-sounding stuff does. And you'd hardly call these isolated observation "vision".

Clearly, the user interfaces we have today are sub-optimal, and I can make hundreds of factual remarks on what could be improved. But I don't think this works out to a "vision". In fact, a vision is I think sometimes bound to be too abstract. If we just had products where the shit was fixed relentlessly, I reckon we'd get to "good" without needing them.

On Hackernews there was once a skeptic of postmodernism who got into a debate with a Derrida fan. The skeptic said "If deconstruction is not BS, how about you explain to us, in plain English, what it's all about." The Derrida fan replied "No. How about you demonstrate that you've read Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Levinas. Then we can begin to talk about Derrida."

If Alan Kay were like the Derrida fan, then he could have rebuffed anyone who came asking what the Dynabook was about with "How about you demonstrate that you've studied the achievements of McLuhan, Montessori, Papert, Minsky, Engelbart, etc. Then we'll talk." Of course he's not like that so he's going to try to give the reporter a bit of the background he has in those things and let them figure it out for themself.

The Dynabook is supposed to be, roughly, an iPad with a keyboard, stylus, and a Lisp Machine-like OS. Of course Apple and third parties have closed the gap with keyboards and styli but it's the OS that's the really important bit because in order for a Dynabook to be a Dynabook it must not be a thing that you can just download and run preapproved apps on. You have to be able to discover -- and change -- the entire system from the bare metal on up. Think "Stallmanism on steroids".

It's like a television you can talk back to. Computing is a dynamic medium that demands interaction from its user, so to deny the user the ability to question and change the assumptions of the medium is to lock them in to certain stereotyped modes of interaction and deny the full richness of the medium. This is where Kay's "real guitar vs. Guitar Hero" analogy comes in. You can either have a device that offers its full potential up front, like a real guitar, or you can have a device that can only be used in circumscribed ways, in vague imitation of having the full richness of the original device, like Guitar Hero. The price you pay for having a real guitar, or a real Dynabook, is what we call "ease of use" -- the ability for a complete neophyte to pick it up and immediately display something resembling proficiency with it. (It is much easier for a trained data-entry clerk to operate a 3270 terminal than it is for that same clerk to fill out a modern Web form, but that sort of ease doesn't count.) And Apple has really doubled down on ease of use, at the expense of everything else wonderful about having a powerful computing device you can hold in one hand. To the point where it's become just like regular, can't-talk-back-to-it television.

The basic problem there is that no company in the industry, from Apple all the way to the lowliest gray box manufacturer in China is not interested in that.

OLPC tried, it got hoodwinked by Microsoft et al.

Mozilla tried, FirefoxOS bombed.

Hell even Linux is turning ever more complex an opaque year by year.

Simple thing is that such flexibility self support do not sell widgets and support contracts, and thus company are not interested in making them.

Well, yeah. For the benefits to be realized you need a society that values that sort of thing. It will look quite a bit different from our society, just like societies with writing are completely different from entirely oral societies -- something else Kay touches on.

OLPC and Firefox OS are not examples of projects that pushed the idea of an OS and application stack that could be understood by a single person. To get a better idea of what Alan Kay has been working towards I'd recommend checking out the STEPS project.

I'd say that they were the closest in recent memory.

The software for both OLPC and Firefox OS were both based on Linux. Is there anything that made them more approachable on the low level than any other Linux distro?

Deconstruction is a way of viewing reality which comes naturally equipped with a process for disassembling ideas (the "deconstructive process") as well as a process for viewing ideas as the synthesis of other ideas (the "constructive process"). The core is this: all semantics are relative, all observations surface-level, and all truths buried in the raw materials. But since the materials are themselves relative, all truths are ultimately undefinable, recursively unknowable. To see a house is to know that it was built on a foundation, that its walls are made of gypsum, and that the number of children living there are proportional to the number of toys left on the lawn. Conversely, to see a corporate email thread is to know the shape of the corporate power structure, the bickering between departments, the products under development, and the CEO's ability to curse. Everything is connected and related. This is the entailment of postmodernism, where we first glimpsed that narrative truths could be relative; now, we know that reality itself is relative, whether it is the reality of a book or the reality of our current "real-world" narrative.

Deconstruction isn't bullshit, but we've been swimming in deconstructive and reconstructive narrative media for nearly half a century, and it has altered how we critique media so heavily that people don't see it as a distinct feature of their worldview. (Great example: Folks seem to love Rick & Morty, a deconstructive soft sci-fi serial, and also Steven Universe, a reconstructive soft sci-fi serial, both of which are running on a network which markets to youth, not literature postdocs.)

Kay, like Derrida, hasn't been unable to explain to people for lack of words, but because the enormity of the paradigm shift means that no number of words will necessarily suffice.

(Aside: If you are rubbed wrong by the first paragraph, in particular because you believe that reality is absolute or that truth is definable, then do not fear. You are merely having trouble overcoming instincts. Trust in mathematics; postmodernism arrived in mathematics in 1874, was completed in 1930, and is widely accepted by the mathematical community as meta-truth. Dissenters exist but necessarily must accept the meta-truth ("There is no one true foundation for mathematics.") to avoid being laughed out of the room.)

I am far from an expert in Deconstruction, but I am an expert in mathematics and have read a fair amount on the foundations of mathematics. I find your description technically correct, but highly misleading.

The vast majority of mathematicians will agree with "no one true foundation". However, unlike the bulk of postmodern/deconstructive work, they are then perfectly happy to say "this particular foundation is good enough to explore some interesting ideas", as opposed to wallowing in the fact that they had to take a generative step to create the mooring of their meaning.

In my non-expert opinion, I think many people instinctively rebel against Deconstruction, not because they can't accept that there has to be a faith-act to pragmatically root meaning... but because Deconstructionists, having discovered that such faith acts are necessary, then refuse to engage with any particular choice made by people who want to discuss pragmatic meaning.

Mathematicians have long ago internalized the important, but ultimately quite limited, idea behind Deconstruction (which, by the way, they didn't need Deconstructionists to tell them, since the idea of having to subjectively choose an axiom system goes back at least to the Greeks). Having understood this, they have since moved on with their lives to continue to do important and valuable things, just as they were doing before. What have the Deconstructionists done?

What have the Deconstructionists done?

Deconstruction changed the way we think about what we read, see, and hear, and taught us to question the assumptions inherent in the same. It gave us the spaghetti western, cyberpunk, and arguably punk rock itself (and it definitely influenced hip hop and dub).

Always remember that postmodernism is "defense against the dark arts" for the left. The techniques of playing shell games with symbol and meaning were devised by the right and by corporations and weaponized against us; postmodernism exists to make us aware of these techniques.

But I didn't really bring up the Derrida fan to argue about deconstruction or postmodernist thought.

Well, he could implement the Dynabook. Why should others do it for him?

Sounds like a lot of hand-waving to me.

That's what he was trying to do at Xerox and Apple.

Without the resources of a large company, the Dynabook will get Pyra levels of adoption and be quickly forgotten about. And no large company wants to take that kind of risk nowadays. Not when there's money to be made pushing "apps" and monetizing eyeballs.

AR / VR might be an interesting place for the ideas.

You must not be familiar with the STEPS project, a complete OS project (with a compiler collection, 2D vector drawing and compositing, desktop publishing, online communications…), in 20K lines of code. Mainstream OSes by comparison are more like 200M lines (10K books).

That stuff is pretty concrete, with an actual GUI and real software. One can get their hands on the source code, though it's really not meant for public consumption (it was a proof of concept, not a commercial product).

Here are the progress reports (latest first):

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2010004_steps10.pdf

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2009016_steps09.pdf

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2008004_steps08.pdf

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2007008_steps.pdf

That stuff definitely works out to a vision.

Are binaries available, to run in a VM at least? Also, can you provide a link to the source code?

Some software and code are linked here http://www.vpri.org/vp_wiki/

His ideal vision is always described in very abstract terms. If he took the care to write it down precisely, what it should look like, I'm sure there would be hundreds eager to build it for him.

He did. There's "Personal Dynamic Media", the classic paper.[1] Kay's vision focused on the user as creator, rather than consumer, of information. In practice, most people are content to watch the boob tube, now available in handheld. This has been the frustration of new media inventors from Edison to Zworykin. What Kay is complaining about is the banality of computing today. That's a problem with humans, not computers.

Kay also thought that discrete event simulation was going to be really important. Smalltalk is based on SIMULA, which was a discrete event extension of ALGOL-60. Objects were supposed to be entities in the simulation. In practice, discrete event simulation is a tiny niche application of computing.

(I got a tour of PARC in 1975 when taking a course at UC Santa Cruz, met Kay and Goldberg, and saw some of the first Altos. The idea back then was "this is what can be done with enough money. Someday it will be cheap." Eventually it was, but not soon enough for Xerox. Years later, I programmed an Alto in Mesa while at Stanford, although by then it was obsolete.)

[1] http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf

Doesn't your typical business application model some discrete events on the real world? Why is object oriented programming so popular of it doesn't meet needs of software it helped to write? There should be some correspondance between principles that layed foundation of OOP and their application, and OOP's popularity os not a coincidence

This isn't the first time Alan Kay express his view on HTML / CSS and Javascitpt.

But what alternative do we have / had?

It is terrible though. It is worth stating the obvious fact once in a while.

This organic design of the web stack with layer upon layer upon layer upon layer can't go on for forever. At some point it will just become too painful and an alternative will emerge.

The web platform has its virtues though. I can still load a webpage made in 1996 and at least read the text if nothing else; we can't say the same of erstwhile competitors like Flash, Silverlight, Java applets...

Perhaps.

but try loading various present day pages without JS enabled.

Many of produce just a white screen unless you turn on JS for 3+ external domains to the one you are trying to read.

And once those load, you often find half the screen filled with persistent headers and footers.

In effect Flash didn't go way, it was just turn into JS+CSS.

And in large part i fear we get this because the people in charge are hell bent on recreating printed media in electronic form.

That's the problem here, actually, but not in the way you think. There are alternatives (Canvas, SVG, etc.) but they're not as good for the standard use case of coming up with something quick that fulfills the business requirement.

And then we need to recognize that that stack is a fucking abomination that should be burned with fire. It should so deeply embarrass us, that we wouldn't want to admit that we use it in polite company.

We need people who are willing to experiment with new ideas and give us something better than HTML/CSS/JS. And we need them to get funding.

I have been working with the web since 1997, but almost only on the server-side (back in the the simpler web 1.0 days) and (during the past decade) on the browser UX/network side.

I just recently started looking at actually creating some web content that uses the modern web stack. Holy moly. What a cluster f__k of insanely over/badly-engineered craziness.

What should embarrass us so deeply and why? HTML and CSS are some of the most generative, enduring, and transformative technologies ever. I wouldn't fund anyone who doesn't recognize how great they are!

HTML & CSS were good for the early web, when it was a simple document layout platform. They're not ideal for building rich UIs and applications. Just because they've been extended to allow that doesn't mean they are the best tool for the job. Similarly, Excel is abused to do all sorts of things it's not intended for as well, when there are better options for databases, financial applications and data science.

The basic thing to remember is that HTML was never meant to handle UIs. It was a very basic document layout format, with some simple ways to provide the reader with addresses for references etc.

It was in effect Netscape that tried to turn it into an UI as a way to get into the office network market. This riled up Microsoft, and the rest is history.

I have a new alternative called Tree Notation:

https://github.com/breck7/treenotation

A sample from an HTML replacement:

  @html
   @body
    @div Hello world

A sample from a CSS replacement:

  @a
   cursor pointer
   text-decoration none

It is not HAML, though that was one of my first inspirations many years ago.

So Jade with an ‘@‘ symbol added?

I kind of feel sorry for Alan Kay. He's trapped in endlessly rehashing ideas from 60's and 70's.

What new ideas are there though? Social networking I guess. Have you seen the mother of all demos? Engelbart's team invented, like, everything.

On the programming side, dependent types maybe. Everything else is from ml or lisp.

Neural networks are old old ideas as well. Computers have finally gotten fast enough to make use of the ideas.

I have total respect for Alan Kay but I hope he stops criticizing other people and actually shows his vision through his own execution (and by execution I don't just mean invention of a prototype but actual productization and distribution)

If you're building something visionary and are not the one who's making tons of money off of it, you have two solutions:

1. IF you're interested in making money: Try to figure out what you're doing wrong and fix it so you actually CAN capitalize on your original invention

2. IF you're NOT interested in making money: Enjoy the respect these people pay you and please don't badmouth others who worked hard to build important products that changed the world.

I feel like Alan Kay is on the second boat, so my heart breaks whenever he badmouths other people who worked hard to build cool things.

It doesn't matter what came first. What matters is what actually managed to pull off the ultimate success.

Anyone who has put as much work into it as Kay has and delivered as many innovations is absolutely entitled to criticize. He is especially entitled to criticize products that built on his ideas but because of some fundamental flaws actually hobble the ideas and hobble society. This is important to point out and if he isn't qualified to do so then who is?

There's a difference between badmouthing and constructive criticism. Try reading through the entire article. I did. And there's tons of badmouthing and condescension.

(and by execution I don't just mean invention of a prototype but actual productization and distribution)

So, the STEPS project I mentioned above¹ doesn't count? Bret Victor's work wouldn't count? That's incredibly short sighted.

You seem to have missed the part where it's really really hard to be successful with unnatural stuff, even when that stuff is unbelievably useful and valuable. Writing is unnatural, and took a long time to spread. It's still not there yet, and with the television and YouTube, we're actually reverting back a little bit.

Computing is even less natural, so instead of a Victor-esque interactive wonder, we got the caveman interface, where you point and you grunt².

Speaking of badmouthing, my heart breaks every time someone implies that recent Apple devices are cool. They're dystopian demons that seduced people into giving into thinking digital prisons are cool. The Apple ][ was cool. The iPad is crap (it could be cool, with the right OS).

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15266230

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKxzK9xtSXM&t=2m18s

So, the STEPS project I mentioned above¹ doesn't count? Bret Victor's work wouldn't count? That's incredibly short sighted.

It is incredibly short sighted to make an assumption about what I said and criticize on that wrong assumption. There's a term for this logical fallacy but i forget.

Anyway, there's a huge difference between coming up with an idea/prototype and turning it into a product that's meant for mainstream usage. You would only know this if you have actually built something that's meant for mainstream usage so if you don't get this it's fine, but try doing that next time and you'll realize that's true.

What I'm criticizing is his comments on Apple's implementation decisions on things like the stylus. There are plenty of reasons why they decided to go that way, and I totally understand if this criticism was coming from some ignorant journalist who hasn't built anything (because they're ignorant), but Alan Kay should know better. There are way more things to consider than just ideals when you're building a real product.

This is probably why Xerox Parc built so many innovative prototypes but most of them were commercialized by other companies. If they had people like Steve Jobs instead, Xerox would be Apple by now.

If you think I'm being overly critical, just watch some of his speech videos on youtube, too much of what he says is based on the past and not the future.

It is incredibly short sighted to make an assumption about what I said and criticize on that wrong assumption.

Are you saying I was mistaken and the STEPS project and Bret Victor's demos do count after all? Even though they're prototypes that haven't been "productised and distributed"?

I merely assumed you meant what you wrote. If you didn't, don't complain.

What I'm criticizing is his comments on Apple's implementation decisions on things like the stylus.

Come on, that criticism was spot on. The iPad could have a spot for the pen. The pen could be tethered to the iPad. Apple could have sold pen like they now do. The Nintendo DS ships with a freaking pen.

I'm reluctant to dispute your point in general, but that was a bad example.

There are plenty of things worth doing that are not profitable. If anything, the people who made the profits where standing on the shoulders of giants like Kay; I think we can afford him some space to be grumpy over shitty execution and lack of vision. It's a matter of perspective; what you call cool things, Kay would call consumer bull crap; and I tend to agree.

If you're not building something for people, what are you building? Art?

I'm fine with that, but just because you're making art, doesn't mean everyone else is an idiot.

Also I think it's very condescending to think that others didn't have vision.

Lastly it's cheap to criticize someone else for "shitty execution" when you yourself have the ability to show with your own execution but you clearly haven't. It's easy to throw around the word "execution" but it's not an easy thing to do.

Herein lies a dangerous assumption prominent in neoliberal thinking: that "building something for people" is only possible by making something that is inherently "profitable." Kay has spoken endlessly on the fact that PARC was -- in spirit, structure, and personnel -- largely the last gasp of the ARPA/IPTO funding culture. That we don't have this kind of basic research funding anymore is one of the reasons we don't have inventions on par with the Internet and personal computing. This is one of the points he harps on about.

Few companies today will create anything that is a truly shattering invention, for the simple fact that companies are not structured to invest the time and money in ways that such inventions demand: decade long cycles, where failure and "wasting" money is the norm. The quarterly earnings cycle prevents this. What's worse, that cycle has been absorbed into the way politicians and governments now think. Today the NSF wants you to demonstrate how your research will produce the desired results when applying for grants. That's not how exploratory basic research works. You'll only ever get more arcane iterations on current systems and technologies.

Kay has spent his life doing this kind of exploratory research. PARC, Squeak, STEPS -- I'd call all of that "execution." But perhaps others who see businesses and profits as the sole reason to get up in the morning would disagree.

1. I agree with your general argument about the need for deep research.

2. Which means you're making assumptions about what I'm thinking.

3. Please don't label others on the Internet with words like "Neoliberal", etc. We are all same people and there may be misunderstanding but we are not fundamentally different species.

4. My point was not to say these not-for-profit research is useless, but that if you're in this field, you should own it. If people build things that are mediocre and you know a better way, why not build one and show it for yourself? He hasn't done that because he doesn't know either. And by "Knowing" I mean actually knowing to build a product that people will use without any problem. It is easy to criticize implementation, it's not easy to actually do it yourself. With all due respect, prototyping and actually turning it into a product that general public can use are completely different ball games.

and actually shows his vision through his own execution

As Steve Jobs reportedly was fond of saying, "Great artists ship."

Among the shallowest of cheapjack Silicon Valley slogans. But certainly revealing of its ethos. In such a climate one could be forgiven for imagining that not everything has to be a commercial product to be used, appreciated, or valuable. What slovenly "artists" we had in the government oh so long ago, who never "shipped" the Internet.

What would the Internet be like today had it remained a government project?

Reminds of what the people of Red lang are trying to achieve: http://www.red-lang.org/p/about.html?m=1

Maybe I'll finally give it a try!

Every once in a while I daydream about a sort of "distributed app platform" built on top of Scheme and IPFS. -- Perhaps Red would actually be perfect for this...

If people could understand what computing was about, the iPhone would not be a bad thing. But because people don’t understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that Guitar Hero is the same as a real guitar. That’s the simple long and the short of it.

Some kids learn guitar. Some kids fantasize about learning guitar. Apple makes machines that enable the computing equivalent of both of these things.

You're never going to turn all listeners into musicians, all readers into writers, all theater-goers into actors. You can't even get everyone to dance at a wedding with an open bar. Technology can play a role in getting a few more people over the line, but Alan Kay's head is way too far in the clouds for him to even see the problem that way.

Honestly, I think what he's done is dissociated himself from his own snobbery. He talks about technology failing humanity, but he's really saying he doesn't like people. He doesn't like how most people think and live. Why else would he constantly be disappointed in technology failing to turn all of humanity into always-on cultural creatives? It's like he looks at books and says, well, the dream for books is for everyone to read challenging literature, but at the beach or on the subway you see mostly "Eat Pray Love" and Stephen King, so clearly books have failed.

People are doing the same dumb shit with books and technology that they did without it. They choose passive consumption. When I complain about it, I'll blame it on technology so I don't sound like a misanthrope.

He constantly talks about creating, learning, and education, but he doesn't bring any attention to any current work supporting these activities. He doesn't say, look, here's this great work being done for kids, and it's limited because the iPad needs this feature. He doesn't say, look, here's this great computing system I use to support my own work, and it be a lot better with this specific kind of OS or hardware support. Instead of talking about how the Apple hardware is holding back current work, he's talking about how it fails to implement his own ideas from thirty years ago.

You'd think he could find SOME new idea to promote and celebrate, if only to point out what he thinks progress looks like, but apparently Apple has snuffed out every worthwhile avenue of improvement by a few unfortunate unfortunate hardware choices.

Hell, where's even the usesthis interview with Alan Kay?

His "vision" is too self-centered and he expects people to live after his ideals but in fact people have better things to do than create art, or whatever.

They choose passive consumption

The same person is likely an active producer in one area, and a passive consumer in others. I know I am.

The topic is Apple because the interviewer is a journalist who was writing a book about the iPhone. Plenty of other resources online show him praising work he likes (Bret Victor, for example) and systems that he thinks are in the right direction. It just wasn't in the bounds of the interview topic.

As for the "not turning all readers into writers," well, what can we say? One would hope that all readers are literate enough to write. Now, we don't expect all literate people to be professional writers, but this is not in line with what Kay is arguing anyway. He's saying that being literate in computing should mean being able to wield computing in order to aid human thinking -- for everyone. He's calling out our current systems, saying that their availability and use, though ubiquitous, do not constitute such literacy.

I don't buy it that everyone would be a digital creative if they just had the right tools. To make quality content, whether it be apps/music/movies/etc..it requires much more than tools.

I respect Alan Kay, but I don't understand the need to bash on modern day technology.

Have we really come along way in terms of general computing? Maybe not [Example: 0]. But in terms of the digital world, I can take a video of my parents and send it to my cousin who lives 10,000 miles away and he can respond in a matter of seconds.

I can literally meet people in remote areas of the world. I can interact with people who barely have food but somehow can get cell phone access and now they are learning and communicating with everyone else. I can't imagine a better way to level the playing field (socioeconomically) globally then how we have it.

Do we have a lot more work to do? Sure. But Rome wasn't built in a day.

The future of the internet & technology, the direction it's headed, is going to come from small contributions from millions across the world.

What people will need will turn into what we have and use. And there won't be some magical device that just pops out of nowhere that will change everything.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

I recognize the Alan Kay I met at HP. Very sure of his own genius and quick to snarkily dismiss the genius of others.

Case in point: The iPad and iPhone makes kids creative like no other tool has before. Kids know how to use it to text, exchange ideas or pictures of kittens, draw or sketch, learn how to program (Swift Playground anyone), take and edit photos. It is everything but a glorified TV where kids are passive. This is the only environment where kids are truly first-class citizens. How on earth Kay could spend so much energy (a whole article) trying to convince us otherwise based mostly on super-weak arguments like "nobody is using the Shake gesture to undo" is truly beyond my understanding.

Don't get me wrong. The Dynabook was a somewhat interesting idea. But it's about as much an inspiration for the real thing we use daily as the Star Trek tricorder. What Kay, to this day, did not get, unlike Jobs, is the power of networking, both physical and human. What made the iPhone greater than the Dynabook ever would have been is the App Store, and the combined creativity of millions of developers. What made the iPhone greater is apps like Messages, Facetime, Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, and countless others. What made the iPhone greater is Instagram, Flickr, sport apps, medical apps, HP-48 emulators, 3D "kill them all and think later" games.

By contrast, what would have made the Dynabook great in Kay's mind was "designed by Kay for Kay's personal interests". Or, as Fake Bill Gates would have said: "One programmer should be enough for everybody".

What Kay, to this day, did not get, unlike Jobs, is the power of networking, both physical and human. What made the iPhone greater than the Dynabook ever would have been is the App Store,

Interesting phrasing, considering that the iPhone did not come with the App Store. In fact, Apple's was the third software distribution platform to be released for iOS, after Installer.app and Cydia.

Meanwhile, Alan Kay was working in Croquet[1] - a project that allows the creation of multi-user collaborative software with live-editing and automatic distribution and replication - since at least 2001.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project

Let me try to help this community regarding this article by providing some context. First, you need to realize that in the more than 50 years of my career I have always waited to be asked: Every paper, talk, and interview has been invited, never solicited. But there is a body of results from these that do put forward my opinions.

This article was a surprise, because the interview was a few years ago for a book the interviewer was writing. It's worth noting that nowhere in the actual interview did I advocate going back and doing a Dynabook. My comments are mostly about media and why it's important to understand and design well any medium that will be spread and used en-mass.

If you looked closely, then you would have noticed the big difference between the interview and the front matter. For example, I'm not still waiting for my dream to come true. You need to be sophisticated enough to see that this is a headline written to attract. It has nothing to do with what I said.

And, if you looked closely, you might note a non seq right in the beginning, from "you want to see old media?" to no followup. This is because that section was taken from the chapter of the book but then edited by others.

The first version of the article said I was fired from Apple, but it was Steve who was fired, and some editor misunderstood.

In the interview itself there are transcription mistakes that were not found and corrected. And of course they didn't send me article ahead of time (I could have fixed all this).

I think I would only have made a few parts of the interview a little more understandable. It's raw, but -- once you understand the criticisms -- I think most will find them quite valid. In the interview -- to say it again -- I'm not calling for the field to implement my vision -- but I am calling for the field to have a larger vision of civilization and how mass media and our tools contribute or detract from it. Thoreau had a good line. He said "We become the tools of our tools" -- meaning, be very careful when you design tools and put them out for use. (Our consumer based technology field is not being at all careful.)

Wow, this article is a pretty egregious misinterpretation of those points. I didn't come away with anything even vaguely resembling what you just said, even if we disregard the factual errors.

Candidly, your comments here make a lot more sense than some "We haven't yet built the DynaBook the way we should" piece.

People often ask me "Is this a Dynabook, is that a Dynabook?". Only about 5% of the idea was in packaging (and there were 2 other different packages contemplated in 1968 besides the tablet idea -- the HMD idea from Ivan, and the ubiquitous idea from Nicholas).

Almost all the thought I did was based on what had already been done in the ARPA community -- rendered as "services" -- and resculpted for the world of the child. It was all quite straightforwardly about what Steve later called "Wheels for the Mind".

If people are interested to see part of what we had in mind, a few of us including Dan Ingalls a few years ago revived a version of the Xerox Parc software from 1978 that Xerox had thrown away (it was rescued from a trash heap). This system was the vintage that Steve Jobs saw the next year when he visited in 1979. I used this system to make a presentation for a Ted Nelson tribute. It should start at 2:15. See what you think about what happens around 9:05. https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=135

Next year will be the 50 anniversary of this idea, and many things have happened since then, so it would be crazy to hark back to a set of ideas that were in the context of being able to be built over 10 years, and would be ridiculous if we didn't have in 30 (that would be 1998, almost 20 years ago).

The large idea of ARPA/PARC was that desirable futures for humanity will require many difficult things to be learned beyond reading and writing and a few sums. If "equal rights" is to mean something over the entire planet, this will be very difficult. If we are to be able to deal with the whole planet as a complex system of which we complex systems are parts, then we'll have to learn a lot of things that our genetics are not particularly well set up for.

We can't say "well, most people aren't interested in stuff like this" because we want them to be voting citizens as part of their rights, and this means that a large part of their education needs to be learning how to argue in ways that make progress rather than just trying to win. This will require considerable knowledge and context.

The people who do say "well, most people aren't interested in stuff like this" are missing the world that we are in, and putting convenience and money making ahead of progress and even survival. That was crazy 50 years ago, and should be even more apparently crazy now.

We are set up genetically to learn the environment/culture around us. If we have media that seems to our nervous systems as an environment, we will try to learn those ways of thinking and doing, and even our conception of reality.

We can't let the commercial lure of "legal drugs" in the form of media and other forms put us into a narcotic sleep when we need to be tending and building our gardens.

The good news about "media as environment" was what attracted a lot of us 50 years ago -- that is, that making great environments/cultures will also be readily learned by our nervous systems. That was one of Montessori's great ideas, and one of McLuhan's great ideas, and it's a great idea we need to understand.

There aren't any parents around to take care of childish adults. We are it. So we need to grow up and take responsibility for our world, and the first actions should be to try to understand our actual situations.

I'm interested to see if you've seen the concepts of atemporality[1] and network culture[2] floating around. Basically, the core thesis associated with these is that we have adopted the internet as our primary mode of processing information, and have as such lost the sense of a cohesive narrative that is inherent in reading a book/essay, or listening to a whole talk, in the process.

You become fully immersed in Plato's worldview when reading The Republic, but if you were see someone explaining the allegory of the cave in the absence of a wider context you will only take the elements which fit your worldview and not his wider conception of knowledge.

I think this ties into what happened to the concept of a centralised computer network, working for the good of humanity, turning into todays fractured silos, working to mine individuals for profit.

[1]http://index.varnelis.net/network_culture/1_time_history_und... [2]http://index.varnelis.net/network_culture

It seems to me the Raspberry Pi people have put out a lot of good work making hard things possible and transforming education.

The video you posted reminded me about some of the work of Bret Victor, especially his interactive environments in his video on "inventing on principle". Although what's missing there is the ability to connect and modify the environment itself.

I still have to think a bit more about your link to Montessori, who has been a great inspiration for the school ( http://aventurijn.org ) that my parents started. Also in relation to what you said about teaching real math. Montessori has this system with beads and other countable cubes and pies to teach things like multiplying fractions, that is not used in most schools that call themselves "Montessori schools".

See what you think about what happens around 9:05

I saw two interesting things around 9:05. A 13 year old made an 'active essay' on the computer which contains not just text but also a dynamic interactive environment so the reader can follow along and even try out new ideas. This type of media is not prevalent today - essays written by 13 year olds today would be in Google/Word docs and contain only static text and static pictures (i.e. digitized paper), but no interactivity. There are ways to do interactivity today, of course, but they are not easy and not the default. Is this what you are getting at?

The other interesting thing is how two tools - the drawing tool and animation tool - are made to work together, even when they were not created with each other in mind. IIUC the image is not a file format here but an object, but don't both tools then need to work with the same image protocol? I suppose you can always have adapters to connect different image protocols, but it doesn't seem like the best option. Still thinking about how much (or how little) shared knowledge is needed to make this scale to all types of objects.

My reason for drawing your attention to this section of the talk is to show some of the ideas (now 40-50 year old) were about "dynamic media" - of course live computing should be part of the combined media experience on a personal computer -- and of course you should be able to do what are now called "mash ups", but to be able to combine useful things easily and at will (it's crazy that this e.g. isn't even provided for maps in a general way on smartphones, tablets and PCs).

But the larger point here is that if one is dealing with dynamic objects as originally intended, the objects can help greatly and safely in coordinating them. This shouldn't be more difficult than what we do in combining ordinary materials in our physical world (it should be even simpler!).

In the system used for the demo -- Smalltalk-78 -- every thing in the system is a dynamic object -- there are no "date structures". This means in part that each object, besides doing its main purpose, can also provide useful help in using it, can include general protocols for "mashing up", etc.

We can do better today, but my whole point in the interview and in these comments is that once e.g. Engelbart showed us great ideas for personal computing, we should not adopt worse ideas (why would any reasonable people do this?), once dynamic media has been demonstrated in a comprehensive way, we should not go back to imitating static media in ways that preclude dynamic media (if you have dynamic media you can do static media but not vice versa!).

Going back and doing Engelbart or Parc also makes no sense, because we have vastly more computing resources today than 50 years ago. We need to go forward -- and -to think things through- ! -- about what computers are, what we are, and how to use the best of both in powerful combinations. This was Licklider's dream from 1960, and some of it was built. The dream is still central to our thinking today because it was so large and good to be always beckoning us ahead.

Thank you for taking the time to respond, and I'd really appreciate if you can clarify my follow up below too!

every thing in the system is a dynamic object -- there are no "date structures"

I'm still programming in data structures :/. I've seen many of your talks over the years and it took me quite a while to realize what you mean by objects (I think) is not just the textual specification (i.e. 'source code' in today's world), but rather a live, run-able thing that can be probed, inspected and made to do its thing, all by sending messages to it. In the Unix world this would be more akin to a long running server process, but with a much better unified, discover-able IPC mechanism (i.e. 'messaging'). The only thing that needs to be standardized here is the messaging mechanism itself. Larger processes would be constructed by just hooking up existing objects. Automatic persistence would mean these objects don't need to extract and store 'just data' outside themselves, etc.

This model blurs the distinction between what today we call 'programming' (writing large gobs of text), what we call 'operations' (configuring and deploying programs), and what we call 'using' (e.g. reviewing, organizing my photos). Instead, for every case, I would be doing the same kind of operation - i.e. inspecting and hooking up objects - but the objects I'm working with would be different, and the UI could be different. This makes programming more interactive ('let me see if this object can talk to that object by actually connecting them' vs. 'let me see if I can write a large blob of text that satisfies the compiler, by simulating the computer in my head').

The other thing I notice is you don't slice the computation the same way that is so common today. E.g. today I write source code (form #1 of computation), which runs through a compiler to produce an executable file (form #2 of the same computation), which is then executed and loaded in memory (form #3, because now it merges with the data from outside itself). Form #1 is checked in to source control, form #2 is bundled for distribution and form #3 is rather transient.

Instead, you're slicing computation on a different axis and all forms of the same computation are kept together - i.e. the specification, executable and runtime forms are one and the same 'object'. The decomposition happens by breaking down along functional boundaries. This means modification of the specification can happen anywhere I encounter one of these live objects, right then and there. I don't have to trace the computation to its 'source'.

So my main question is - am I on the right track here?

Going back and doing Engelbart or Parc also makes no sense

I agree, but given the sad state of composition, even if we had some of those ideas today, it would seem like a step forward :) IMO, today we want to think of farms of computers as one large computer, and instead of programming in the small, we want to program all of them together.

I think your analogy is going in a better direction. I had the same idea after taking a look at Squeak for a while. What would need to be added to your analogy is a notion of design. You see, in Smalltalk, for example, your programming takes place in the messages. So, even the daemons (which, for the sake of argument, we could think of as analogies to objects), which would be the senders and receivers of messages would be made out of the same stuff, not C/C++. So, this is a pretty dramatic departure from the way Unix operates. What this should suggest is that the semantic connection between objects is late-bound. Think of them as servers.

Secondly, in the typical Smalltalk implementation, there is still compilation, but it's incremental. You compile expressions and methods, not the whole body of source code for the whole system. What's really different about it is since the semantic actions are late-bound, you can even compile something while a thread is executing through the code you're compiling. So, you get nearly instant feedback on changes for free. Bret Victor's notion of programming environments blurs the axes you're talking about even more, so that you don't have to do two steps to see your change, while a thread is running (edit, then compile). You can see the effect of the change the moment you change an element, such as the upper bound of an iterative loop. To make it even more dynamic, he tied GUI elements (sliders) to such things as the loop parameters, so that you don't have to laboriously type the values to try them out. You can just change the slider, and see the effects of the change in a loop's range very quickly, such that it almost feels like you're using a tool-based design space, rather than programming.

I don't know how this was done in ST-78, but in ST-80, at least in accounts I've heard from people who've used versions of it, and in the version of Squeak I've used from time to time, the source code is not technically stored with the class object, though the system keeps references to the appropriate pieces of source code, and their revisions, mapping them to the classes in the system, so that when you tell the system you want to look at the source code for a class, it pulls up the appropriate version of the code in an editor.

Source code is stored in a separate file, and Smalltalk has a version control system that allows reviewing of source code edits, and reversion of changes (undo). The class object typically exists in the Smalltalk image as compiled code.

There are many things that are different about this vs. what you typically practice in CS, but addressing your point about data, in OOP, objects are supposed to take the place of data. In OOP, data contains its own semantics. It inverts the typical notion of procedures acting on data. Instead, data contains procedures. It's an active "live" part of the programming that you do. So, yes, data is persisted, along with its procedures.

A simple example in Smalltalk is: 2 + 2. If we analyze what's going on, the "2"'s are the pieces of data, the objects/servers, and "+" is used to reference a method in one of the data instances, but it doesn't stop there. The "2" objects communicate with each other to do the addition, getting the result: 4. As you can tell implicitly, "2 + 2" is also source code, to generate the semantic actions that generate the result.

"More or less" ... I can see that it's hard after decades of "data-centric" perspectives to think in terms of "computers" rather than "data", and about semantics rather than pragmatics. It's not "data contains procedures" but that objects are (a) semantically computers, and are impervious to attack from the outside (a computer has to let an attack happen via its own internal programming), and (b) what's inside can be anything that is able to deal with messages in a reasonable way. In Smalltalk, these are more objects (there are only objects in Smalltalk). The way the internals of typical Smalltalk objects are organized could be done better (we used several schemes, but all of them had variables and methods (which were also objects).

So "2" is not "data" in Smalltalk (unfortunately, it is in Java, etc.)

We had planned that the interior of objects should be an "address space of objects" because this is a better and more recursive way to do modularization, and to allow a different inter-viewing scheme (we eventually did some of this for the Etoys system for children about 20 years ago). But the physical computers at Parc were tiny, and the code we could run was tiny (the whole system in the Ted Nelson demo video was a little over 10,000 lines of code for everything). So we stayed with our top priority: to make a real and highly interactive system that was very comprehensive about what it and the user could do together.

I've seen some of Bret Victor's talks but your description made it click!

the source code is not technically stored with the class object

This is more of an optimization choice, perhaps? Given the link is maintained, it might be OK to say the source code and the bytecode form are two forms representing the same object?

Yes, you have the gist of our approach in the 60s and especially at Parc in the 70s. And the Doug McIlroy parts of Unix also got this (the "pipes" programming and other ideas).

What I called "objects" ca 1966 was a takeoff from Simula and Sketchpad that was highly influenced by both biology, by the "processes" (a kind of virtual computer) that were starting to be manifested by time-sharing systems, and by my research community's discussions and goals for doing an "ARPAnet" of distributed computers. If you took the basic elements to be "computers in communication" you could easily get the semantics of everything else (even to simulate data structures if you still thought you needed them).

So, yes, everything could be thought of as "servers". Smalltalk at Parc was entirely structured this way (and the demo I made from one of the Parc Smalltalks for the Ted Nelson tribute shows examples of this).

It's worth noting that you then have made a "software Internet", and this can be mapped in many ways over a physical Internet.

And so forth. This got quite missed. In a later interview Steve said that he missed a bunch of things from his visit to Parc in 1979. What was ironic was that the context of the interview was partly that the SW of the NEXT computer now did have these (in fact, not really).

To be a bit more fair, big culprits in the miss in the 80s were Motorola and Intel for not making IC CPUs with Chuck Thacker's emulation architectures that we used at Parc to be able run ultra high level languages efficiently enough. The other big culprit was that you could do -something- and sell it for a few thousand dollars, whereas what was needed was something whose price tag in the early 80s would have been more like $10K.

Note that a final culprit here is that the personal computer could not be seen for all it really was, and especially in the upcoming lives of most people. The average price of a car when the Mac came out was about $9K (that according to the web is about $20K today -- the average price of a car today is about $28K). To me a really good personal computer is worth every penny of $28K -- I'd love to be able to buy $28K of personal computer! One way to evaluate "the computer revolution" is to note not just what most people do with their computers in all forms, but what they are willing to pay. I think it will be a while before most people can see enough to put at least the value of a car on their "information and thinking amplifier vehicle"

It's worth noting that you then have made a "software Internet", and this can be mapped in many ways over a physical Internet.

The more interesting/optimized ways to map this would be where a single object in the software internet somehow maps to multiple computers, either doing parallel computation or partitioned computation on each. I feel the semantics of mapping the object onto a physical computer would have to be encoded in the object itself.

Perhaps some other kinds of higher level semantic model (i.e. not a 'software internet') might also be easy to map onto a physical internet. This is something I am interested in actively exploring. That is, how to build semantic models that are optimized for human comprehension of a problem, but can be directly run on farms of physical computers? Today a lot of the translation is done in our heads - all the way down to a fairly low level.

big culprits in the miss in the 80s were Motorola and Intel for not making IC CPUs with Chuck Thacker's emulation architectures

Maybe there is a feedback loop where the growth of Unix leads to hardware vendors thinking 'lets optimize for C', which then feeds the growth further? OTOH, even emulated machines are faster than hardware machines used to be.

I'd love to be able to buy $28K of personal computer!

Well, you can already buy $28K or more of computing resources and connect it to your personal device. It's not easy to get much value from this today, though.

9:05-12:30 I'm sold. A mindblowing vision for what the universality of computation can truly do... Thank you.

"There aren't any parents around to take care of childish adults. We are it. So we need to grow up and take responsibility for our world, and the first actions should be to try to understand our actual situations."

I am seeing the expectation that there will be parents around to take care of childish adults, though this has really come into prominence in the last 10 years, the last 3 years, in particular. For me, it's evoked notions of H. G. Wells's "Eloi." If that sentiment moves forward unchanged, we won't get "parents" in reality, of course, but some perverted in loco parentis in society. I've heard hope expressed in some quarters that reality will provide some needed blows from some 2x4's across the head, once the young venture out into the world, but I wonder whether sheer numbers will decide this; whether the young will choose to reorient our society, in an attempt to please themselves, rather than being influenced by its experience.

Re. "most people are not interested in this"

From what I've seen, this excuse came out of a combination of the technical side of the "two cultures," and the distraction of a lot of people becoming excited by some perceived new possibilities. More recently, my perspective has shifted to it coming out of a perverted notion of "self-esteem," that challenge is "harmful," because being contradicted creates a sense of limits, isolation or shame, or more materialistically, the fear of economic isolation, thereby reducing career prospects for something original.

What's emerged is a desire to affirm one's self-image as "good," regardless of notions of good works. This is where the "legal drugs" come in, reinforcing this. Neil Postman was right to fear this dynamic.

Diverting off of what I'm saying here (though staying on your topic), have you looked at William Easterly's critique of how foreign aid is conducted? I think it dovetails nicely with what you're talking about, here. The short of it is that most aid efforts to the undeveloped world offer some form of short-term relief, but they don't address at all the political and economic issues that cause the problems the aid is trying to address in the first place. Secondly, when he's tried to confront the aid organizations about this, there is no interest in pursuing these matters, a version of "most people aren't interested in stuff like this." Whether there's a sincere desire to solve problems, or just go through the motions to "help," to make it appear like something is happening (ie. putting on a kind of show of compassion for public relations, and satisfying certain political goals), I don't know. It seems like the latter.

Do you have any insight on what's causing the reticence to get into these matters? Easterly didn't seem to have answers for that, as I recall.

Closer to home -- for example in the US public educational system -- we have prime examples of your (and Easterly's) point about "band-aids" vs. "health". After acknowledging how politics works, I think we can see other factors at work in those more genuinely interested in dealing with problems. Some of these are almost certainly (a) the idea that "doing something" is better than doing nothing (b) that "large things are harder than small things" (c) the lack of "systems consciousness" amongst most adults (d) pick a few more.

The "it's a start" reply, which is often heard when criticizing actions in education which will get nowhere (or worse, dig the hole deeper) is part of several fallacies about "making progress": the idea that "if we just iterate enough" we will get to the levels of improvement needed. Any biologist will point out that "Darwinian processes" don't optimize, they just find fits to the environment. So if the environment is weak you will get good fits that are weak.

A "being more tough" way to think about this is what I've called in talks "the MacCready Sweet Spot" -- it's the threshold above the "merely better" where something important is different. For example, consider reading scores. They can go up or down, but unless a kid gets over the threshold of "reading for meaning" rather than deciphering codes, none of the ups and downs below count. For a whole population, the US is generally under the needed threshold for reading, and that is the systemic problem that needs to be worked on (not raising the scores a few points).

To stay on this example, we find studies that show it is very hard to learn to read fluently after we've learned oral language fluently. Montessori homed in on this earlier than most, and it has since been confirmed more rigorously. And this is the case for many new things that we need to get fluent at and above threshold.

So at the systems level of thinking we should be putting enormous resources into reforming the elementary grades rather than trying to "fix" high schools.

And so forth. This is the logic behind building dams and levees and installing pumps and runoff paths before flooding. One recent study indicated that the costs of prevention are 20% of the costs of disaster.

We could add to (d) above the real difficulties humans have of imagining certain kinds of things: we have no trouble with imagining gods, demons, witches, etc. but can't get ourselves beforehand into the "go all out" state of mind we have during an actual disaster (where heroes show up from everywhere). The very same people mostly can't take action when there isn't a disaster right in front of them.

This is very human. But, as I've pointed out elsewhere, part of "civilization" is to learn how to "do better than human" for hard to learn things.

Hmm. So, it sounds like the same "keyhole" problem I've seen you talk about before (you used an AIDS epidemic as an example with this). What's seen is taken as "good enough," because the small perspective seems large enough. If there are any frustrations or tragedies, they're taken as, "It goes with the territory. Just keep plugging away."

There's a parable I used to hear that I think plays right into this:

Two people are walking along a beach, and they see an enormous field of starfish stranded ashore, and one of them starts throwing them, one by one, back into the sea. The other is watching, and says, "What's the point? You're not going to be able to save all of them." The person doing the throwing holds up a starfish, and says, "I can save this one."

It's a nice thought, talking about good will and perseverance, and certainly the message shouldn't be, "Give up," but I think it nicely illustrates the "keyhole" problem, because ideas like this lead people to believe that because they can see people who need help, even if the number is more than they can handle, and they're trying to help those people in the moment, that they're improving their lives in the long-term. That may not be true.

I've seen you talk about the "MacCready Sweet Spot" in relation to the Apollo program. BTW, I first heard you talk about that in a web video from some congressional testimony you gave back in 1982, when Al Gore was Chairman of the Science and Technology Committee. When you said that the Apollo rockets were below threshold, not nearly good enough to advance space travel, and that the rockets were a kind of kludge, the camera was panning around the room, showing large posters of different NASA missions that had been hung up around the chamber. Gore said in jest, "The walls in this room are shaking!" I can imagine! When I first heard you say that, it struck me as so contrary to the emotional impact I had from understanding what was accomplished (I do think that landing on the Moon and returning safely to Earth was a mean feat, particularly when the U.S. couldn't get a rocket into space to save our lives 12 years earlier (I don't mean that literally)), but as I listened to you explain how the rocket was designed (450 ft., mostly high explosives, with room for only 3 astronauts, not to mention that the missions were for something like 9 days at a time. Three days to get there. Two, sometimes more days, on the surface, and then three days to get home), it occurred to me for the first time, "My gosh! He's right!" It really helped explain my disappointment at seeing us not get beyond low-Earth orbit for decades. For years, I thought it was just a lack of will.

I've explained to people that when I was growing up in the '80s, I had this expectation drummed into me (willingly), as many people in my generation did, that we would see interplanetary travel, probably within our lifetimes, and in several generations, interstellar travel. It was very disappointing to see the Space Shuttle program cancelled with seemingly nothing beyond it on the horizon, and I think more importantly, no goals for anything beyond it that have been compelling. I heard you explain in a more recent presentation that this was a natural outcome of Apollo, that it set in motion something that had its own inertia to play out, but the end result is no one has any enthusiasm for space travel anymore, because the expectations have been set so low. The message being, "Beware of large efforts below threshold." Indeed!

We are "story creatures" and it takes a lot of training and willpower to depart from "fond stories and beliefs" to "actually think things through".

That the moon shot was just a political gesture -- and also relevant to ICBMs etc -- was known to every scientist and most engineers who were willing to think about the problem for more than a few seconds.

We hoped that the -romance- of the shot would lead to the very different kinds of technologies needed for real space travel (basically it's about MV = mv, and if you don't want to have to carry (and move) a lot of M, you have to have very high V (beyond what chemical reactions can produce). If you have to have a large M you use most of it to move just it! This has been known for more than 100 years.

But the real romance and its implications didn't happen in the general public and politicians.

And the story we tell ourselves today is, frankly, a dismal one. It's that all of computing should be invented and put into the service of "the economy" rather than people. Instead of a culture of "computational literacy" in which human thought is extended to another level to the same effect as written literacy hundreds of years ago, we have an environment of complex technologies that cater to our most base evolutionary addictions and surveil us for profit.

Our universities are no longer institutions where people learn how to think, but rather where they learn how to "do" -- usually "doing" involves vocational practices that already exist, especially those that some manager (ie provost or dean) deems economically important. This is why you have generations of programmers bitching about type systems instead of the very politics, history, and social consequences of their own wares.

We don't have funding like ARPA/IPTO anymore and the devices and software of our world show it. Everything is some iteration on ideas that came from that period, good or bad – iterations whose goal is always "efficiency" in some form. Our current political culture prevents big initiatives like this, because how on Earth would they benefit the economy in the short or medium term, the limits of our new horizon?

Because these technologies have been created in service of an economic system that has proliferated social problems, they can never be a meaningful solution to those problems. Sure, we might invent some new systems for dealing with environmental catastrophe, but they are always predicated on the assumption that people should consume more and more. We are at the behest of billionaires – smart ones, mostly – who understand complex systems but also have an interest in ensuring that they remain complex.

It is unlikely that we will achieve a new kind of transcendent way of computing until we change the way we think about politics and economics. That is our environment. That is the "fit" that our technical systems have, as you say.

"We are 'story creatures' and it takes a lot of training and willpower to depart from 'fond stories and beliefs' to 'actually think things through'."

What your analysis did for me was help put two and two together, but yes, it "collided" with my notions of what an accomplishment it was, and what I had been led to believe that would lead to. What you exposed was that the reality of "what that would lead to" was quite different, and it explained the reality that was unfolding.

I knew that Apollo was a big rocket (ironically, that was one thing that impressed me about it, but I thought how amazing it was that such a thing could be constructed in the first place, and work. Though, I thought many years later about just what you said, that the more fuel you add, the more the fuel is just expending energy moving itself!), and that there were only three people on it, though the "efficiency" perspective, relating that to how it did not contribute to further knowledge for space travel, didn't occur to me until you laid it out. I also knew from listening to Reagan's science advisor that NASA was heavily influenced by the goals of military contractors that had done R&D on various technologies in the '60s, and which exerted political pressure to put them to use, to get return on investment. He said something to the effect of, "People worry about the Military Industrial Complex. Well, NASA IS the Military Industrial Complex! People don't think of it that way, but it is."

Not too long after I heard you talk about this, I happened to hear about a simulator called the Kerbal Space Program (commonly referred to as KSP), and someone posted a video of a "ludicrous single-launch vehicle to Mars (and back)" in it. Even though I think I've heard that KSP does not completely use realistic physics, it drove your point home fairly well. Though, people would point out that none of the proposed missions to Mars have talked about a single-launch vehicle from surface to surface. All of the proposals I've heard about have talked about constructing the vehicle in orbit. KSP, though, assumes chemical propellant.

https://youtu.be/mrjpELy1xzc

"the real romance and its implications didn't happen in the general public and politicians."

In hindsight, I've been struck by that. When I took the time to learn about the history of the Apollo program, I learned that Apollo 11 made a big impression on people all over the world, but that was really it. I think as far as the U.S. was concerned, people were probably more impressed that it met a political goal, JFK's bold proclamation that we would get men to the Moon and back, and that it was a historic first, but there was no sense of, "Great! Now what?" It was just, "Yay, we did it! Now onto other things." There's even been some speculation I've heard from politicos, who were in politics at the time, that we wouldn't have done any of the moon shots if Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, that it was sympathy for his legacy that drove the political will to follow through with it (if true, that's where the romance lay). Hardly anybody paid attention to it after 11, with the exception of Apollo 13, since there was the drama of a possible tragedy. Apollo 18 never got off the ground. The rocket was all set to go, but the program was scrubbed. People can look at the rocket, laid out in its segments sideways, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

One question for Alan, if he's reading on (and of course thanks for decades of great work and inspiration).

Do you think that your criticism against passive consumption etc might be incompatible not just with how things like modern computers and platforms are designed, but also with how most people are wired to behave?

That is, that it's not just that our tools constrain us to being passive consumers but that we also prefer, promote, and seek tools that make it easier for us to be passive consumers, because most of us rather not be bothered with creating?

If this is true, this might be (a) an inherent condition of man everywhere, or (b) something having to do with our general culture (above and beyond our tools).

I think that by talking about schools etc you alluded to (b), but could (a) also be the case?

Edit: I see that later on here you commented "We are set up genetically to learn the environment/culture around us. If we have media that seems to our nervous systems as an environment, we will try to learn those ways of thinking and doing, and even our conception of reality." which kind of answers my question.

One perspective on this is to think about your definition of "civilization" and compare it with both "human universals" and what we know about the general lives of hunter-gatherers and the extent that we can use this to guess about the several hundred thousand years before agriculture.

Many of the things on my list for "civilization" are not directly in our genes or traditional cultures: reading and writing, deductive mathematics, empirical science of models, equal rights, representative governments, and many more. It's not that we do these well, or even willingly, but learning how to do them has made a very large difference. We can think of "civilization" not as a state of being that we've achieved, but as societies that are trying to become more civilized (including getting better ideas about what that should mean).

Most of the parts of civilization seem to be relatively recent inventions, and because the inventions are a bit more distant from our genetic and cultural normals, most of them are more difficult to learn. For example, as far as history can tell, schools were invented to concentrate the teaching of writing and reading, and they have been the vehicle for the more difficult learning of some of the other inventions.

And, sure, from history (and even from looking around) we can see that a very high percentage of people would be very happy with servants, even slaves, whether human or technological.

In Tom Paine's argument against the natural seeming monarchy in "Common Sense" he says don't worry about seems natural, but try to understand what will work the best. His great line is "Instead of having the King be the Law, we can have the Law be the King". In other words, we can design a better society than nature gives rise to, and we can learn to be citizens of that society through learning.

In other contexts I've pointed out that "user friendly" may not always be "friendly". For example, the chore of learning to read fluently is tough for many children, but what's important beyond being able read afterwards is that the learning of this skill has also forced other skills to be learned that bring forth different and stronger thinking processes.

Marketing, especially for consumers, is aimed at what people -want-, but real education has to be aimed at what people really -need-. Since people often don't want what they need, this creates a lot of tension, and makes what to do with early schooling a problem of rights as well as responsibilities.

One way to home in on what to do is to -- just for a while -- think only about what citizens of the 21st century need to have between their ears to not just get to the 22nd century, but to get there in better shape than we are now. Children born this year will be 83 in 2100. What will be their fate and the fate of their children?

If people cannot imagine that the situation they are in had to be invented and worked at and made, they will have a hard time to see that they have to learn how to work the garden as they become adults. If they grow up thinking as hunter gatherers they can only imagine making use of what is around them, and to move on after they've exhausted it. (But there is not place to move on to for the human race -- larger thoughts and views have to be learned as part of schooling and growing up.)

Thank you for the reply.

I think you hit the nail on the head -- even though making the distinction between what people "want" and "deserve" is not very popular in the US (or where I live and anywhere else for that matter) at the moment (or even since the 70s or so).

Despite all the self-improvement books and seminars and everything, the norm is that people should just be given what they want, and not anything harder but that can potentially make them better and more creative. In fact a person would be labelled "elitist" to dare suggest anything else -- e.g. that universities are not just vocational schools for getting the skills for one's future job, or that technology should not just be about what Joe Public is capable of mastering, but about advancing Joe and Jane public.

"In fact a person would be labelled "elitist" to dare suggest anything else -- e.g. that universities are not just vocational schools for getting the skills for one's future job, or that technology should not just be about what Joe Public is capable of mastering, but about advancing Joe and Jane public."

I've run into this very thing. The ironic thing about it is advocating for literacy, and understanding the abstract inventions of our civilization is the antithesis of elitism, because think about what would take place in a society where nobody who has the ability to influence events knows these things; where people do not know how to create their own analysis of events, to argue well, or to invent new social structures that benefit communities; to be active agents in negotiating their society's political destiny, keeping in mind the invented conceptual "guardrails" that maintain things like rule through law, and equal rights. In a society like that, elitism is all you have! Where the thought-inventions of our modern civilization are maintained, there is more possibility for creating an egalitarian society, in certain contexts, more power-sharing, and I think the evidence suggests more social progress.

This doesn't get enough credit these days, but I think the historical evidence suggests certain forms of religion have helped promote some of these civilizational inventions as virtues, on a widespread basis, supporting the secular education that spread them.

My experience has been that the reason people may put the label "elitist" on it is that learning these ideas is hard, and everybody knows that. So, there's been an understood implication that only a small number of people will be able to know most of them, and if most of the attention is devoted to inculcating these inventions in a relatively small number of people, then that will create an elite who will use their skills to the disadvantage of everyone else, who did not receive this education. What these people prefer to use instead is a lowest-common-denominator notion of egalitarianism, which doesn't promote egalitarian virtues in the long run, because it attenuates the possibility of maintaining a society where people can enact them. If we forget the hard stuff, because it's hard, we won't get the benefits they offer, over time. We will revert to a pre-modern state, because all the power to maintain our civilization is in these ideas. Keeping them as conventions/traditions is not good enough, because as we see, conventions get challenged via. a pragmatic, anti-tradition impulse with each new generation.

I am calling for the field to have a larger vision of civilization and how mass media and our tools contribute or detract from it

That would be nice. Unfortunately outside of Kay's rarefied circles, "the field" is close to being a Darwinian selection machine for the worst (most unimaginative, trivial, greedy, pusillanimous) traits. I've ducked in and out of various IT and development roles since the early 2000s. Nearly every one of the best people I've known in that time has left the field for others where they felt they could develop more of their broad humane selves. Some have retreated to academia, others moved altogether (nursing seems to be a theme, oddly). Those of the best that didn't leave, are embittered and cynical. For all the febrile contrepreneur-speak, the overall picture is pretty bleak.

See the comment by scroot above. It meshes with yours, but recognizes that the underlying culture has gone in directions that are undermining real progress and value of life. This is why I've put a fair amount of time along with many others in trying to get elementary education to a better place. I think we'll have to grow a few generations of "civilization carriers" to pull out. (And, yes, I've been staggered at the low place that much of computing has gotten to, but it is reflecting much larger cultural problems.)

Yes, wholeheartedly agree with this being part of a wider cultural current. It feels like we're at a low point from which things can only improve, but I have thought that before, only to see the decline continue.

My comment was a mere crise de coeur from the bottom ranks of the industry hierarchy. Reading the article and comments here was a slight shock. I had almost forgotten that these high-minded humanistic strands had once been a prominent part of the tech world. I hope they re-emerge. Thanks for your contributions.

Yes. But, even if the field adopted a larger/better vision, you still have a bigger problem: Most smart people are attracted to mediocrity. Example: The LFTR (ie molten salt breeders) people have been trying to get their stuff adopted but most smart people (I know of) are attracted to micro-optimizing wind mills and outlawing coal. Even smart people who want to take on a larger vision are still able to snatch mediocrity from the jaws of succes. It may be counter-intuitive, but Hans Hoppe's views on how to improve civilizaltion would lead to a fulfillment of your goals. It's not a coincidence Japan, Germany, US, Italy were centralized in the 1800s and became involved in world wars in the 1900s. Medieval Europe had no central empire, yet was able to catch up and surpass China and Japan, with the Renaissance a culmination. A lack of mega states lead to more diversity, cooperative competition and a stable global civilization through variety and choice. If we are to repeat past success and get more Faradays and Teslas, micro states or no states are necessary. The EU is an example of this: A poltical wing of NATO. First they get you by passing regulations protecting the "consumer", then the wars and corruption come about. Goldman Sachs made money when the wealthier states wanted to pay off the debts of its clients (Greece). This is no different when Clinton/Congress wanted to bailout Mexico (who owed lots of money to US banks like Citibank/Citigroup). Singapore amd Lichentenstein both have a powerful de facto monarchy in control, but its small land size and population limits the destructive desires of the state. Yet look at the diversity of race/opinions/demographics that exist in such a small area. Until the fetish for megastates subsides, we are doomed to slow adoption of knowledge. However, I am not a good communicator. Might I suggest this book for a better scholarly discussion: https://mises.org/library/economics-and-ethics-private-prope...

My goals are a lot bigger than Hoppe's (and I fervently hope for something much better than his vision).

Could you explain the "are a lot bigger" part?

I get the sense Hoppe is repulsive to you, but I am very open-minded to hearing a counter-argument and find out what I got wrong about him. For example, are you against a complete free-market in schooling? Or do you want a voter-based approach on the city/state/federal levels?

My perspective is that our planet is small but there are lots of people. "Biology is variation" so there are wide distributions of properties. I like the idea of "Equal Rights" (and also think that it's necessary). The systems that are critical, including the human systems, are non-linear and intertwined. The combination of these is that the human society needs to find - invent - how to organize itself.

This is very much in the spirit of the thinking that led to the American Constitution, and Tom Paine's "Instead of having the King be the Law, we can have the Law be the King".

We need solutions that allow further thinking and design to be done.

One way to look at this is to ask questions about "human nature" and to what extent does it need to be followed and to what extent should we try to teach (even train) the children to act in "designed ways" -- for example, not trying to take revenge.

The interesting and difficult parts of goals like these are that we have humans in the mix while trying to come up with better societal designs. For example, even the best forms of socialism have been "gamed" incessantly, and often fatally, by humans only interested in "harvesting" for themselves.

This is one of many reasons why well thought out versions of social reform have often been destroyed when the implementation phase is started "Every one loves Change, except for the Change part!"

I can not argue with any of your vision. It's based on sound thought, knowledge, and scholarly research.

However, I disagree with your examples, specifically the Constitution. I apologize for disagreeing with you, but I still don't see how any form of state can function with a population in the double digits of millions. Even if 90%+ of the population were educated in Montessori-based systems.

It goes against the basic economic principles of "incentives". The state is still a monopoly (in the classical sense) of violence, even under a Constitution. The state is also the sole interpreter of its own laws.

Even under a Constitutional Republic, politicians have become the new monarchy, priesthood, and witch doctors. Just like when Christians find a backdoor for polytheism, so do the Citizens the same at the voting booth and in the media to worship kings and queens.

So the state is still the king. We just play musical chairs at each election. In fact, we even have fewer checks/balances on power today than the British Empire had under American Colonial rule. The US government has absorbed private institutions that could check it's power: It' subsidizes church(s), subsidizes and regulates private schools, the Ivy Leagues have become an extension of the state, and the US has become the #1 employer of scientists, engineers, lawyers, etc. This is a combo of socialism and fascism lite, that continues to grow through each election and generation, albeit slowly.

When the Law is King, people still rely on politicians to interpret and carry out the Law. They will defend "their" neo-king/queen (ie favored politican). Previously, they would have been suspicious of unelected officials." That suspicion was a de facto check/balance on power. But, not the sole check/balance.

Example: Obama (and Congress!) passed legislation to support Neo-Nazis in the Ukraine. https://www.stpete4peace.org/Ukraine https://www.thenation.com/article/congress-has-removed-a-ban...

Where was the outcry? Trump is bad. But, Congress and Obama are just as bad. These are the politicians people want in power. These are the crimes people overlook and ignore. This is just one more example of how the voters let senators and presidents get away with crimes. It is easy to expose Trump as a shady/scheming politician and crooked entrepreneur (eg Trump Uni.). However, politicians like Bill Clinton, Reagan, etc. get away with murder and Congress is fine with it. So too are the voters. The Constitution has not prevent a global military empire.

Look at how the Constitution was promoted: with G. Washington's celebrity endorsement. The US was thus created partly by a militia leader who used warfare to overthrow a government and won wars. (Losing generals are unpopular.)

In practice, the Law was never in full hands of the King. The King/monarchy had checks and balances going back to the medieval periods. The various religions and churches (plural), guilds, Parliament, and so on.

The Constitution has given people a false sense of ownership and protection and lowered their distrust of the state. This is one of the reasons why parents love government schooling: they can blame tax-cheats for why Johnny can't read.

"Who cares if the Dept. of Edu. is unconstitutional? The ends justify the means."

Canada, Australia, and other states did not overthrow British rule, yet they still became multi-cultural and prosperous... without a violent Revolution that led to war widows, orphans and high taxes.

This is why I disagree with the idea of a state that would let politicians (including monarchs or dictators) have access to lots of money, weapons, etc. I've seen people much better educated and with high IQ ignore the crimes of entire political parties like Republicans, Democrats, and celebs like Lenin, Che, Mao, etc.

In other words: The Constitution, from my p.o.v., promoted political centralization and was a hidden psuedo-absolute monarchy in disguise. Nobles replace the absolute monarch. So I agree with your vision, but I just disagree with political centralization.

(Sidenote: The Constitution was passed despite the delegates not having authority to overthrow the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution expanded the state's power, did not solve the underlying issues with the Articles of Confederation, and set a bad precedent of upper-class members of the establishment being able to expand state power to solve problems at the expense of freedom. )

Thank you again for reading and putting up with this. I realize we disagree on a few things, but your patience is appreciated.

I'll avoid trying to reply to this. The Roman poet Juvenal quipped "But who will guard the guardians?" referring to one of the main problems of any republic. Plato had one suggested solution, and the US founders had another. Today we have something quite different than either had imagined.

One key question for "civilization" has usually centered around the extent to which enough children can learn to reach beyond their genes to embrace ideas and behaviors that have been invented for the better.

Another key question revolves around the trade-offs between individual choices vs "smartest choices". This reflects the distribution of talents, outlooks, skills, knowledge, etc in any population. And also the distribution of what various people need to "feel whole". (These are often at odds with larger organizations of societies.)

I think I'm beginning to understand. Thanks again for the replies. I'm going to have to think a lot of about what you have written. (My apologies if I kept mis-interpreting you and going off on the wrong tangents.)

Simplicity is closely related to education, and education is closely related to freedom.

How are we supposed to take education seriously when we create devices of such complexity that they are essentially magic, and hand them to students?

Before computers, complexity always had tight upper bounds. A watch could only get so complex before it wouldn't fit in its housing; and a car could only get so complex before it could not be efficiently manufactured/repaired. With computers, there is no upper bound to the complexity.

We are now overrun with complexity, but it's hard to see how to fix that. A business that puts blind faith in a complex system to do something slightly faster/better will probably win against a business that tries to truly understand what it's doing. An employee who just keeps adding to the complexity will probably win against an employee stepping back to simplify things. A consumer who makes convenient choices about complex things without asking many questions will probably find life easier.

Simlpicity is related to education in a sense that education is about teaching you a sequence of simple steps that lead toward the complex.

Also, I think the perception of computers being magic doesn't come as much from their complexity as from the people who try to force the complex into looking like it's simple. They're hiding complexity so hard the end result doesn't make any logical sense, so it's magic.

AK had a lovely quote in the article:

"Well, a saying I made up at PARC was, “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.” They’ve got simple things being simple and they have complex things being impossible, so that’s wrong."

let’s do what Sony did with the Walkman, let’s use this technology to make things more convenient in a way that a consumer can recognize, even if the user interface limits them.

That's a fantastic characterization of what I hate about Apple, and to contrast, what I love about free software.

The sad thing (in my opinion) is that people love the limitations Apple gives them. There it's no undefined behavior when the behavior is so arbitrarily limited. People don't want to create. They just want content. I find it rather depressing.