Alan Kay: Is it too late to create a healthy future? [video]

https://videocast.nih.gov/Summary.asp?Live=28442&bhcp=1

by tosh • 8 years ago

272 100 8 years ago

videocast.nih.gov

lisper• 8 years ago

Needs a [video] tag.

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

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

njarboe• 8 years ago

Here is what Alan Kay had as the title which was changed by the NIH people (talk starts at about 4 min in):

If "the best way to predict the future is to invent it", is it too late to invent a healthy future?

The answer to this one is not clear and Kay's answer in this talk would be, "It depends on what we teach the children of today."

I would highly recommend watching the whole thing. Also: He says he started making up these pity slogans because most people can't read/understand a paragraph of text.

excalibur• 8 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

TeMPOraL5• 8 years ago

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

nayuki• 8 years ago

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

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

ASalazarMX• 8 years ago

Works fine for me, no Flash.

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

icebraining• 8 years ago

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

murat124• 8 years ago

Firefox Developer Edition 64 on Mac w/ uMatrix and bunch of other extensions. JW Player seems to be playing the video for me.

sp332• 8 years ago

Do you have DRM video disabled in Firefox? Maybe it's using Flash as a fallback.

kennethfriedman• 8 years ago

Here is a youtube version: https://youtu.be/dTPI6wh-Lr0

confounded• 8 years ago

(youtube-dl works)

nine_k2• 8 years ago

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

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

mitchtbaum• 8 years ago

hence the plural in Futures Studies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_studies

...blame it on the low-pass filter of mass communication

lainga• 8 years ago

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

nine_k2• 8 years ago

Zero article could work. Future as a non-measurable substance, like water. Future as something that does not need a specification with a "the", like captain on a ship.

lgessler• 8 years ago

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

rladd• 8 years ago

If one watches the actual lecture, Kay says that his real title was altered by an "NIH low pass filter".

The actual title was "Is it too late to create a healthy future?"

sctb• 8 years ago

Thanks! We've updated the headline here.

Theodores• 8 years ago

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

drawkbox• 8 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

Hextinium• 8 years ago

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

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

jweir2• 8 years ago

That stat is bogus. Maybe technically correct based upon the status when you register for selective service, but look at the number of objectors during the Vietnam era:

A total of 170,000 men received C.O. deferments; as many as 300,000 other applicants were denied deferment. Nearly 600,000 illegally evaded the draft; about 200,000 were formally accused of draft offenses. Between 30,000 and 50,000 fled to Canada; another 20,000 fled to other countries or lived underground in America.

Source https://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/conscientiousobject...

azeirah5• 8 years ago

Is "conscientious objector" a formally defined status? i.e. "you are a conscientious objector iff you object to being drafted for the US military", or is it a analogous to "this person will publicly speak out and/or rebel against horrors?"

Because I had the feeling while watching Alan's talk that he wasn't talking about military drafts -- which is exclusively male anyway and he's talking about people, not men -- but rather, that he was talking about people the more informal second definition

Or stated differently; people who remained passive during wars, even if they were actually against the mass murders and large scale horrors.

Then again, if it's the second definition, where in the world did he get those statistics from, how would you even reliably determine who has or hasn't publicly stated their position, ... I mean, there's no reliable written historical record of this position, is there?

jimmy1• 8 years ago

"It's not doing more of what we are doing and it means if we've done things with technology, for example, that have gotten us into a bit of a pickle, doing more things with technology at the same level of thinking is probably going to make things worse."

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

TeMPOraL5• 8 years ago

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

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

crispinb3• 8 years ago

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

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

darkmarmot• 8 years ago

If I ever see something even approaching generalized intelligence, I might be slightly concerned.

But, thus far, our best AIs are simply pattern recognition systems strung together like Christmas lights.

There's also no reason to think that 'intelligence' can be exponentially scaled or that any system can recognize how to improve itself -- or have the capacity to do so in situ.

pascalxus• 8 years ago

We are no-where near rich enough to afford UBI at this point. Run the numbers, Even if you taxed every last billionaire at 100%, you'd be nowhere near enough money for even the most basic UBI.

Who knows, maybe in a 1000 years? i don't see it happening in our lifetimes.

And what are all those AIs supposed to be working on? Based on the direction it's currentlying heading, it looks like we'll just be getting more the same stuff we don't need.

If AI is going to help humanity, it needs to be applied to maslow's hierarchy of needs. 99% of society still isn't past the first row. Look at the bottom row, it's pretty simple: Shelter, Food, Water and by extension to afford those things: transportation and medical insurance.

WhompingWindows• 8 years ago

Who are these luminaries you speak of? I know Neil degrasse Tyson thinks AI is going to be beneficial, but I don't know who else takes that position. Most of the "experts" who are quoted on AI, not those scientists and engineers actually building the AI, but those "expert philosophers" like Sam Harris who assume their prosaic musings can capture the future of technological innovation, they are mostly gloomy or neutral on the subject. So, who's out there actually building AI and declaring it'll lead to utopia?

wallace_f4• 8 years ago

Zuckerburg is another popular figure who is optimistic about AI.

shanghaiaway3• 8 years ago

Elon Musk. Google/Waymo. Uber. Every car company working on "selfdriving." Amazon. Etc. Literally everyone in tech is working on an AI-powered pipedream.

tensor• 8 years ago

AI is here and its use will increase no matter what you desire. It's really no different than any other technology. As a species, we've consistently been getting more and more efficient in most aspects of our lives. How that translates into the well being of the many is a completely different topic. Being more efficient is ultimately only a good thing. But that doesn't mean it will lead to a utopia.

Our problems always have been, and always will be, each other. You point to AI as a problem, but we all should really be looking in the mirror instead. It's up to all of us to solve the social troubles that will arise from continual increases in efficiency.

UBI is one idea that might help prevent a severe imbalance of resources in society. But it alone won't be enough to solve our social problems, and I don't think most people claim it will. It's a start.

If this is really something that keeps you awake at night, be a part of the solution and help us think of realistic ways to address these issues. Going backwards in time isn't an option.

lintuxvi• 8 years ago

You're right. It's about our thinking. You and I. It's Alan Kay's quote he wants to shout. We need to get better at our solutions, and how we share them.

eksemplar2• 8 years ago

Is AI really here? We process a lot of data, we’ve done so for years, and so far ML hasn’t been able to do it better than our in house analytical scientists.

I see how the automation of those analytical scientist work a huge companies like google, where you probably save quite a few millions on having less employees, but even at our 20.000 employee municipality AI is an expense. Sure we could maybe cut the data/analytical staff down to half the size if we replaced them with data scientists, but data scientists are more expensive and you’d also need to pay a license for whatever ML platform you use, and none of our POCs with various consultants or academics have provided us with anything that was better than what we already have. In fact, In every test, it turned out our own human build models were a lot better at predicting and auditing than ML.

Heh.

AI is also struggling outside of big datas. We’ve run a poc on self driving cars for three years now, and they don’t work, at all. They certainly can work, if we replace and maintain every piece of road infrastructure to their exact needs, but that’s never going to happen.

I guess AI will eventually find a usage outside of advertising and privacy invasion, and don’t get me wrong, we certainly use it for things like trolling through millions of old case files as part of our quality control. So it’s not completely useless, but I don’t see how it’ll change the world anytime soon.

api• 8 years ago

Agreed. There is a real poverty of deep "meta" thinking today.

Arn_Thor2• 8 years ago

History proves otherwise. Technology crammed people into cities, which was terrible until it allowed us to create better infrastructure to cope with the density. Technology made London air unbreathable until it gave rise to cleaner sources of energy which we could place further away from people. Technology often times makes things worse, and then helps us fix the problems that arise. And the net result is longer, healthier lives for the vast majority of people on the planet. So I say "keep going"!

knieveltech2• 8 years ago

History isn't done yet. Your rosy prognosis appears to ignore current widespread ecosystem collapse and mass extinction, growing geopolitical instability, and the looming possibility of the biosphere becoming incompatible with human civilization as it is currently implemented.

wallace_f4• 8 years ago

Yea our technological ability is not limiting humanity; our ethical or dare I say moral abilities are the limit.

I would waget that's probably what the Great Filter is. Survival in nature inevitably transitions into survival among other intelligence. Intelligence seeks to preserve itself, not its eventual mastery of the universe, and it'll be a hard battl to win even if 99% are good-natured, 1% will still undermine others for their own benefit.

petermcneeley2• 8 years ago

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

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

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

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

blueprint• 8 years ago

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

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

soared• 8 years ago

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

What?

petermcneeley2• 8 years ago

At 32:09 his "brain" means genetics culture language schools.

I dont think individual mental illness plays much of a role. Most people in power are rational self interested actors.

bsaul4• 8 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

3rdAccount2• 8 years ago

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

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

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

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

mikekchar2• 8 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

chongli• 8 years ago

Either I'm too dumb to understand much of what he's trying to convey

I have a lot of respect for Alan Kay too but what you're hinting at is something that's bothered me about him for a long time: his "solution" for almost every problem is for everyone to be as smart as his Xerox PARC dream team.

He's like the Phil Jackson of technology: sure he's deserving of a ton of respect, but he wouldn't win anything with the 2012 Bobcats. Well that strategy doesn't work with society at large. You've got to work with the people who are, not those you wish would be.

dangom2• 8 years ago

His talk is exactly what he talks about: he presents ideas at a level of understanding of those listening to him. Instead of being scientific or philosophic, he gives interesting examples such that people immediately get it.

Alan's all about looking at the big picture and not getting lost in irrelevant details. He tries to get his point across right away by showing how NIMH is so focused on canonical mental health problems that they don't think about where these problems come from, nor about even bigger mental "problems"(such as the 99,77% if you watched through the talk) and what mental means in the first place.

He may not know how to fix healthcare, but he shows what is necessary for us to think about if we ever want problems to be solved. He then follows with examples from the areas he's more familiar with, namely tech and education, to show how to get to solutions without brute force.

Human critical thinking at its very best.

bsaul4• 8 years ago

Have you looked at all the video ? This talk is actually about children education ( to build a better future). But then he brings deatchcamps, his dentist not removing plastic protection often, francis bacon new science, aristotle not knowing the number of teeth of his own wife, brings some statistics in the middle about mental disorder, etc etc.

It may be human critical thinking, but then please it needs some structure and a feeling of progression in a reasonning, actually leading somewhere ( and if that something could be anything new, more than just « computers could be better learning device » that would actually help).

eksemplar2• 8 years ago

”Instead of being scientific or philosophic, he gives interesting examples such that people immediately get it.”

How is being scientific or philosophic exclusive from giving interesting examples that people immediately get?

I’d say being able to speak in a way that your audience gets is an inherent part of philosophy.

Being scientific isn’t being complicated, it’s basing what you say on a foundation of evidence.

Being philosophical isn’t being abstract, it’s basing what you say in reason.

If you’re neither of those things, you’re seldom worth listening to.

lcuff2• 8 years ago

I think this talk addresses the question "What do we need to do so that children born today have a healthy world to live in when they're 82, in the year 2100? Bret Victor is amazing and interesting, but he's not addressing the same issues. Nor are the issues he addresses nearly as important. If you only watched the first 20 minutes of this, you probably missed the point of needing to radically change how we educate children, and Alan Kay's ideas for how to do that, which as far as I'm concerned, are dead on the money.

bsaul4• 8 years ago

I did end up watching the whole talk, just to make sure i didn’t miss the point.

What do you mean by his ideas on how to educate children ? Not dumbing down , and in the process use computers ?

I don’t think this in itself is anything original, unless you provide some examples on how that would look today ( the video sample in the talk shows a child manipulating a computer interface from the early 90s so i couldn’t tell how old that video was).

But more importantly why spend the first 40 minutes on general pseudo-scientific anecdotal statements, if you’re eager to talk about that ? Do you think people really need to be convinced education is important ?

spindle2• 8 years ago

I agree, and there are only maybe half a dozen people in the whole world whose tidbits of wisdom are so good, and so well delivered, and so inspiring, that I don't mind them having this vagueness. Alan Kay is one of them.

If everyone was like this (and I agree, a lot of TED speakers are), I'd go crazy.

justaaron4• 8 years ago

vagueness? he's simply discussing comparative pedagogical models and techniques! jumping around a bit = we've been culturally ok with that since mtv circa 1993 or the beatnik authors of the late 50's or virtually any film or literature that jumps around in the narrative timeline.

_iiu1• 8 years ago

I dunno, it ties together rather well, IMO. It's only our future, intellectual honesty, social divides, and everything wrong with society addressed with the wisdom and distillation of decades of well formed thought condensed into presentation form. No big deal. This is like a holy revelation and you don't get it????

armitron• 8 years ago

I have always found interesting how some people seem to make an effort to justify to themselves - in all sorts of ways - their failure to grasp something.

Alan Kay is a supreme genius, there can be no question about that, but also an original and deep thinker who is not afraid of not falling inline with the prevailing ideology of the day. He is deeply rooted in the outside, the sphere of human thought and potential that iconoclastic transformative ideas spring from. And, here you come, unfavorably comparing him to Bret Victor rather than seeking to fill the gaps within you that do not let you appreciate what the genius is plainly talking about. In a way you are testament to the point Alan Kay is making. Your inability to grasp simple - yet unpopular and certainly not easy - ideas and your preference for easily-digestible material demonstrates the degree of cultural erosion in play today.

In a world where people like Tim Berners Lee are given the Turing award and people like Alan Kay are ostracized and ignored, languages like JavaScript and PHP proliferate whilst the best ideas behind Smalltalk and Lisp are still not widely used because the armies of 9-5 for-money “coders” are not in a position to appreciate them, in such a world you have people reaching for Bret Victor and describing an Alan Kay talk as boring. Sad state of affairs.

david927• 8 years ago

In a world where people like Tim Berners Lee are given the Turing award and people like Alan Kay are ostracized and ignored

Well, to be fair, Alan is a Turing Award recipient since 2003. He's hardly ostracized and if he's ignored, it's because his cause is ignored.

He speaks of a broken present leading to a wider broken future. And to conceive that things are broken requires a deep understanding of the fundamentals of what you're looking at. Is you car currently horribly inefficient? You probably (like me) would have no idea. It would require knowing what every part does and what was it designed to do and why. That's a big ask. It requires a deeply fundamental understanding of it all.

And this -- this -- is what he's talking about in the lecture. He's gone from proselytizing the brokenness to preaching how to build the new mindset that can recognize it, which is the first and best shot at addressing it.

aizatto• 8 years ago

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

Is it too late to create a healthy future?

Thoughts?

Personally I don’t think so.

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

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

Letting them decide on their own.

justaaron4• 8 years ago

this is mindblowingly good.

Alan Kay: Is it too late to create a healthy future? [video]

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