Alan Kay
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.Collection: Wisdom
Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.Collection: Technology
Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.Collection: Time
Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.Collection: Wisdom
The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.Collection: Technology
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.Collection: Technology
Computer science inverts the normal. In normal science, you're given a world, and your job is to find out the rules. In computer science, you give the computer the rules, and it creates the world.
Context is worth 80 IQ points.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.
Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
It's hard to change information in books, but if we have everything online, then a somewhat untrustworthy group of people controlling the thing - which I think is what we have - gives us '1984.'
I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.
Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
Social thinking requires very exacting thresholds to be powerful. For example, we've had social thinking for 200,000 years, and hardly anything happened that could be considered progress over most of that time. This is because what is most pervasive about social thinking is 'how to get along and mutually cope.'
Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others.
There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.
Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc. In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
I've been a Fellow in a number of companies: Xerox, Apple, Disney, HP. There are certain similarities because all the Fellows programs were derived from IBM's, which itself was derived from the MIT 'Institute Professor' program.
As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
All the companies I've worked for have this deep problem of devolving to something like the hunting and gathering cultures of 100,000 years ago. If businesses could find a way to invent 'agriculture,' we could put the world back together and all would prosper.
When I first got to Apple, which was in '84, the Mac was already out, and 'Newsweek' contacted me and asked me what I thought of the Mac. I said, 'Well, the Mac is the first personal computer good enough to be criticized.'
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.
Steve was perfectly aware of the Dynabook. That was one of the reasons he wanted me to come to Apple.
In the old days, you would chastise people for reinventing the wheel. Now we beg, 'Oh, please, please reinvent the wheel.'
In the commercial world, you have this problem that the amount of research you can do in a company is based on how well your current business is going, whereas there actually should be an inverse relationship: when things are going worse, you should do more research.
It's easier to invent the future than to predict it.Collection: Inspirational
If you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.Collection: Challenges
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.Collection: Firsts
Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.Collection: Simple
I made up the term "object-oriented," and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.Collection: Mind
I think the trick with knowledge is to “acquire it, and forget all except the perfume” - because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one's own “brain voices”. The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.Collection: Thinking
Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.Collection: Gold
Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.Collection: Worry
The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.Collection: Ideas
Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.Collection: Research
An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.Collection: Technology
Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the "Aha." Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in - the one that we think is reality.Collection: Art
Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.Collection: Thinking
I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.Collection: Arrogance
The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.Collection: Law
Change is easy, except for the changed part.Collection: Easy
Understanding- -like civilization, happiness, music, science and a host of other great endeavors--is not a state of being, but a manner of traveling. This great road has no final destination. The journey itself is the reward.Collection: Journey
In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.Collection: Success
Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out.Collection: Believe
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Point of view is worth 80 IQ pointsCollection: Views
The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.Collection: Design
In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds. The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators. The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.Collection: Nerd
Artificial intelligence is what we don't know how to do yetCollection: Artificial Intelligence
When I first prepared this particular talk... I realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn't been done. And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web. Because the web has produced so much uninformed criticism. It's kind of a Gresham's Law-bad money drives the good money out of circulation. Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can't criticize anything.Collection: Hate
Bad User on Device is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated.Collection: Media