Alan Kay, The Father Of Mobile Computing Is Not Impressed
The finest distillation of that imagination was the Dynabook, one of the most enduring conceptual artifacts of Silicon Valley—a handheld computer that was powerful, dynamic, and easy enough to operate that children could use it, not only to learn, but to create media and write their own applications. In 1977, Kay and his colleague Adele Goldberg published “Personal Dynamic Media,” the most robust description of its intended operation.
“Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator,” they implored—note the language, and the emphasis on knowledge. “Suppose it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference materials, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change.”
The Dynabook, which looks like an iPad with a hard keyboard, was one of the first mobile computer concepts ever put forward, and perhaps the most influential. Although some of its concepts were realized in 1973 with the desktop Alto, the Dynabook has since accrued the dubious distinction of being the most famous computer that never got built.
I’d headed to Kay’s home in part to ask the godfather of the mobile computer how the iPhone, and a world where 2 billion people own smartphones, compared to what he envisioned in the ’60s and ’70s. Kay believes nothing has yet been produced that fulfills the original specs for the Dynabook, including the iPhone and the iPad. In fact, mobile computers, he says, have turned out to be mind-numbing consumption devices—sophisticated televisions—rather than the wheels for the mind that Steve Jobs envisioned.
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.
So, one of the major things that schools should be charged with, is to teach children to be media guerrillas—that’s what we call them. It’s guerrilla warfare going on, because everything has been infiltrated. ... Things that are constant in our environment both seem natural and also become invisible.
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Well, it’s not really standardized because they’re up to HTML 5, and if you’ve done a good thing, you don’t keep on revving it and adding more epicycles onto a bad idea. We call this reinventing the flat tire. In the old days, you would chastise people for reinventing the wheel. Now we beg, “Oh, please, please reinvent the wheel.”
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..., the telephone was an amplification of a human universal, which means you don’t have to learn how to use it, which means it’s just going to completely triumph over anything that requires you to learn something. ...
The idea is, you never let the child do something that isn’t the real thing—but you have to work your ass off to figure out what the real thing is in the context of the way their minds are working at that developmental level.
When I saw what Papert was doing, while I recognized it immediately, it had just never occurred to me. And then that nanosecond I realized this is what McLuhan was talking about. This is what Montessori was talking about. This thing is the equivalent of the Montessori school.
Papert had the great metaphor. He said, “Look if you want to learn French, don’t take it in fifth or sixth grade. Go to France, because everything that makes learning French reasonable, and everything that helps learning French, is in France.
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I said, “If we’re gonna do a personal computer”—and that’s what I wanted PARC to do and that’s what we wound up doing [with the Alto]—”the children have to be completely full-fledged users of this thing.”
Think about what this means in the context of say, a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad. They aren’t full-fledged users. They’re just television watchers of different kinds.
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A well-written essay is something where the author knows a little bit about you, somehow, and tells you in the beginning of the essay what you need to know and answers questions that the author somehow knows that you have. It’s amazing how well good authors can do this. They prepare you for the whammy, two-thirds of the way through, and for the last third of the thing, where they actually get you to elevate your thinking—it’s incredible, isn’t it?
See the full interview here: https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-about-the-iphone-and-technology-now