BigShinyThing

Alan Kay — educator, scientist and co-designer of the OLPC device — in a recent interview:

The things that are wrong with the Web today are due to this lack of curiosity in the computing profession. And it’s very characteristic of a pop culture. Pop culture lives in the present; it doesn’t really live in the future or want to know about great ideas from the past. I’m saying there’s a lot of useful knowledge and wisdom out there for anybody who is curious, and who takes the time to do something other than just executing on some current plan. Cicero said, “Who knows only his own generation remains always a child.” People who live in the present often wind up exploiting the present to an extent that it starts removing the possibility of having a future.

[Via if:book]

Computer scientist and educational technologist Alan Kay is famous for two things: his exhortation that

The best way to predict the future, is to invent it.

and his stunning success in doing just that — during his time with Xerox in the early 1970s, Kay and his team developed not just the computer interface as we know it — with windows, icons, mice and pointers, but also, in 1972, conceived of the Dynabook: a radical portable device somewhere between a laptop and a tablet PC, unbuildable for another 30 years.

We’ve been reading some of those early papers, and were interested to see what he had to say, in 1972, about what people would do with such tools:

The ability to make copies easily and to ‘own’ one’s information will probably not debilitate existing markets, just as xerography has enhanced publishing (rather than hurting it, as some predicted), and as tapes have not damaged the LP record business but have provided a way to organize one’s own music. Most people are not interested in acting as a source or bootlegger; rather, they like to permute and play with what they own. [our emphasis]

and

A combination of this ‘carry anywhere’ device and a global information utility such as the ARPA network or two-way cable TV, will bring the libraries and schools [not to mention stores and billboards] of the world to the home. One can imagine one of the first programs an owner will write is a filter to eliminate advertising. [our emphasis]