notes-misc-miscAlanKayNotes

" So, throw in another level of invention and all of a sudden, you have to have schools. Schools came about originally for teaching writing. We’ve never been a civilization that’s an oral society, so the interesting question’s why. What is different about writing, given it’s just transliteration from speech, particularly in an alphabetic society? Why were alphabets invented?

And why ask when they’re the most obvious thing?

And the answer is, people are completely unaware that they’re making speech sounds. Because what people actually do is normalize all that stuff and they think they’re just speaking words to each other, right? A natural thing to write down is a word, rather than a speech sound.

FC: Sure.

An actor portraying Alexander Graham Bell speaking into a early model of the telephone for a 1926 promotional film by AT&T. [Photo: via Wikicommons] AK: Suppose you want to make a lot of money. Well, just take the top 20 human universals and build a technological amplifier for them—like communication.

The telephone became a success in the late 19th century. And why? Well, at Western Union’s board meeting, in 1895, they said, “No sane person would conduct business through such a contrivance,” because we already had telegrams that were written records, right? For business, [the telegram] is a really great thing because you’ve got records of what people are saying to each other and all that stuff.

But the problem is, 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. [And] what it does is, it takes us one step back towards an oral society. And if you look at a lot of the inventions in the 20th century, it all removed the necessity for reading and writing, right?

FC: Yeah, really simplified it.

AK: And by the way, chat and tweeting? Remove that, because the utterances are so small, they’re basically transliterations of oral. And that has been studied in Africa by some of Jerome Bruner’s students.

Putting a writing system into an oral society doesn’t actually do it, doesn’t change them. It requires something more, because the thing that’s important about writing and how it changes the thinking of the civilization is the literate aspects of it, the structure and the thought, in various ways. Anyway, so this is all stuff that’s water over the dam, but most people don’t understand it. Most people in media don’t understand it.

If you read [Marshall] McLuhan?, the first thing you realize is: Wow, if we could make something like a printing press—but its content is the next level of dealing with complexity, beyond what we could do with prose and written-down mathematics and stuff like that—we can actually create a media environment that the acclimation to [which], just like the acclimation to the printing press, would be another level of thought. And by the way, we need it, because our technology is taking us into a place where we need another level of thought, beyond the level that it took to create it. ... [educator Maria] Montessori’s ... She was the one who, early on, got onto this idea that we’re driven genetically to learn the culture around us. One of the things she said was, look, the problem is, the culture around most children, whether at home or in school, is like the 10th century, and we’re living in the 20th century. If you really want them to learn, if you want them all to learn, it can’t be like choosing a musical instrument because you’re interested in it. Everybody learns their culture, because it’s in the form of a culture, and that trumps any particular interest we have.

This is what McLuhan? was talking about too. That’s a big deal. It’s a difference between taking a class in something and living in something. So if you want to fix this, you gotta fix the schools, and get the kids to grow up in the 21st century, rather than being in a technological version of the 11th century.

FC: Right. And shouldn’t the technology that all those kids need to be taught to engage with, shouldn’t that assist them instead of making it, you know, a kind of a commoditized front that they have to penetrate?

AK: Yeah. Sure. There’s a lot of things that could be done.

For instance, I got into thinking about personal computing from a child’s point of view, because of an encounter with Seymour Papert, the Logo [programming language] guy in the ’60s. I had heard about him, went to visit him in ’68. I read all his stuff. Papert was a mathematician. I have a degree in math and I could see what he was doing. It was like, “Holy shit. This is the best idea anybody’s ever had.” It was profound. ... There are profound things in mathematical thinking and the way it models the world that are traditionally left until high school, and even college, for a variety of reasons. They are abstract, but there are things about the way the child’s mind works that, if you just took that into account seriously—and Papert did and only a few other people did—back then, you could immediately invent a mathematics that was real mathematics and perfectly suited for them.

He realized, “Oh, we could take the real content out here as a version in the child’s world that is still the real thing.” It’s not a fake version of math. It’s kind of like little league, or even T-ball. In sports they do this all the time. In music, they do it all the time. 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. ... FC: How did this feed into your vision for a mobile computer?

AK: That was when I thought up the Dynabook, because I was already doing a desktop computer in 1968. That was my thesis project and I just finished it to get my PhD?. I did my little Dynabook cartoon with the two kids learning physics by having programmed their own game of Space War on this thing out in the open, lying on the grass, with wireless networking connecting the two things. None of these were new ideas. But putting the kids, and then, the connection with McLuhan…? " -- [1]

" 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...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? " -- [2]