1. Viewpoints Research Institute
1968
2008
Five 5 Minute Ideas
Preface
These are the slides and commentary from a talk given to the Research Board. As an experiment, I decided to try to write a coherent essay using the slides as a sequence of topics.
The essay form is quite a bit more efficient than talking, so there is considerably more content in the narrative than in the talk – and the narrative also covers more than the talk. Many of the observations in the narrative did not appear at all in the talk.
The result is kind of a hybrid – it's not what I would say in a talk (or did say), but it is also not what I would write in an essay (because tying the narrative to the slides precluded using a number of examples that would not work at all in a talk, but would be perfectly amenable in an essay).
I hope that the hybrid will be of some use – and in particular will provide motivation for downloading and reading several of the essays we have written about this and related subjects.
Alan Kay is one of the earliest pioneers of object-oriented programming, personal computing, and graphical user interfaces. This work was done in the rich context of ARPA and Xerox PARC with many talented colleagues, and has been recognized with the:
Charles Stark Draper Prize* of the National Academy of Engineering “for the vision, conception, and development of the first practical networked personal computers”
Alan M. Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery “for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing”
Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation “for creation of the concept of modern personal computing and contribution to its realization”
*with Butler Lampson, Robert Taylor, and Chuck Thacker
Alan Kay
Viewpoints Research Institute
SAP
Walldorf, July 19th, 2013

2. 0.
Big Data?
Big Meaning!
Big Data

3. 1.

4. 1.
Horse?
Horse
Caballo
Caballo?

5. 1.

6. 1.

7. 1. ?

8. ? 1. Employee? Sell? Employee? Buy?
“Data is just a stupid programming language”
— Bill Gosper

9. 1. ?

10. 1. ?

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12. 2.
Big Meaning! ?

13. 3. Apple B Apple A Wants Needs Educators Marketeers SAP (aka us)?
Civilization
Progress, etc.
Consumer Products
Pop Culture, etc.
Effort Required
Exploration
Training
Deep Learning

14. 4.
UI is not just Doing, but Learning

15. 4.
Don't Optimize Bad Ideas!

16. 4.
e. g.

17. 5. Progress is a team sport! We Need Advancers Hired Guns Practical
Large Systems Programmers
Academia
Progress is a team sport!