| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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| Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet. |  |
| PDF link for printable transcription | Alan Kay |
This text was first published in If / Then From Alan Kay's lecture 'The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happend Yet' in the Fall 1997 Franz Rosenzweig Lehrhaus series Technology: Blessing or Curse? at the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York. New media from clavichord to computer keyboard. Is the computer more like a musical instrument or the printing press? Amateur pipe-organist and computer pioneer Alan Kay compares these three technologies and argues that, without more serious understanding of the computer's capacity to change the way we think and act, what will develop is a "Chopsticks" culture, not a more literate society. I once had a 'heckler' in a talk about technology, an anti-technology-person. I invited him to come up and talk about it. So he came on stage and I said: "Let me relieve you of all the technology that's encumbering you right now." He nodded pretty reasonably when I took his watch from him. But when I started removing his clothes he started protesting. I said "Quiet: language is a technology, it's one of the things that we make." He didn't have much to do from then on. For people like this, technology is all the stuff that wasn't around when they were born. There is really nothing you can consider human that isn't based in our formulation of ourselves through language and culture. Much of what we are comes from fashioning ourselves through our various symbol and representation systems. So technology is just *us*. That doesn't mean it's not dangerous, because *we're* dangerous. And when you take something dangerous and amplify it, you can get something *really* dangerous. I'm going to take three technologies, one of which ¬ for most people in this room ¬ was just getting started when they were born, or didn't exist. 1 The first technology is a neutral one: musical instruments. I used to be a professional musician, playing the jazz-guitar for 10 years ¬ stage bands and other kinds of things. I am also an amateur pipe-organist. I have a big, baroque pipe organ at home that we built over six years. It's about as high as the ceiling, has 1450 pipes, more than 40,000 parts. Building one of these things makes you very aware that it is a machine. Once you get it done, the touch on it is about half the touch on a (forte?) piano¬ featherlight, even though there are all of these [tracers?] going all over the place. It's the most complicated mechanical thing that people made 250, 300 years ago. The piano is a more mundane representative of this kind of instrument. A concert-pianist friend of mine was an anti-technologist until I pointed out that his piano was a piece of technology. He had been playing since he was six, gave his debut at twelve with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and was so much a part of it he had not thought of it as a machine. To him it was just an extension. That's what technology is when it's working: an extension of the best we can do. When a musical instrument is working well, it takes the best we have and allows us to do special things with it. But there's no music in the piano. The music comes out of us. It's a kind of epi-phenomenon, but you don't get it just by putting it in a home or a classroom. [Another question I like to ask is : when is technology an amplifier and when a prosthetic? A bike is a pretty good amplifier, not much of a prosthetic. But a car has some prosthetic attributes. Put a prosthetic limb on a healthy one and it starts withering. It's doing the work instead of you.] A clavichord is the most expressive keyboard instrument invented, but much less expressive than any other instrument. You just can't do that much with the tone. You can play a piano with a rake, because the key is detached from the hammer once it goes down. You can influence its velocity when it starts off and have the dampers a certain way, but that's it. If you've ever heard two different pianists play the same piano one right after the other, it often sounds as if they're playing two completely different pianos. The piano also absolves the player from having to pay much attention to pitch, which makes it not a terribly good first instrument for kids. Drop a rock on a key and it will play that pitch. It's not going to play it sharp or flat; you can't nuance the pitch. This can lead to a mechanical approach, where you don't even have to listen to yourself to play. We've all read stories about people who practice for hours while reading a book, playing scales up and down. Why pay any attention to keyboard instruments? The answer is: a human being alone can't do polyphony, only one voice at a time, unless they're a Tibetan monk. Basically we're single-voice instruments. The piano keyboard allows us polyphony and ¬ even more important for western music¬ harmony. Anyone who has learned the theory of harmony and taken some mathematics will have noticed some similarities. Much of elementary geometry is recognizing 'if this thing is this over here, then it has to be the same thing over there.' Harmony has only been invented once, because there are hardly any musical instruments in which the pitches are laid out such that you can see the visual geometry of how sounds relate to each other. Keyboard instruments were invented around the year 1600, and developed in the seventeenth century. The keyboard made people start noticing these patterns: 'This works here and then it works here. This has this interval relationship and this interval relationship...' [The fact that this happened in the 17th century was no coincidence. Thomas Hobbes start writing political essays based on reason, as opposed to simple rhetorical argument. Newton's (...) was written in exact imitation of (...) Hugo's elements¬ an attempt to do science as though it were geometry.] Baroque music came about because of the invention of the opera, which required something like a church motet [?], a choral accompaniment that was done with a lute. Being a guitar player, I can tell you: doing simple accompaniments on a guitar in the style of the 17th century really is no mean trick. You have to be an excellent player. But to render those same accompaniments on a keyboard is almost trivial. So the keyboard became very, very popular. Harpsichords were even built with gutstrings ¬ hard to keep in tune ¬ to imitate the lute. Some of the most gorgeous music ever written for the harpsichord, in 17th century France, was an imitation of the lute style, using the same kinds of ballads. So the keyboard was an attempt to automate something that was tough and expensive. Eventually it paid its way eventually by giving us a new way of thinking about music ¬ which came out of this new tool-to-think-with. That's why the keyboard is a very important pivotal technology. 2 The second technology is printing. Socrates said that writing forces you to follow an argument rather than participate in it. He hated the idea that somebody could write something down, and then go off and die, and you would never be able to argue them back out of it. What we think is so important about writing, he thought was horrible. The spread of knowledge to which people now analogize the Internet was brought about by the printing press. If you are trying to write an argument that is going to be copied by scribes, you had better couch it in some form that is going to survive the retelling, like various kinds of allegory and metric schemes. You want to capture the essence of the story and it can't be so much of an argument, because the points might get lost, but something that is able constantly to repair itself such that the original is contained. Only long after the invention of the printing press did people realize it meant something very different from manuscript writing. Once the author had corrected the galley proofs, the press would kick out 2,000 copies absolutely in accord with those galleys. Page numbers first started appearing in books in western culture in 1516, about 65 years after the invention of the printing press. They had appeared centuries before in Jewish writings, because Jews ¬ a marginalized society outside the intellectual world of western culture ¬ were already trying to argue and annotate and cross-reference. When you are building a tightly-reasoned argument, you need something like the press to transmit its nuances exactly as you intended. That was a huge change. And it took hundreds of years. It took the Catholic Church 100 years to figure out that books might be dangerous. The first on its index of banned books was Copernicus' book about the heliocentric system, about a 100 years after the printing press; 150 years after, the second best-selling book in England was still an astrology book. Some things don't change. The best-selling book was of course the Bible. In 1600 science had not yet been invented, but was starting to creep into existence. All of a sudden, in the 17th century, this new rhetoric of close argument and trying to imitate recent arguments started to become very important. This country [the United States] is based entirely on those arguments. I brought one of them along. Tom Paine's *Common Sense* was written in about five or six weeks, and published, anonymously and at his own expense, in January 1776 when we were already at war with the British. A pamphlet without a cover, it's about why monarchies might not be the best way of doing things, and an attempt to argue not from polemic or rhetoric, but from first causes whenever possible. One of his famous lines was: "A thing long done, becomes so habitual that it seems natural." In the six months after publication between 500,000 and 600,000 were printed for a grand total of 1.5 million colonists. A careful study, undertaken about six years ago, to estimate the real level of literacy in America, said: 'if you take literacy as the ability to deal with the most important discourse of your civilization, then no more than 20 percent of Americans can really read and understand the comment on this.' So we're perhaps less literate now, than we were back then. We don't know really how literate they were. Then there was something even smaller and tinier: the Constitution of the United States. It's a tiny little book, if you make it into a book, and very interesting to computer scientists because it has admirable parsimony. This is the prescription for a kind of social machine: what it has taken to run a machine full of millions of non-cooperative parts, namely us, for hundreds of years, without breaking. One of the seven modern wonders of the world, to be able to design a system from scratch, prompted by saying: "We can design a better system than humans do by common sense. Let's try and organize the way they live.' What was in here and what isn't in here? There is a joke that says: in America everything that is not against the law is permitted. In Germany everything that is not in the law is forbidden. In Italy everything that is in the law is permitted. And in Russia everything that is okay to do, is forbidden. Four different ways of looking at the world. So the guys who framed the U.S. Constitution realized: "We can't write down how people live, not even today and we can't write it down fifty years from now." They debated doing one of these every generation, but decided not to ¬ thank goodness, becaus I think they were better than most of their successors. They decided to just let everything happen as it does and write down how to resolve the conflicts. 'We'll have a wide open system here and we will try and keep it from going out of control, but we won't specify how to control it.' Incredibly wise. When somebody asks me: "What is the best book to read about computer systems design?" I say: "Well read The Federalist Papers, because that explains why this [subj?] is a good idea. Then read the U.S. Constitution, because you'll see the size of an invention that affects people for hundreds and hundreds of years." Everybody is comfortable with the idea that music is interactive, though we would hate to force every child in America to learn to play the piano. There was a period when that was almost the case. It would be great if music was pervasive in the culture, but making every child fluent in music seems like going too far. But most European cultures *did* decide that it is absolutely, vitally important for every child in the culture to be fluent with the music of the printing press. That's a big difference. The hardest thing talking about computers is that things aren't always what they seem. You can do things with a computer for a long time without actually touching their essence because they are such a chameleons: they spend most of their time imitating other media, like paper, television, cartoons, movies. Most people who have used the computer have never touched what it is actually about. What's inside it is not esoteric in the way quantum mechanics is esoteric. Almost everyone can learn to drive a car, in about half an hour. But I have never found a way of explaining in a satisfactory manner what the music of a computer is in about half an hour. So I have to make an analogy. The most important thing to understand about the computer is that if it were a book, then it is a book that can dynamically read and write itself. Its content is the same as any media content. The computer contains just abstract markings, from which you can fashion anything ¬ the symbols for any language, any mathematics, any pictures. But that's too atomic a way of looking at it. Much of its content is descriptions of media. It is a language machine, that deals with things that are like sentences, and can not only move those sentences around and hold them and send them, but also read and write those sentences. In a fairly open-ended way. It's a whole new way to deal with relationships between ideas. For which the short word is: 'mathematics'. Math is one of those terms to which we've been sensitized. And, unfortunately, because of our school system, most children and now most adults have never had any contact with math whatsoever. Math is actually the science of studying patterns of things: organizations and disorganizations and correlations and relationships between any number of things. Math is a subset of language and we know from the way we use language and the way stories are told that stories don't have to be consistent. [If you're coming home from a trip and your significant other is really glad to see you, then the proverb for that is: *Absence makes the heart grow fonder*. But if you come home and your significant other is not particularly happy to see you, then the reason is *Out of sight, out of mind.* If you see something out there that confirms your every belief, then you say: "Where there's smoke, there's fire.* But if you see something that goes *against* your beliefs, and you say: *You can't tell a book by its cover*. King Solomon was the wisest man in the bible, because he used more proverbs than anybody else. The problem with proverbs is, that in a literate society they don't fly very well. The Greeks noticed that for every proverb there is an anti-proverb. They realized: "Hey wait a minute, all we are doing is comforting ourselves here. We're not actually thinking, we just *think* we're thinking. We're actually making up stories after the fact as to why we should think everything is okay."] Math is a larger scheme of trying to deal with relationships or ideas, just like in ordinary language. You don't require algebra examples to do math; you just require an interest in consistency. Ofcourse math is desperately, desperately dangerous. Because it's not about anything more than language is. Language is only about itself. There is nothing about language that forces anybody to tell the truth. You can make up anything you want and put it in there, you can draw any map you want and put it in there. Th problem with math is that there is a lure in the consistency of an argument. It still may be complete bullshit, or even worse than bullshit: it may be terribly dangerous to a civilization. Nothing was more rationalized than German's 'Final Solution' in World War Two. They liked the logic of it. Math is context free. Science is all about trying to figure out what context can we use which language in. This is why science is incredibly more important than mathematics. The problem with the computer is that it tends to automate too much if we let it. Like a car. Or like a player piano, which you can use instead of learning how to play. Use it to replace playing, and you're subtracting yourself out of the musical process. One of the ethics of the computer community ¬ and for technology in general ¬ is: don't automate the center of your interest, automate the fringes. Then you can usually get the best of both worlds. 1+2+3 Let me take these three technologies and try and lump them together. I've had the following experience all too often over the last number of years. Go into a classroom and you discover kids happily doing things on a computer. The teacher is happy, the parents are happy, the principal is happy ¬ everybody is happy. But if you look more closely at what the kids are doing, they are doing nothing of any consequence whatsoever. It's like putting a piano in a classroom, but not putting any musicians in there. What grows up is a kind of *Chopsticks* culture. The kids are unafraid of these pieces of technology, but the fact that they are happy and doing things is almost always meaningless. Because it actually takes centuries of work to develop the larger ideas about these forms, until it gets to be more than just playing around. I've been in classrooms where the same thing happen with books, because elementary school teachers are often much less literate than we think. Teachers are for the most part totally illiterate in math and science, I mean totally. The fact that they know how to add two numbers together is meaningless ¬ not even math unless you think about it in a particular way. And nobody cares. I have a degree in mathematics and what pains me the most going into classrooms is the mathematics textbooks ¬ designed to be bought by totally unsophisticated people, with riots of colors and stuff. Math is cool, not hot. They emphasize coverage and zillions of things, when what you really want is to take one or two things over the year and get to the bottom of them. One of today's fondly held myths is that 'kids will show us the way.' Adults respond to kids' fearlessness, but if they had any sophistication whatsoever, they would realize that no kid ever invented calculus, or a (c-7th cord ?), or how to really finger a keyboard to get the maximum out of it. Kids are able to plunge in and, in a rich enough environment, actually get fluent at this stuff. When I was working on personal computers thirty years ago, the one I did looked kind of like an Apple II: it had a box set on a desk, a display screen, and a tablet instead of a mouse. When I looked at it, I thought: "Gee, this thing looks just like a time-sharing display terminal, except the timesharing computer isn't there." I immediately thought of the Gutenberg Bible, which is made to look as much like a manuscript book as possible. Two hundred and fifty-three different characters in the font to imitate every ligature and abbreviation done by the Medieval scribes. Rubricators were brought in to re-illuminate Gutenberg Bibles, which were a lot less expensive than manuscript ones (a couple of million dollars by today's standards) but still about $60,000 ¬ three years of a clerk's wages. Gutenberg Bibles are big because that was the size of manuscript books. It wasn't until 50 years later, around 1495, that Aldus made books the size they are today. Why? Because they measured the saddlebags. The first set of books from Aldus's press was called "The Portable Library." Books had now come down to a few hundred dollars by today's standards, which meant they could be lost. If they could be lost, then they could be moved without peril. Back in 1967, I realized that as long as a computer sat on a desk and looked like a time-sharing terminal, it wasn't participating in the actual revolution. It was participating in the automation of the old. That's exactly where we are right now. Only when the computer becomes something like an article of clothing, or a pocketbook, will things have developed sufficiently to become a way of life. And that can only happen when there is enough actual content. We got content in printing by being able to print unbelievably large amount of bad stuff. The 19th Century is called 'The Age Of Invention' because the total number patents went up by a factor of 8200. Most were absolute crap. Crackpot inventions. But the important thing was that everybody was trying to invent. It was in the air. Some inventions turned out to be very important. The total number of good inventors went up. That's what happens if you go from being a scribed society to a larger society: make the society literate and the quality of writing will go up, even though the total number of writers still remains rather small. This is one of the reasons for saying: "No, The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet." It's not going to happen until the kids start learning its music, and particularly the reading and writing of its music, the stuff which is most important to deal with. And it is not going to happen until the technology becomes available in almost throwaway form. So when you're lying on your back in a pool and a 10-year-old comes and overturns you and the computer sinks to the bottom, it's not a tragedy. You just go out and get another one for $19.95. If that happened to your laptop today, you would not appreciate it. It's still a special thing used for special purposes, rather than something you grow up with. The most important thing to think about the computer revolution is whether it's more like a musical instrument or more like the printing press. If it's like a musical instrument, then we don't have to worry about it too much, because people who are tuned to the music will find it and good things will happen as a result. If it's more like the printing press, then we absolutely have to understand what it is about the music and what it takes to learn that music. Because the continuation of our civilization could be vitally involved with this new thing. I think the computer is much more like the printing press than like a musical instrument, and should be taken much more seriously. Q: Are there going to be new ways for us to interact with computers, more experiential? Will we move beyond the desktop metaphor? AK: What we invented at Xerox PARC wasn't really a desktop metaphor ¬ that was Apple's rendering of it. Our basic idea was that if they are using a computer in a sensible and helpful way, a reasonable kid or adult is going to do projects lasting over many days and weeks. So you should really have a project-based interface ¬ all the materials, all the windows, all the tools and everything for that project ¬ that sustains over time. The Apple people never understood that when they saw the demo, and all the years I spend at Apple, I tried to get them to put that in. Today, you have to constantly build up and break down windows and the screens get very cluttered, whereas this has a sustaining over time of your projects. But it is something that Apple never got... Virtually no-one who has implemented that interface design in the commercial world has ever taken the slightest interest in why it works so well. If they knew why, they would also know a lot more about when it *doesn't* work. But they don't care. Most of these things today are sold on the number of features. User interface design is hundreds of times harder than doing basic technology. It took us just a few months at Xerox PARC to do most of the basic hardware and software technology we have today. But it took us five years to even invent that overlapping window interface ¬ because there are these mushy, feeling creatures called humans who are feeling their way in this space, trying to find something they can extend themselves in to. Much of the friendliness of the interface is not pointing to things with the mouse, but being able to pull things and pick them up as an extension of your hand. It's well-known now, cognitively, that at the basis of much of our learning is things we have been able to handle. We learn to see in part by perambulating and interacting with the world physically. It's not terribly healthy for kids to have a lot of interaction with knowledge systems at an early age that don't involve kinaesthetic experiences ¬ but that stuff is expensive. My theory is that we should get Japanese toy companies to make them for a buck and let them break every couple of weeks, then you'd just go out and for another couple of bucks, and get another set. Q: What do you think of teleconferencing and by extension, what is the future of office space? A: I like thresholds of things rather than comparisons. So an interesting threshold with any telecommunication system, is whether you can argue through it or not. I'll tell you a personal story. Xerox held a conference with 2,000 'artificial intelligentsia', at a center that didn't have a room for 2,000 people. So they decided to do it with teleconferencing: twenty or thirty people in a room, linked together. The most powerful person at this forum was the Comptroller of Denver, a lady about 65 years old with an incredible personality. She just dominated, in the nicest way. At a cocktail party the first afternoon, I was getting a piece of shrimp and looked over and here was this little old lady standing next to me. And about two minutes later I realized that this was the Comptroller of Denver. She was about five feet tall, but on television she was about the same size as everybody else, just like kids are. And there is no possibility of physical threat. The interaction was completely different because of that. To quote Paul Hindemith: "The greatest sin in art is not boredom, as it is commonly supposed, but lack of proportion." You can apply that to pipe organs, orchestras, buildings. Human beings have a real problem with scale: if something is a little better by doing more of it, then why not do ten times more of it? The simplest prediction is that most business people will scale any technology badly. Technologies, especially of the 20th century, force us more and more to make choices for ourselves that nature used to make. On the other hand, you could say that what's happened since the 1960s is that all the stuff that used to be under the rug is now out in the open. To me things are better than they have ever been before, but they look worse because so many things were hidden before. The positive thing is that technology is forcing us to do things we should do anyway: take some responsibility for our lives. The early-term effects are going to be similar to what happened with television, which I think is a complete disaster. Things were simpler when a kid was brought up in a closed culture. If kids were wired like robots, then it would be easy, but they aren't and they need to be protected more now and brought in gradually to this unbelievable cacophony of ideas. If you are exposed to every belief system on earth at an early age, I think that's entirely wrong. Q: Are there more similarities than differences between musical instruments and the printing press, and is there a way to relate all of them? A: I chose those two analogies for tonight, because they started me going thirty years ago and are still providing me with insights. Gosh, what should the personal computer be like? I thought: like a musical instrument, because there is an intimacy there, and like a book, because it can hold super-high and important content. There is an intimacy with the Aldus-style book ¬ in the kind of communication you have with the author. Because of the physics of silicon, it was possible to predict with high accuracy, thirty years ago, the exponentional improvement in silicon. We can now predict ten years or more ahead of time exactly what kind of computer we will have. That's gold to a researcher: you know the technology is going to meet you at the pass, so why not make a long-range plan? The computer will be able to compute what you have come up with. The hard deal in this game is software and user interface design. So you really have to make long plans. McLuhan had this nice quote: "humans are makers of technologies and then the technologies turn around and remake us." So it's a co-evolution ¬ a deadly embrace we can never get out of. Our brains are about fashioning artifacts, including the structures we build inside there. If we are self-conscious about it, we can actually control the co-evolution and if we are non-self-conscious about it then it is going to absolutely drowns us in bullshit. Because its natural, easy form, is bullshit. Q: What exactly does a Disney fellow do? Your intellectual itinerary has taken place outside of the academy in a number of very important businesses. What is it like to be in that company now? A: In the sixties, when I was in graduate school, the greatest research funding the world had ever seen in computers was done by the Department of Defense in the public domain, through the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Pretty much every Ph.D. that went to Xerox PARC was funded by this group. In a fit of lack of proportion by Congress about the Vietnam War, the Mansfield Amendment shut off that funding, because the students were blindly reacting about the government being on campus and not caring about the details. In this case the details were devastating, because ARPA was the only funding in which people, rather than projects, were funded. We have been running on fumes ever since, let me tell you. Xerox PARC would never have happened without the Mansfield Amendment choking us. Maybe one person out of the thirty that went there would have gone to a company if the ARPA funding had held. Because the natural place for people like us was in the universities, working with students. One of ARPA's funders got invited to Xerox PARC and went around trying to convince people he had funded through graduate school, age thirty and under, to come to this new lab. We talked about it a lot and got some concessions from Xerox, as far as being able to publish and other things. In order to advance technology ¬ particularly this new media stuff ¬ we had to actually create it. And, unlike today when you can buy a chip for 25 bucks, we needed many millions of dollars to build hundreds of machines, pre-Macintoshes, and try them out. Normally we would have done that at ARPA . Xerox was the next best thing. Xerox could have had a ten-year lock on that technology, but blew it by ignoring it. So everybody left Xerox in disgust and zillions of start-ups came about and it was almost as good as ARPA in the end. So we are in that complicated place right now. My aim ¬ and it is always a trade-off ¬ is to try and get the intellectual property out of the company. The last thing we did at Apple was convince them to put several millions of dollars worth of work out on the Internet for free. Disney is an interesting company in many ways: it's an entertainment company trying to become a media company. When there is some transition, there is always the chance to influence things. Disney has probably 50,000 products a year, most made by other companies, so it is a huge engine. Somebody told me that something like 15,000 products came out of *101 Dalmatians* ¬ sounds almost obscene! At Apple they only had a few products, so if you did anything that wasn't like those products, suddenly the thought-police were all over you. Whereas in Disney, a company with 50,000 products, if you do one that might be educational or good for a kid, why not? It is just one fifty-thousandth of the overall products. I spent about a year determining there were would be no barriers to doing high-content stuff for kids at Disney. That's what I went there to do. Q: Did you have a brief from them as to what they wanted from you as a fellow? A: I have never accepted that, ever. I was a fellow at Xerox and a fellow at Apple and the basic deal is small amounts of entirely discretionary funding. That is the deal. I know Disney has different reputations in different quarters, but I can truly say that I have never before worked with as many highly creative people. Just never, not even at Xerox Park. They don't have a lot of computer people yet, but the positive energy within the company ¬ as far as actual work, as opposed to what the corporate processes might or not be ¬ is incredible. I like small groups, doing our own thing, having fun with other people, learning and trying and help a kid whenever you can. That's basically our game. We are just a drop in the bucket. Disney has something like 102,000 employees in a $20 billion company. We have already done a high-content product for kids that will be coming out on the Internet. Edutainment is getting from A to B as quickly as possible. In education, the journey is emphasized, so B is gone by the time you get there; it's really C because you are a different person. High-content ¬ or as Seymour Papert calls it, 'Hard Fun' ¬ is like hitting a baseball or learning to read: the more work you put in to the activity, the more you get back from it. Disney has mostly been doing Soft Fun and we're interested in Hard Fun. Disney is big enough to do both. We'll see. I have had a great time this last year. It has been very successful. Abridged from Alan Kay's lecture "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet," given in the Fall 1997 Franz Rosenzweig Lehrhaus series "Technology: Blessing or Curse" at the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York. Published with thanks to the Steve Shaw, director, JTS Department of Education. PULL QUOTES Harmony has only been invented once, because there are hardly any musical instruments in which the pitches are laid out so you can see the visual geometry of how sounds relate to each other. The keyboard made people start noticing these patterns. The keyboard was an attempt to automate something tough and expensive. Eventually it paid its way eventually by giving us a new way of thinking about music. Doing simple accompaniments on a guitar in the style of the 17th century really is no mean trick. You have to be an excellent player. But to render those same accompaniments on a keyboard is almost trivial. So the keyboard became very, very popular. The most important thing to understand about the computer is that if it were a book, then it is a book that can dynamically read and write itself. It is a language machine that deals with things that are like sentences, and can not only move those sentences around and hold them and send them, but also read and write those sentences. When you are building a tightly-reasoned argument, you need something like the press to transmit its nuances exactly as you intended. That was a huge change. And it took hundreds of years. When somebody asks me: "What is the best book to read about computer systems design?" I say: "read the U.S. Constitution, because you'll see the size of an invention that affects people for hundreds and hundreds of years." Go into a classroom and you discover kids happily doing things on a computer. The teacher is happy, the parents are happy, the principal is happy ¬ everybody is happy. But if you look more closely at what the kids are doing, they are doing nothing of any consequence whatsoever. One of today's fondly held myths is that 'kids will show us the way.' If adults had any sophistication whatsoever, they would realize that no kid ever invented calculus, or how to really finger a keyboard to get the maximum out of it. |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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