Alan Kay: The PC Must Be Revamped—Now - ' Reinventing the PC '
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Reinventing the PC
How would these new systems and computers be different from the kinds of PCs we're familiar with now?
I don't want to get hyperbolic about it, but one of the most interesting questions connected with this is: How much learning is a person willing to do to really learn how to use a computer? The answer, over the last 25 years of the commercialization of personal computing, is almost none. Nobody really wants to put in any amount of effort. The things that people have been willing to learn have tended to be like the media they grew up with, which have really simple user interfaces. (The big exception is video games.) You don't see Doug Engelbart's approach to user interface, which was an incredibly efficient, two-handed interface that required training to learn how to use.
One way of looking at personal computing is to focus on the kinds of things that computers can help people learn. There are a whole bunch of things that can be done if learning, rather than function, matters. If you were to change the approach to the user interface, as we thought we were doing at Xerox PARC, to a more learning-curve-oriented system, then you would be able to accelerate the acceptance of the newer ideas about what computers can do.
The spreadsheet, for example, with a few changes in it, would be thought of as being a highly parallel simulation engine. If you think of the purpose of the spreadsheet being not only to tabulate what did happen, but to give you an idea of what could happen, you would immediately redesign the spreadsheet and integrate it with graphical displays or visualization in a very different way. You would be on the road to a different kind of computer literacy. Another area is trying to keep track of lots of things that are happening simultaneously in time, and building a language that would model an aspect of the real world that's so important to us. There are just dozens of these examples.
Is it really necessary to reinvent the PC if computing is to leap forward?
When you go to a mass market and marketing is driving things rather than ideas, customers and the marketers will find a common ground where the marketers and buyers don't have to work too hard. The mundanity of the market sustains itself for a while, but then starts actually hurting itself because it gets into a position where it cannot imagine what the next stages would be.
What could get people to adapt this new style of computing?
Basically, the reason I work with children and not adults is because adults are famously difficult to change in any significant way. They've made a commitment to the norms of the world they live in. Children are born not knowing what culture they've been born into, how the culture thinks, and what that culture thinks is important. Yet they are born with some built-in patterns of thinking that are universal. Since the late sixties, I've been interested in the extent to which you could cultivate the kind of thinking skills that only a few people use in the world today, by getting children to learn much more widely and much more fluently than most adults have. If you want to make a change, get the children to think differently.
This is one of the big reasons behind the $100 laptop. Particularly in the Third World, where they value the idea of education much more, in a way that's very different from in the United States and Europe, there are many opportunities to see what can be done to help children.
People will attempt to spread our society's pop-culture technology to the Third World as the Third World gets wired up, so there's only a little window of time where you could possibly get children hooked into stuff which requires a lot more learning. It might not be possible, but I can't think of anything that I would rather work on.
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