How to invent the future (part 2)

So I kept on rewriting the title. This is not a bad title for this class. Another way of looking at it is instead of trying to move forward from here where everything is confusing and the present looks like reality, we wanna go out to the future and bring it back. And we talked about some process and methods. Today we're gonna talk about a few of the gazillion things.

Of course, I didn't get done last week, which made this week even more. And finally, decided, screw it, I'm gonna do this, both of these talks again without an audience. To do them to their natural length, Because the destiny for this is being online and online people are not confined to fifty minute hours. And I'm sure Sam was all for that. Great, so again, here's my email address.

Of all the people who are tuned into this talk and in the classroom, I got three emails. One of which was interesting. That means that either or both of my talk isn't interesting or you're not interesting or both. So try and at least disabuse me of the latter. Okay, so to start off with, here's Leonardo, pretty smart guy. Imagine if you were born with twice Leonardo's IQ.

Think of how easy it would be to get into Stanford. Maybe you do have twice Leonardo's IQ. But suppose you were born with twice Leonardo's IQ in October, how far are you gonna get? Zip, right? Before they burn you at the stake or whatever they did back then. Yeah, so here's a guy with nowhere near Leonardo's IQ, Henry Ford.

And whereas Leonardo could not invent a single motor for any of his vehicles, think about that. So he was smart, but he wasn't that smart. Henry Ford was able to put together processes that allowed him to make millions and millions of cars for about 800, sell them for $800 a piece.

And the difference between the two was that Ford was born into the right century and Leonardo was born into the wrong century. And so the knowledge that it had accumulated in the nineteenth century made much more difference than any level of smartness. And where did that knowledge come from? It came, might as well pick Newton if you're gonna pick anybody.

It came because the context was changed from the middle ages and the renaissance to something completely different in the seventeenth century. And Newton made the biggest change of anybody. And so we can call that change a change in outlook. We can call it a change in context, world view, point of view, whatever you want. So I'm numbering rules for you. I decided to go back and start with zero.

So the zero through here, probably the most important one is to make progress here, me move this guy off. Context or point of view is worth 80 IQ points. If you've got the context of science and math, you're gazillions of times smarter effectively than the smartest people of antiquity like Archimedes.

A person who learns calculus with an IQ of 110 or 120 can do things that the greatest geniuses of the past can't do. Okay, so we can sum that up by saying knowledge is silver, context is gold, and IQ is just lead. It's a lead weight on you. Biggest problem with most people who are at your level and going to the next level is you're always the smartest people in your classroom or room at home.

But that only means you're the smartest person amongst 30 or 100. And if you happen to be a room that had the hundred smartest people in the world, and you were the smartest person in that room, you're still not as smart as the other 99 working together. So being clever doesn't do it. And this is the simplest snare, is the IQ snare.

Tony Hoare, really great guy, was here at Stanford for a while, Turing winner. Said debugging is harder than programming, so don't use all your cleverness to write the program. Anybody recognize this? Anybody write programs here? Let me see hands. Yeah. So people are so clever writing the program, they forget that debugging is harder. And that's true about anything.

So that's principle number one, we had zero. And here's a summary of what I showed you. And the number two one at the top there is that the goodness of the results correlates most strongly with the goodness of the funders. This is the simplest way of summing up the past. Because you have to realize, the difference in the past wasn't that the people were smarter back then.

We weren't smarter than the smart people today. Every generation has really smart people. The difference in whether you get enormous results or not is in this context idea and the funders that support it. And one of the ways of thinking about them is, as opposed to getting gold medals like a bunch of us have gotten in our 60s and 70s, 40 years after you did the deeds.

Good funders give out the gold medals ahead of time knowing that 70% of them are gonna turn to lead. Because the funders give it out before you've gotten the results. So this will be a slide that you can use later on. It's basically what I said last time. And last time we looked at four systems, Sketchpad. We didn't really look at the Engelbart system, but it's easy to find out about online.

We looked at the first really good gesture system, Grail. And we saw that Ivan Sutherland again invented VR long, long before it ever came to use. And I really rushed past personal computers. And the first thing that was kinda like a personal computer, it was kinda cute, Harry Husky's Bendix G15 in the mid-50s. So this is really early.

Harry just left us a few years over the age of 100, really wonderful guy. Here's my vote for the first real personal computer called the Link by Wes Clark. Wes Clark also did the building size computer that Sketchpad was done on, so he liked to work both large and small. Here's one I did with Ed Cheadle, looks kind of modern. And an idea I had in 1968, which struck me really deeply.

Not because it was a tablet, but because it was a thing that children needed. And I've learned from Seymour Papert what children can actually do with computers, and that seized me in a romantic fashion. And we looked at this idea of better and perfect are the enemy of what is actually needed.

In other words, you have to draw thresholds in order to know where you are, else you're just measuring local variations. You don't know whether they're good or bad. And the last thing we did on Tuesday was looking at this process of taking a glimmer of an idea out thirty or more years to see if it makes more sense thirty years from now than it seems to now. And if it does, you bring it back.

Simulate it by making super computers that allow you to do the software. And five or eight years later, you've got something that will revolutionize the world. This is where the trillions rather than billions comes in, because you create an industry. And last time I didn't get a chance to show you kind of what an example, just one of the examples of what Park did, so I thought I'd do it.

Today, and this is a self portrait because now I have extracted stuff from a demo. But this is a system we brought back to life from 1978. So you get a chance, and this is a self portrait. So this is the successor to the Alto called the Dorado. So it had now an x bigger than xVGA screen rather than the portrait model.

And this dithering technique was invented at the same time in the 70s by Bob Floyd and Steinberg, and partly done at Park. So this is what a typical image on only a few computers in the world looked like back then, one bit per point. And where do we get this system from? Well, here's the Xerox dump. And if you look closely there, there's a disk pack.

Actually got Xerox throughout most of the disk packs of the work that was done at Xerox PARC. Few of them got rescued. Here it is, few hundred files on there. One of them happened to be most of a system that we did in 1978. And it's of partial interest because the next year it was the stuff that Steve Jobs got shown during his famous visit to. So you have a little flavor here.

Now what we did is we brought this back to life. And it was relatively easy because this system is called Smalltalk, Smalltalk 78 is a pure object system. And so it resembles the Internet. This is a Internet self portrait and it's just as good a self portrait of small talk.

Because the idea was to have the one to one correspondence between the idea of little logical computers, which is what we called objects. That could send messages around and make an entire system. And so it's a little different than from what you think object oriented programming is today.

One of the consequences is that there are no actual applications because you can mix and match objects as you choose to Here we see something that is vaguely familiar. Thought I'd turn that off. Okay, so this is a typical screen back then and it ran on the Alto there, the portable note taker and the Dorado. Here's a bit map painting I did forty five years ago that we found and stuck in here.

See the user interface is with the object itself and here I'm marking it up. It has a character recognizer, gesture recognizer like Grail did. There it's recognizing I want an arrow and making one. The overlapping windows, the icons. What would be called rich text today. And you can see the gesture recognizer is being used to tell it how to justify.

And this system is organized in terms of projects. So each project you can think of in today's terms as a separate desktop. They persist over time. Now think about this compared to the user interface today where you use an application that doesn't have every feature that you want. And you start and stop applications and try and cut and paste between them.

Here what you have is just working spaces, an unlimited desk for every project that you have. You can have as many, they persist over time. Because this is a workflow idea. We couldn't get Apple to adopt this idea. And so these are kind of thumbnails of each one of them. We can go into one of them.

Here's a little thing done by a 13 year old girl writing an article for creative computing back in 1975. And so you can see it's sort of like desktop publishing. But in fact, any object can be used in here. And so, for example, if we look here, she's telling about this, how she used the program and how she's typing in there.

She's typing in code and it's being executed to grow the box and turn the box and so forth. Right, get the idea? So, be nice if Wikipedia had even thought about this, right? Because imagine you go to the article on logo, guess what? You can't execute logo code in there. Why? It's on a computer. What didn't they get about computing?

Well, pretty much everything. If you look at it closely, you'll see the web design and the web browser are two of the worst things ever done in computing. Because they fail to take account of the fact that you're actually on a computer. Okay, another example here is an animation system. You notice that ball is not squashing there. And it would look better if the ball squashed when it hit.

So if this were normal system and it didn't have that feature, we'd be done. But we can relate objects to each other. So here we're single stepping to get to that frame that we'd like to change. We're looking at the interface of this bouncing guy and we're seeing, yeah, there's a thing called current frame, that's what this thing is. And here's our painting window and let's look at its interface.

And here's something that allows me to set the picture in there. And I wanna connect the two windows together, so I use the gesture recognizer to draw a line between them. Gives me a little place to explain how I'd like to relate them. And I say, the painter's picture wants to be the bouncing animation's current frame. Okay, everybody get what's going on here? So I say, okay, go ahead and do that.

And now it's latched on to that thing that's there. Now I can start the animation going again. But while it's going, can paint, look carefully, and you'll see that the thing is being painted while it's running. Wouldn't you like to be able to do that today? I mean, just think about, why not? This is like sketch pad, right? Except a few years later. Yeah, this is completely natural.

It's what you get very, very easily if you just have unlimited objects. So in this particular thing gives you automatically something much more powerful in PowerPoint because all you have to do is sequence these things called projects or the desktops. That's what I'm doing here. I'm just moving from one to another. So that's an example of what happened at Park.

And if we go back to the screen of the various inventions there, we can look at, this is now I'm answering Sam's question. Well, how much of the Alto idea actually made it out of Xerox PARC? Well, about half. We'll see what the other half is in a second. How about the GUI? Well, about 70%, because you notice the GUI didn't come out as something that has this unlimited desktop idea.

Even today, thirty some odd years after this, nobody has put it in there. It's ridiculous. But it has to do with people wanting to have applications and sell applications even though most applications won't do all the things that you need. How about desktop publishing? About 70% for the same reason. The way we did programming, only about 10% has come out.

And I won't go into all the differences, but I think you've seen some of them. Laser printer, about 90%. Post script, 100%. That's partly because the guys who did this at Park formed Adobe, Geschke and Warnock. And so they sold as in their company what it was that, how they thought you should be able to do printing. 100% of the Ethernet, there was no competitor.

About 50% of peer to peer and client server, we'll see why in a second. One hundred percent of the Internet, again, there's no competitor for it. There's no. And so, one way of looking at this is what came out most successfully were the things for which people already out there didn't think they already knew how to do it. So everybody knew how to program.

And so the biggest resistance was in how we did programming. That just didn't make it. Now here's three things that I didn't mention before because none of them made it. But one of them was, hey, the architecture of the Alto was revolutionary and allowed you to run very high level languages very efficiently and to make changes on the fly.

And we tried with Intel and Motorola to get them to adopt these architectures for the chip and zero. Intel, especially at the time, didn't know anything about computing, didn't know anything about programming, and didn't wanna learn. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming even to do CPUs. Andy Grove, for instance, was against the first CPU on a chip that Intel did.

The idea of the Dynabook didn't make it out. Think about it, when did the iPad decide to put a stylus and a keyboard on the iPad? Right, the iPad Pro. They couldn't, why couldn't they do it? What was their problem? So 10% of that idea came out. Now here's an interesting idea to think about. Here we've got the Internet of machines connected together.

And if your programming language happens to be a software Internet, like Smalltalk was, then you can map the objects into the network and you can migrate the objects around. Each object is self contained, they do messaging. The messaging is either done internally or it goes out on the Internet.

And so you have a solution for all the different scalings of computing that you have, whether it's a small device. Yes? So why do you say only 10% of the time, but what's so important about the stylus and keyboard? Well, so here's the thing. Two year olds use this, and 92 year olds use this. And everybody else uses tools for dealing with media.

So when Steve decided not to do styluses, he completely went away. All he was doing was selling sugar water to babies. He was not selling something, for instance, that any artist can draw on. And when I first, and he sent me the first iPad for my comments on the thing.

And the first thing I did was to go out and get a capacitive stylus and draw lines with a ruler on, I guess it was Autodesk, one of the Autodesk software that was pretty good. And I determined that the touch sensitivity on the iPad was fabulous. Despite the fact that it's done in a very, very complex way. Because it has to find centroids from wide things on it.

But it was done extremely well and I got very linear results on it. And so it was there to do, but there was no place to put the stylus on the iPad. And long, long ago, remember I showed you a tablet system from the mid 60s, '50 years ago. So, we had a perfect chance to decide by experiment whether a purely stylus driven system was actually enough to do the work that you wanted to do.

And the answer is no. Similarly with Engelbart, you could do every piece of text entry without using the keyboard. But they had a keyboard there because you just can't do it fast enough for being able to put in large amounts of text. You need to have a keyboard. This is- Tools for experts by experts, like Engelbart. Well, so here's the thing that Engelbart said.

They said, well, why do you have to learn your system? Back then, he said, people are gonna use their computers for six to eight hours a day, and they laughed at him. So what you guys are doing, is using your computers for six to eight hours a day, and using interfaces that are made for a couple of seconds a day.

If that isn't the most ridiculous thing you've ever, it's about as ridiculous as this building. If you think about it as a user interface. Right, come in the door and there's a stairway and there's no map and where am I, where can I go, and Jesus, this looks like a dungeon? And remember, computer human interface is part of what you're supposed to learn about and you can't do it in a dump like this.

You have to have some sense of design around. And I'm not sure you can do software without having some sense of design around. So how could, I won't make any really rude remarks. But, so, and just to use up time I don't have. I should point out that some of this migrating object idea was done at Park.

Really great follow-up was done by a visitor to Park, Jerry Popak, who was at UCLA, went back to UCLA and did a fabulous system using Unix as the base called Locus, L O C U S. And if you're interested in looking at a future that will at some point actually happen, you can get that book from MIT Press.

And particularly the first couple of chapters of that book outline what the issues are for dealing with real scaling on the Internet. I won't go further than that. So zero. Principle 21, reality is a low pass filter. You have to have enormous ideas in order so that people not understanding them will retain something. You don't wanna have the low pass filter give you back a dial tone.

That happens on, because most ideas are mediocre down to bad, even by people who have good ideas. Those are the ones that you don't wanna work on. Because if you're successful on them, they're still gonna get peeled down. So here's a book. I put this slide up here for Sam, because Sam reads books. You people probably don't. But this is a book, this is not a book about Xerox PARC, Sam.

This is a book by an executive at Xerox, written in the 60s before PARC, about trying to get the Xerox machine adopted. And this was after Xerox had been the fastest growing. But one of the companies that turned down the complete rights for a licensing fee to the Xerox machine was IBM. That story is in this book.

And IBM's consultant said, well, this isn't gonna work because there's no market for plain paper copying because people are not copying. Well, of course, it wasn't a good copier back then. And so I could write a book, RUs with Xerox to Trillions Nobody Wanted. I didn't have time to make a picture that looks like John Dessauer.

So it doesn't matter, and I'm gonna try and explain to you in the time I have left, why the goodness of an idea is almost irrelevant. Now for the reality kit, get out your reality kit. And we're gonna deal with the top. So just break the seal and just open up the thing. And this will work best if you put it down on your thing like this. Look at the instructions For people online.

Did you get a reality kit? Okay, everybody got one? What happened? Where were you? Boy. Hey, you know what? You guys must have been late. Take them, hand them out to some.

Somebody else? Okay, you're killing me guys. Okay, so cover your right eye, look at the plus with your left eye, and then slowly move the thing in, keeping focused on the plus until something happens. Slowly move slow. Slow as in the word slow. Who's seeing something? What do you see? Disappears blind spot.

Disappears in our blind spot. Everybody's seeing that? Don't say yes if you're not. This is a good thing for everybody, particularly in computing, to do once a day. Right? Okay, so now, let me ask you, what do you see where the dot was? Nothing? What?

Text. See text. How could that be? What? The brain's algorithm is built on the spot with what it thinks that you see your It doesn't start with what the surroundings are. Why? That's what I expect. Okay.

So, here's what's happening here. You see something like this, right? So what's happening is inside your eye, there is, I wonder if I got a laser, yeah. Over here is where the blood vessels come through, so we have a very badly designed eye. If you're arguing with a creationist, this is a good argument against God here.

Because if there was a God, he gave squids a great eye and he gave us a bad one. Our eye happens to have the blood vessels in front of the light detecting cells. And so our brain has to filter out all of those also. And over here is where most of your acuity is, in an area called the fovea. And so when the thing is further away, you get something like this.

And when you move in, at some point the dot gets over where there are no light sensitive cells at all and you can't see it anymore. And as my friend over here said, somehow the brain fills it in. And we'll look at that in a second. So principle number 22 is we have a blind spot in our eyes that our brain makes up stuff to fill in. It's just making it up.

Think about this because what's the other case where your brain makes up stuff that you think is real? A dream? And most people think they only dream at night, but in fact human brains are set up so that we actually dream. Did you get one of these? So in the old days, we'd throw chalk at you, but there is no chalk. Okay.

And a powerful idea about that is number 23, is that we can't learn to see until we realize and admit that we're blind. And the biggest problem with most human beings is they don't understand that they are blind because they think they can see. This leads to much of the trouble in the world.

And the powerful idea about that is the zeroeth one again, is it makes a huge difference if ideas are experienced in as many ways as possible. In other words, perspective point of view is worth 80 IQ points. Just because something seems to be right, and this is why math is a danger about thinking. Okay, let's go to the poker chips now. Pry them loose.

Okay, and what you're gonna do is hold them up like this. So one is about twice as far away as the other. Like that. Okay, you'll see something like this, right? On your retina, it's actually something like this. Think about it, if it's twice as far away, it's subtending half the angle. And therefore, it should show up as half size, but it doesn't show up as half size.

Now we can stick these guys on a ruler. Since these poker chips are now yours, you can take it back and really science the shit out of it. Here's what we should see, that's what's on our retina. Descartes, by the way, got an ox eye and peeled the back of it off to see whether biological lenses actually acted like glass lenses, and they do. And here's what's going on.

So the stuff that's on your retina gets mapped into about 12 different places in your brain. Your brain is Think about this in computer terms, sorry. In computer terms, the cells in your brain are like the hardware and there are processes going on. And one set of processes are all the ones that have to do with our belief system. And before we recognize something, it goes through our belief system.

And then it goes into the real time version of our belief system, which is called the dream. So we have beliefs in the dream and our beliefs are, damn it, these things are the same size. By the way, can do this with oranges, with quarters. Anything where you know they're the same size, do the same thing.

So the result of information from the actual world combined with your beliefs, you wind up with this. And anybody here is an artist who can draw? Okay, you must know this illusion then, right? It's called size constancy. And it's why, one of the things, did you learn that? I mean, can you actually draw? Yeah. Didn't you raise here?

You can draw, right? So if you can actually draw, first thing you realize is you can't see what's going on and so you start measuring. Hold your arm rigid, you measure it off so I can measure. Sam's head is that high and wow, it's only half size compared to this guy who's closer to me. Doesn't look like it to me, it looks like it's almost the same size because heads are the same. Got it?

So the principle 24, the mind's eye is different than our sensory eye. And we do things according to the mind's eye. And most people who have ever lived on this planet don't know that there are two different eyes. Because they take the world as it seems. They build up a common sense from the world as it seems. This is why human beings generally cannot think.

You can't think if you're doing this stuff. So another term for beliefs is a private universe. We each have one of our very own. If you've ever argued with somebody who thought was reasonable up to that point, what's happening is your beliefs are conflicting with their beliefs. Our waking dreams are private. I love this phrase. This is a new phrase, alternate truths.

Kellyanne Conway, that's what's going on. So you can see why being a scientist is tough. A scientist has to get around all of this crap that our brain is throwing up. Okay, so quick easy model is how random this is, is a little bit of rain water on dirt dislodges a few crumbs of dirt and a little gully happens. And the gully is more efficient at rooting water, so things start happening.

Just where things start happening. Originally, you get something like this. Completely random, it could have gone anyway. And you make a whole world out of it. Here's a world that's completely pink. If you've ever been in the Grand Canyon, it is just almost overwhelming. If you look up, you have to remember to look up. There's a little bit of blue sky up above.

And the problem with human beings is we don't look up, we look out. So here's an example, that's pretty washed out. But here's a, that's a pink plane and our thoughts are like ants crawling over it. We can think about things, can make progress, we can run into an obstacle, we can get around the obstacle and so forth.

But everything we're doing here is pink except we don't know it's pink because we've never been in anything else but pink. So this is like a fish not knowing it's in water. It's always been in water. Every once in a while, you might have a little outlaw thought, little blue thought. But you've been to school, you're going to Stanford, you go to church, temple, synagogue, mosque, whatever it is.

Because our beliefs project out. And when we see something that isn't normal, normal is actually the same as crazy. Smash. But maybe you're out for a run, you're just waking up in the morning, you're taking a shower. And all of a sudden, you get a holy shit. Holy shit. There's a blue world. Blue world that's orthogonal to the one I'm in.

And once you're in that blue world, you realize, there's probably a lot of them. Can you see each one of these as a context? Can you see that what happened from the Renaissance by Newton to our modern age was going from a pink plane to a blue plane? Right? This is what ARPA did with computing.

It went from mainframes, a completely different way of thinking about things to the world we have today, despite the fact that nobody had thought of it at all. It was considered literally crazy by our colleagues in computing when we were doing it. Okay, so here's the compass, you just leave the compass on there. It's for you to remember that some people get to this really early.

Einstein was five, he was recovering from having the measles, I think. His father brought him a little compass for him to play with. And Einstein remembered later in life, he said, this made the most impression of me, of anything in my childhood. Because the way he looked at it, there must be something deeply hidden behind things.

He didn't take it as it came because he was worrying about how does the needle know where to go? There's nothing visible about it and yet it is doing this. And that changed Einstein's complete way of thinking about things. Okay, so when a baby is born, when we are born, we're not born into nothing, we're born into a culture.

Most cultures over the last hundred plus thousands of years were traditional cultures, hunting and gathering cultures. And traditional cultures don't know that they are inside a particular outlook. Traditional cultures think they're in reality. And so they react incredibly strongly to other people's versions of reality, to the point of war.

And many people, this is what our genes give rise to and many people today, including in our country, are born into this pretty natural way of looking at things. We had to invent the idea of outlook and, well here's another one. So if you happen to be born here, you can have the same baby and bring it up here, the baby will grow into being French.

French in its outlook, French in language and so forth. Here's a big idea, what happens when books got invented? So a guy by the name of Marshall McLuhan asked the question, what are books? What is writing as an environment? If you thought of writing as being brought up in France, what would that actually mean to the human race? Turns out it's profound. Take a look at it if you're interested.

You also ask what is media as an environment? So for example, what is this as an environment 20 fourseven? Think about it. Not that the kids are being told to shoot people, but the problem is they're seeing shooting people as normal. Because what environments do is to take things and normalize them. They make them into part of reality. They make things thinkable. They don't say what to do.

And of course media that we have today is doing exactly the same thing and most people don't realize. Okay, so unhook the last flap here. There's a little desktop here, tabletop. So look at the picture there first and before you start experimenting, me make an assertion that the tops of the tables are exactly the same shapes.

I've been doing this hundreds of times and I can't see it, but if I take my plastic thing and move it over there. Yeah, no, it isn't crazy, we are crazy. If you remember nothing else from this course, remember that the natural state of humanity is to be crazy. Because crazy is not having good models in our mind for what's going on out there.

We just draw the line at certain kinds of crazy, but we are actually crazy. So this is a really good one, isn't it? Happens to have been first done here at Stanford. This guy is Roger Shepherd, and that is his book, it's full of these. Okay, so, good. Last couple of, got a, yeah, I think I'll get through.

So, anthropologists over the last one hundred and twenty years or so studied several thousand traditional cultures. And wrote down properties of these cultures that were never absent. So if a single culture out of several thousand did not have a trait, then that trait was removed. So all of these traits are thought of as human universals. Virtually all of them are genetic. And here's a book.

Books are actually useful. It's another good one to read. This is a great book. This is, yeah. I became very friendly with Sam and I noticed I could not mention a book to him that he would not have read the next time I saw him. That's how you know he's a good guy. Okay, so the basic idea here is genetics drives culture. Genetics has the precursors, the desires, and culture fills in the parameters.

So you can think of these, they're all category names. And once that list was made, people got interested in things that were not in every culture. And this is a partial list of those. So agriculture had to be invented. It was a pretty easy invention, but was only invented about twelve thousand years ago. Out of several hundred thousand years of us being on the planet.

So initially, it was a hard thing for hunting and gathering people to think about. We've got, like every animal, we have zillions of genes to help us cope with things. We can deal with hardship like every animal, incredibly. But the idea of progress had to be invented. It's really an invention of the eighteenth century.

And the reason is, is that for almost all of human existence, people died in the same world that they were born into. Almost nothing happened. And so, what you had to do to get from birth to death was to cope. It's only been recently that the idea of, no, we could shape the world to be better. That's a new idea. These are all powerful ideas.

Oral language versus writing and reading, the differences are profound. Stories, superstition, religion and magic versus the representation systems of science. News, remember news never introduces a new category, right? What you hear about is, it's this forest fire, it's that war, it's this murder, it's this kind deed. This is why news can happen so quickly. That's what our mind craves.

What we hate is categories, because it can take us a couple of years to learn a category. So you never hear any news about calculus. Takes a couple of years to learn it, and there aren't enough people. Fast thinking versus slow thinking. Differences over similarities is one of the reasons why most programming languages go bad and the web browser went bad.

Whereas a modern way of thinking about things as similarities over differences emphasizes similarities. It has many things to do also with equal rights and democracy. Vendetta and revenge, those are the favorite movies and the favorite video games are revenge games. Personal revenge games where the system has gone bad and somebody has to break the law to put things right. We just love that trope.

But in fact, the whole legal system was set up in order to avoid thousand year feuds and vendettas. Okay, so we can think of this side we have things that human beings want. And simple way of thinking about them is, every single one of them on this side is a legal drug.

And for people in this class who are trying to make money by being entrepreneurs, just make a technological amplifier for any of these things that we crave. Genetically, look at the things that are there. Hunting and gathering, social language like the telephone, stories, news, theater, all of those things. That's your list. Just get this book, right Sam?

And make something that will make people worse and they'll buy the hell out of it. Because we don't have any natural, all of these things are in shortage in the world that human beings have been into except for a couple hundred years ago. Over here, we have things that human beings need and they're terribly, you can't really see, but these are terribly difficult to learn.

Because they're not particularly genetically prepared for, they had to be invented. Okay, so last shot here, twenty first century going on to the twenty second century. Hey, we're not born into France or traditional society anymore. We're born into a universe that is unbelievably large. A planet that most people don't even realize we're on yet.

Not just our social system of a few hundred people that we know, but millions of social systems and billions of people. A technological system that is starting to touch everybody in many, many different ways. It's only been, for instance, modern medicine really dates from only World War II. That's a long time ago for you folks, but it's within my lifetime. I was born before World War II.

And before World War II, you simply did not get antibiotics when you had an infection. It was that soon. Doctoring was almost quackery. So much of scientific medicine has happened in the last fifty or sixty years. And then we have the system of our mind. There's not just social, but psychological, cognitive, and so forth.

And so we can sum up this world that we're born into in this century as the systems we live in and the systems we are. Think about that, the difference between that and what most people think that they want. These are the systems we have to learn about and deal with. And these systems are not separate. I've mentioned them separately, but they're all intertwined with each other.

They're all invisible. Okay, and I'll just leave you with this last slide. So we found out about all of these systems. They were invisible until a few hundred years ago, and some of them invisible until a few years ago. And the human tragedy is in two parts. Part of it is just finding out something in our civilization doesn't automatically transmit it to people born into the civilization.

Right, the educational system has to be changed in order to reflect this stuff. And the composite picture here is that part of our brain, the genetic part of our brain, even overlaid with this stuff, still has these reactions and ways of thinking about things or not thinking about things that go back one hundred thousand years.

So I think with things like television to look at, things like video games to look at, things like Facebook to look at. If you're gonna go out and make a company that is going to appeal to people, try to do it without appealing to the parts of their nature that they're helpless in front of.

Because one of the things that those of us who helped invent the technologies of today are quite worried about now is that the technology is so much easier to invent than it is to change the educational system. And so what we've got is the informational equivalent of k people with nuclear weapons.

But now they're informational weapons and in many ways I think these weapons are more dangerous because by renormalizing human attitudes and human beliefs, could very easily bring down our civilization and put us back into the stone age. The talk on Tuesday, maybe a little thicker today.

But the whole impetus behind the ARPA research and inventions of these things, and particularly people like Engelbart, was to try to invent new tools and new media for humanity to get itself out of its problems. And Engelbart, for example, said, almost everything important that has consequence in the adult world is done by adults working together.

And so this is why his system was collaborative from the, so here's an interesting thing. So here's a Mac, some people have Linux, some people have Windows on it. Here's the interesting thing.

Not a single one of the main operating systems today has built into it the thing that Engelbart showed in 1968, which is the intrinsic ability to share any content that you're looking at with anybody else to the point of allowing them to interact with it and to talk back and forth. Right, Skype it doesn't do it.

So this is a thing that is at an operating system level, it's not a trivial thing to do. It is possible to do, but not a single operating system used today does it. And so, the ability to actually work collaboratively on content has been held back by notions of operating systems that go back pre-nineteen sixty five.

All three operating systems we have today that are the main ones are old, old ideas. They don't even get to where Park was on the notion of how processes can coordinate with each other. There are many, many other of these things.

Because these operating systems are rather similar to each other and because they're pervasive, unless you use your reality kit, you're gonna think that they're normal and therefore that's the way things should be. Many people in computing have a misplaced notion of Darwinian process. Like most people. Most people think Darwinian processes optimize. That is absolutely not the truth.

One of my degrees in molecular biology, and I can tell you any biologist would say, they absolutely not optimized. The whole point of Darwinian processes is to fit into some niche and some environment. And if that environment isn't the right kind of environment, the processes of evolution is not gonna give you something that's very interesting. That is the way it works.

And as computing gets less and less interesting, its way of accepting and rejecting things gets more and more mundane. So this is why some of these early systems like Sam looked at Sketchpad and said, why aren't they doing it today? Well, because nobody even thinks about that that's important. Nobody even thinks of doing WYSIWYG on web media.

I just typed in some answers to Quora and I was in a regime that was pre-70s. I was typing into a little window. I couldn't see what it was gonna look like until I clicked the button. Come on, this is bullshit. But nobody is protesting except old fogies like me, because I know it can be better. You need to find out that it can be better. That is your job. Your job is not to agree with me.

Your job is to wake up. Find ways of criticizing the stuff that seems normal. That is the only way out of the soup. You have to go against your genetic impulses to try and learn the environment around you. It's the most natural thing we have, but it's not gonna help. Because the environment is weak, and if you learn the environment, you're gonna be weak. All right, thank you very much.