Why the Real Computer Revolution Never Happened (Alan Kay & Anjan Katta)

I'm thrilled to share this very special episode of The Generalist—one I've been looking forward to for a long time. Today, we tackle one of the most urgent questions of our time: What should computing look like in the age of AI? I'm joined by two extraordinary guests: Alan Kay, a pioneer of modern computing whose vision helped shape the personal computer revolution, and Anjan Katta, founder of Daylight, who's building a radically reimagined personal computer designed for deep thinking in our AI-saturated world. This conversation has been months in the making, and I couldn't be more excited to bring these two brilliant minds together. We explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping our relationship with computers, whether current computing paradigms serve us well as AI becomes ubiquitous, and what new models of human-computer interaction we might need to thrive alongside intelligent machines. This is a conversation about reclaiming agency in an age of algorithms—and imagining computing tools that amplify human intelligence rather than replace it. I think you're going to love it. We explore: • Why Alan believes the "computer revolution" commercialized in the wrong direction, missing the deeper humanistic vision of early computing pioneers • How the structure of information, from pagination to platforms, shapes the way we think • How Daylight is creating a reading and writing-focused device that helps access our "prefrontal cortex" rather than our "lizard brain" • The concept of a magical medium, and how computing might help us become our best selves • Why Marshall McLuhan's media theories predicted our current technological predicament decades before it happened • The critical difference between intelligence and wisdom in computing systems, and why wisdom should be our focus • How thoughtful constraints in computing design can lead to better thinking and more meaningful interaction • The urgency of developing systems thinking in a world facing complex challenges • And much more — Transcript: https://thegeneralist.substack.com/p/why-the-real-computer-revolution-never-happened — Thank you to the partners who make this possible Augment Code http://augmentcode.com/generalist: AI coding assistant that pro engineering teams love. Brex https://www.brex.com/mario: The banking solution for startups. Generalist+ https://thegeneralist.substack.com/subscribe: Essential intelligence for modern investors and technologists. — Timestamps (00:00) Intro (05:17) The computer revolution we never got (and what we got instead) (11:45) The value of writing and the impact of the printing press (21:34) The addition of pagination and the evolution of arguments (24:53) Why Anjan calls his idealized version of computing a magical medium (29:00) Alan’s work at PARC and early conceptions of personal computing (32:02) Moore’s Law and the impact of reality TV (37:41) How Bob Barton and Marshall McLuhan influenced Alan (42:31) The problem with labels and what Anjan found surprising about Alan (46:02) How much help is too much help? (48:18) Marvin Minsky's military robot story and the history of misunderstanding AGI (51:50) What we need help with and why wisdom is hard to scale (54:19) How Daylight approaches computing with humility and thoughtful constraints (59:13) Alan's reflections on the Dynabook concept and personal computing vision (01:01:11) The timeline of building Daylight and the idealism behind the project (01:03:14) The urgent need for different thinking (01:06:40) A second shot at rebuilding computing from the ground up (01:11:57) Final meditations — Follow Alan Kay LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-kay-12a627b/ Quora: https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11 — Follow Anjan Katta LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anjan-katta-250b232b4/ X: https://x.com/anjankatta — Resources and episode mentions: https://www.generalist.com/p/why-the-real-computer-revolution-never-happened — Production and marketing by penname.co https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What we don't need is something that mimics fallible human beings magnified by the Industrial Revolution. It's bad enough having fallible human beings putting out garbage and having the internet multiplying it.

• 0:14Mario Gabriele?

  Is it better to have a thousand times more fallible human beings if they're in the top 20% of intelligence?

• 0:22Speaker 00

  I think the operative word is wisdom, not intelligence.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  The first aspect of computing where I approach it is how do you help access the front of your brain, your prefrontal cortex, the higher version of yourself versus falling into the lizard brain aspect of yourself? We now have a second shot to start from scratch again with computing and build it up now with all the lessons we have and the wisdom.

• 0:46Mario Gabriele?

  Hey, I'm Mario and this is the Generalist Podcast. The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. Each week, I sit down with the visionaries and builders who are living in that future to help you understand what's coming next and how you might prepare for it. Today's episode is truly special, a conversation with Alan Kay, the legendary computer scientist and polymath, and Anjan Katta, founder of Daylight Computer. It's not an exaggeration to say that Alan helped invent the modern world. At Xerox PARC in the 1970s, he and his team created the foundations of personal computing as we know it, the graphical user interface, object-oriented programming, and the conceptual framework for laptops and tablets.

• 1:28Mario Gabriele?

  Despite those achievements, Alan believes that the real computer revolution never actually happened. Instead, what we got were commercialized inventions that missed the deeper vision entirely. Anjan represents a new generation that's trying to course correct. His company, Daylight, has created what's arguably the most thoughtful computing device in quite some time. It's a PC designed for reading, writing, and thinking, rather than consumption and distraction. To do that, Anjan had to rethink computing from the ground up, spending years building novel hardware to ensure daylight had the right foundations. It is, in many ways, a return to computing's original, humanistic principles. We recorded this on a sweltering summer day in Alan's London home,

• 2:13Mario Gabriele?

  and the conversation ranges across centuries and disciplines. We talk about Paleolithic caves, Marshall McLuhan's media theories, and modern AI. It's part history lesson, part technology critique, and part philosophical meditation on what it means to be a human in an age of increasingly powerful machines. To learn from one of the great polymaths of our era alongside a supremely original founder was a genuine privilege. It sent me down a dozen rabbit holes and reframed how I think about humanity's relationship with computers. This is a new podcast, so if you enjoy conversations like this, I'd love to have you subscribe and join the journey. Now, here's my conversation with Alan Kay and Anjan Katta.

• 2:57Mario Gabriele?

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• 3:40Mario Gabriele?

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• 4:24Mario Gabriele?

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• 5:07Mario Gabriele?

  including one in three US venture-backed startups, trust Brex to help make every dollar count toward their mission. Join them at brex.com/mario. Alan, I was watching your lecture to UPSLA in 1997, which has been titled...

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Oh, my goodness.

• 5:26Mario Gabriele?

  You have... The computer revolution hasn't happened yet. And so...

• 5:29Speaker 00

  Yes, I've used that title a few...

• 5:31Mario Gabriele?

  A few times.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  Times. And I think Dan Ingalls for that one, he said, "Alan, go out and rattle their cage."

• 5:37Mario Gabriele?

  Hmm, I think he did it. 28 years later, would you say the computer revolution has officially happened yet?

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Well, a revolution has happened, but not the one we really wanted or needed. There's no question. And of course, that was the point back then also because that was at the end of almost two decades of commercialization, of inventions, of the earlier research groups that were interested in personal computing. And so what we got commercially was different. And what we got socially 28 years after that lecture is extremely different and mostly unfortunate.

• 6:20Mario Gabriele?

  When you sort of think about the aspects of the revolution that haven't happened yet that you would have hoped to have happened, what does that look like exactly?

• 6:28Speaker 00

  Many of us in the 60s who were working on this, these ideas, were readers of McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  So we were well aware that something large always happens when you make new media. For one, it tends to absorb previous media in various ways. For another, it changes what normal means to most people. It can produce different psychological effects. So one of the things that McLuhan predicted just from television, not from thinking about computers and networks, was that the world would suddenly feel both small and large at the same time. He called it a global village. He did not really want a global village, but he felt that the intimacy, the feeling

• 7:23Speaker 00

  of contact over larger areas was going to be a very large effect of what he called the electric world. And so he made several predictions. One of them, he said, most people will feel that they've lost their identity because they're now in a small town, but nobody cares about them.

• 7:47Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, they have no

• 7:48Speaker 00

  Nobody knows them.

• 7:49Mario Gabriele?

  true connection.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  And they feel like they should. And so one of his predictions was many people will spend the rest of their lives fighting, sometimes violently, for their identity. So there's an interesting one to think about. And he made many other, like he predicted for television, that the content of television, the shot length would come to resemble that of the television commercial.

• 8:18Mario Gabriele?

  Hmm, just shortening

• 8:21Speaker 00

  Yes, everything, because he said the, the actual thing that fits TV the best is the commercial.

• 8:26Mario Gabriele?

  Gosh, that was very prescient.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  And, no, he pointed out that the paintings by the great masters in the churches in Italy were also commercials. Commercials are always paid for by the people who have the most money. They're meant to glorify what their beliefs are and so forth. So he could, he could see these things, which should be obvious to most people, but they are not. Most people tend to Take what's around them specifically, rather than seeing it fit into some period of history. But McLuhan was a literary critic, actually. And so he could see many of these.

• 9:06Mario Gabriele?

  Movements.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  He could see these things. Yeah.

• 9:08Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  And so he made some very prescient

• 9:14Speaker 00

  observations and predictions. And many of us in the 60s were well aware of it. When I look back, I spent a fair amount of time trying to deal, explain to the educational establishments what was likely to happen. Nicholas Negapanti and I spent a fair amount of time going around to publishers, explaining what was going to happen to their.

• 9:39Mario Gabriele?

  Businesses.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Businesses.

• 9:40Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 9:41Speaker 00

  And but in fact, looking back, if I had time to allocate back then, I would have allocated at least a factor of 10 more time dealing with education.

• 9:53Mario Gabriele?

  Wow. Interesting.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  Because what we got was the most naive, most dangerous set of reactions in the public general approach to things and what the public thinks of as normal and so forth. Far beyond the dangers that we thought we saw back then.

• 10:16Mario Gabriele?

  Anjan, I want to bring you in here because clearly you do what you do because you think in some capacity, the revolution hasn't happened yet. Which parts of, you know, particularly some of the educational aspects that that Alan mentions, did you sort of sense were were clearly missing or clearly misaligned when you started to build?

• 10:36Speaker 02

  I think I think what's interesting here is obviously my attraction to engaging deeply with Alan and his work. And a lot of this sort of visionary early computing work is this sort of, oh, my God, that's what it could be. And that's definitely been a lot of the wind in my sails. But actually, I would say it's more of a bottom up thing that sort of got me into like. Computing isn't actually what it should be and it could be. And the bottom up was just my personal experience, which is I've increasingly more RAM in my computer, more powerful CPUs, I have better and better software. And I was just like not more productive nor feeling better, nor remembering the things I was reading.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  I was just so often distracted or I'd be staying up way too late. And I just feel not great using a computer.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  And so for me, I was like, what are they doing in these Apple commercials when they paint all these glorious features? And then what I actually see is this sort of this caveman, Neanderthal lizard brain behavior. It's just the possibility that this should be versus my actual experience of it is so different.

• 11:47Speaker 00

  So let me break in there for a second because I just want all of us and our audience to be aware that what we're doing right now could have been done in a Paleolithic cave 100,000 years ago. We're sitting around having a conversation and it's being recorded both audio and video. Right? And so the only technology that's actually involved here is one that is delaying the account of it later on.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Yes, that's right.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  And actually, we're talking about technologies that could not have been invented without the invention of writing. And yet we are not writing about it because we do not assume the people who would need to read the writing are going to read it. We're making it into pictures and stuff because we're assuming the people who need to understand what we're talking about are not basically readers and writers, but in fact, still oral society types. Right? So that is something to really think about. I bring it up in almost every talk I do. I show a slide. Showing an old camp, campfire and saying, hey, that's, why are we having this conference?

• 13:01Speaker 00

  Why aren't you reading something? Because reading actually conveys much more of the kinds of detail that have to be comprehended in order to understand where we are. But we're having a conference. I'm not complaining here.

• 13:17Mario Gabriele?

  No, no, it's a good point. I honestly hadn't thought of that, but.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, people don't.

• 13:21Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, even as a writer, I don't necessarily think of that, which.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Well, let's, you know, just for a second.

• 13:28Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  Let's, if, if you know, for instance, in Plato's dialogue, the Phaedrus.

• 13:34Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  He has his mouthpiece, Socrates, complain bitterly about writing. And you may know, know this, that Socrates complained, oh, writing is robbing us of the ability to memorize.

• 13:51Mario Gabriele?

  Ah, wow.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  Because we can, we now have a prosthetic for memory and when you, somebody writes something, they can go off and die. And we can't chase them down and talk them out of it. There's a whole bunch of things there. And however, the nice thing about being here in the UK is we're in a land that understands irony. And both Socrates and Plato were noted ironists.

• 14:18Mario Gabriele?

  So that was a winking.

• 14:20Speaker 00

  Well, I think it was.

• 14:21Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  So, and what was he winking at? Well, he was winking the way Shakespeare did when he had Puck, say, on the stage of the Globe Theatre, what fools these mortals be? To an audience that not only were fools, wanted to be fools, but paid to be fools. That's irony. And if, you know, if we don't give Shakespeare credit for that. So what was, what was Plato actually saying? Well, the first one is, hey, the only reason you know about this is I wrote it down. And by the way, I wrote it the way I wanted to. We don't know whether Socrates actually said that or not. So what point was I probably trying to make?

• 15:05Speaker 00

  And I think the point was, no, the right thing to think about writing is because we have writing, we have 10,000 more things that are worthwhile remembering.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  The writing doesn't take away from our memory at all. That's up to us. That's like getting fat after the car was invented. That's up to us. And writing gives us this incredible benefit of allowing us to expand beyond our village culture. And so memorization is much more important because it's too inefficient to have a zillion books around and try to run from one to another. You need it between your ears. And so memorization is incredibly important now, much more important than it was in an oral society where you only had to memorize a few thousand things. So I think that's what Plato was actually saying there.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  And I think we can apply some of those approaches to thinking about what we're talking about today. Sorry to break in, but that was a perfect lead in.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  I think that captures a key part of this. I forgot who it was too, but they're like, you could have the most beautiful colonnade that you're in discussing, reading something, but if there's a gnat beside your ear buzzing the entire time, good luck trying to remember that. And so in so much as what we're talking about here is the positive capability the computing revolution has never truly manifested. I think also what I feel is we got to also remove the negative strains, the gnat in your ear that comes in the way of even accessing the current capability, leave alone the positive capability that's here.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  That's a very good point. And by the way, we have about a thousand gnats inside of our brain. So getting the one in our ear out is relatively easy compared to the ones that our genetics give us. That's something I think we have to have to think about. And when McLuhan was thinking about not just writing, but especially what printing.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Did. One of the, one of the questions is, why is writing associated with city building? Which is the root of what the word civilization means, means people living in cities. And why is writing associated with up-level thoughts? And why did the printing press have such a large effect? Because the Renaissance was already started by the time the printing press was revealed. So it didn't start the Renaissance.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  But it looked, when you look at it from afar, there's a, a really great set of books by Elizabeth Eisenstein called The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. So she looks at it as an incredible amplifier that happened to come along just, you know, about 40 or 50 years after thought had started shifting around.

• 18:14Mario Gabriele?

  Interesting.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  What Kenneth Clark called the Great Thaw. And along comes this first manifestation of the Industrial Revolution. And I call it that because the Industrial Revolution is making a lot of things cheaply and being able to distribute them widely. So the first things that were made that way were quickly made type, made from punches that Gutenberg and, he didn't invent printing.

• 18:41Mario Gabriele?

  Yes, you, you made this point in one of these lectures that I thought was so interesting, which was like, most of the technology was already there in China.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:49Mario Gabriele?

  You know?

• 18:50Speaker 00

  China had the problem of, same problem as the Middle Ages had, when the printing in the Middle Ages was done by basically woodcuts. The movable type that the Chinese had had to be laboriously carved in order to be used. Whereas Gutenberg was a gold.

• 19:10Mario Gabriele?

  Goldsmith of some kind, right?

• 19:11Speaker 00

  Goldsmith. And when you make a gold coin, you don't pour it, you don't pour molten gold into a mold. You just put a gold blank and you hit it with hard steel carved into what the coin is supposed to look like and the soft metal will flow from being struck. And Gutenberg realized, oh, I could make the letter H.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  Into a punch and I could punch the letter H from my steel die, I could punch it into brass. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. I can make a whole bunch of letter H sockets. I can pour lead in there and all of a sudden I've got a zillion letter H's.

• 19:51Mario Gabriele?

  And yeah, then suddenly everyone else can start printing books.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  And so there are 20,000 presses in Europe by the time Aldous got going at the end of the century. So it's 40 year. So years later, there are 20,000 presses.

• 20:06Mario Gabriele?

  Aldo Minucio, is that right?

• 20:08Speaker 00

  Yes, Aldo Minucio. His Latin, sometimes he's called Aldous Minucius in his Latin form, but yeah. And you know, I've told the story of why books are the size they are because Aldous went out and measured saddlebags. He wanted to know, just as Anjan wanted to know, you know, how big should a daylight?

• 20:30Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  Be and you know, can you carry it out on a picnic? That was part of the, the fun introduction of the, of the product. But I think, I think these things are critical to think about, but I, but one of the most difficult thing for people to, most people today to think about what computing might be about is what, what can you do that's importantly different? About it because for literally billions of people in the world, they only experience computing as a bunch of conveniences.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  Essentially imitations of media that were invented before computers. Made somehow convenient in one way or another, access, being able to carry them around and so, and so forth. And they almost never get to touch any of the things that the computer might be good for. I mean, one thing that apparently Aldous and the scholar Erasmus, who are friends, had as an idea in the early 1500s, so it's about 70 some odd years after the, the printing press. They decided to put page numbers in books and page numbers.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  Previously, we're only in books done by a marginalized society, which were the Jewish culture in Europe. Huh, why was that? Well, because the, if you look at an addition of the Talmud, it looks like a hypertext document. There's the main body of it. Yes. There are commentaries everywhere. Overlapping windows. Yeah, and so numbering pages actually makes sense. Yes. When you're actually in a larger discussion or argument. And I think the page numbers in books, because books were sequenced by printing the next two words on the next page at the bottom of the previous page.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  So the people who were putting the books, and this practice was carried on for a couple of hundred years. Wow, I had no idea. So I have, I have some books from the 18th century, so several hundred years later that still do that, because that was the way, it's like Qwerty, you know? Yes. People got used to a certain way of doing it. The numbers in the, the books were for this invention after the Talmud of Erasmus and Aldous of referring to things, and it wasn't to refer to things in other books, because a typical press run in a town in Europe is several thousand volumes, and the pagination was going to be different.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  We couldn't refer to, where did Plato say blah blah about writing in Phaedrus? Because what edition? It's all over the place. But what they did was they realized, oh, wait a minute, something printed is going to spread around, and it allows us to set up longer arguments than any oral culture can do. And because of the printing press volume, it's going to have much more significance than manuscripts. There are too few manuscripts around to have much effect, but this is going to balloon.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  And so they realized the argument was going to change. And we don't see that until the 17th century. So now, a couple hundred years after the printing press itself, we start seeing people arguing about politics, how governance, we see the Royal Society being started here in England, and science involves argument. And so both of these argumentative forms were able to be carried to a much greater depth because of the printing press, or so goes the story. I mean, that's something that attracted us in the 60s.

• 24:53Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, you know, for those folks, I imagine as they listen, like, we really are actually talking about computing, even though we're talking about the printing press and in all of these different ways. Something you said reminded me of the McLuhan quote, which you've talked about, which is, you know, I don't know who discovered water, but it wasn't a fish. And when we think about computing and finding these alternative paths, it made me wonder, you know, Anjan, when you looked back at sort of some of the history of the industry, I know that it came more bottom up for you. Where did you sort of see some of the opportunity to take one of those like more orthogonal tracks,

• 25:36Mario Gabriele?

  to do something that wasn't just, I don't know, faster, more RAM? And how did you start to conceive of that?

• 25:42Speaker 02

  I think the big sort of wow moment from all of this was I think I read McLuhan, but I compartmentalized it and didn't really appreciate and apply it to computers. It's like Alan's work and so on, the wow moment was like, whoa, this is a magical medium. This is a meta medium. And I think because of the way we use it and because I grew up with this, you think a computer is a way to message, a way to email, a way to do your homework, a way to find your calendar, blah, blah, blah. And you sort of see the caricature version of the authoring and magical medium, which is the Apple commercial where they show you using Final Cut Pro or GarageBand to make

• 26:25Speaker 02

  music, but it's actually totally inaccessible for most of us. And so at least the way I relate to all of this is what a magical medium is, what a meta medium is, is magic. It's actually an intelligent, interactive, dynamic way that you could be a better version of yourself. And so at least for me, I've always looked at this in terms of, Alan always talks about Jerry Bruner and man, a course of study, this curriculum on understanding the human. I think that's the core of this for me is like, where did we come from? How did we become the way we are? Who are we today? What's the world and where are we going? And you actually can't appreciate that if you don't see the difference between an animal and a human and how we sort of created propositional ways of thinking.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  And then from oral cultures to writing cultures and all the different knowledge media along the way. And you know, it's like history is the history of kings and wars and winners. The true history is this history of these sort of ideas and technologies, whether it be the axle, the printing press or the codex. And so if you sort of in that lineage, take computers as this beautiful evolution of everything that came before, to me, the key application of that evolution is we can access more of human potential. And at least for me, that's the real juice of this all is the way we are is a subset of really what we could be.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  And I think the three ways that shows up is one is I think often. Because of our difference between how we evolved and the environment we're in, we're sort of dominated by genetic predispositions, the lizard brain. And so the first aspect of computing, at least where I approach it, is sort of, how do you help access the front of your brain, your prefrontal cortex, the higher version of yourself versus falling into the lizard brain aspect of yourself? I think the second aspect of computing is how do you go from the reduced version of yourself that's sort of determined by society, the way you're socialized, by the culture of the time, by our environment, to actually a holistic individual, all of our capacities and ways of being?

• 28:37Speaker 02

  And I think the third is sort of, you know, the top of Maslow's hierarchy is sort of, what does it mean to fully actualize your special capability? So not be your lizard brain, be the best version of you as a human, and then be the best version of you as an individual. And at least for me, the power of a medium is it can work with you to help accomplish each of these three sort of expansions of your being.

• 29:02Mario Gabriele?

  Alan, when you were at Xerox PARC and you were devising the idea of the DynaBook, was the concept that these could be, you know, computers could be so opiating, addictive to the lizard brain part of us, like even something that crossed your mind? Was that like a path that seemed open?

• 29:21Speaker 00

  What Anjan just said was quite important and, you know, it's worth looking at it. So one of the things we're aware of in the mid 60s was the idea of personal computing, which occurred before there were personal computers. So you could do personal computing on a suitably set up terminal to a time sharing system. And so the early conceptions of it were more of, not unlike what we have today. Today, we have a cloud. And we rely on the cloud.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  And the early notions of it came from the analogy to power, water, gas, utilities. This is something not just for a single people. So it's not a person in a castle, but it's basically something that is delivered one way or another. And so when John McCarthy saw a, an air defense graphics terminal in the 50s, which is designed for tracking Russian bombers, his first thought was every home will have one of these. So he's a good person to start with thinking on this is because he instantly could see,

• 30:42Speaker 00

  and so could the research community could see that the networking part of this air, what became air traffic control, but back then was tracking Russian bombers. Each of these complexes could run about 150 graphics terminals. And there were 24 of them. They were connected by telephone lines. And so in the 50s, you had the first glimpse of what could be thought of as personal computing for the general public.

• 31:15Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  And so that, that gave rise to a set of ideals that, well, we should try and invent that. So the, the original name of the internet, before it was invented, was called the intergalactic network. And they asked the guy who made up the term, why did you call it that? And he said, well, engineers always give us the minimum. Said, I want a worldwide network, so I'm asking for an intergalactic one.

• 31:44Mario Gabriele?

  That's amazing.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. And if you think about it, many people, especially funders, tend to be rather conservative.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  And so if you can get away with hyperbole, then pretty much everybody is served. Because somewhere be... So, one of the interesting things that happened in the mid 60s was the official first article by Gordon Moore about what is called Moore's Law. And the first prediction was things that improve a factor of 2 every year, which is really exponential. More careful work was done, and I guess a couple of years later, he said, "Well, it's not going to be worse than a factor of 2 every 2 years." And the reality was about a factor of 1.5

• 32:38Speaker 00

  or so, a factor of 2 every year and a half. So that gave us this, not just the exponential curve, but it also gave people who are thinking about the future, something to hang their hat on. Now, the problem with this prediction was it wasn't just a physical prediction. It required stages of engineering to do. Engineering is very obstinately connected with the real world. So there had to be faith, there had to be funding, there had to be changes in technique. But those of us who are thinking about future computing

• 33:22Speaker 00

  relied on it. So just, you know, let's just make it an article of faith. But the other thought was, when you ran it out, because his prediction was only 30 years. So his prediction was basically to 1995. And my fervent hope is that Moore's Law would not extend much beyond 1995.

• 33:44Mario Gabriele?

  Is that right?

• 33:44Speaker 00

  And do you know why?

• 33:45Mario Gabriele?

  Why?

• 33:46Speaker 00

  Because if you go, give it a couple of more notches, you can actually simulate television.

• 33:52Mario Gabriele?

  Hmm.

• 33:53Speaker 00

  And television is actually not good the way it's used in America and now the UK.

• 34:01Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  And I remember way back explaining to my friends in the UK, "Do not let commercial television come in here." And they say, "No, it's okay. We're, you know, we're much more sophisticated than you Americans. It's not going to affect us." And the other thing that McClellan didn't actually realize, but he sensed... Is that they said, you know, Marshall, why, why don't you use psychological terms? Why do you make up all of these things? And of course, he was a literary critic. He didn't, he wasn't a scientist or anything. Yes. Yeah. But his, his rejoinder was really good. He said, well, psych, in the 50s, he says, well, psychologists are studying white rats. He say, I look to see what advertising

• 34:45Speaker 00

  people are doing. They are the ones who are studying human beings. Wow. Okay. So that is a really, that's a beaut- Brilliant line, yeah. Yes. And he wrote, one of his books was called The Medium is the Massage. Yes, right. Not, not the message, but the massage. He loved puns. Yeah. There. And he wrote another book called Mechanical Bride. He was trying to wake people up. He realized he couldn't, he couldn't tell them, just as you could not tell an Archie Bunker fan, that this is satire. Yes. Because you're talking to somebody who actually doesn't understand satire. Hmm.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  So the thing about reality TV is what Archie Bunker did is allowed him to use racial slurs as coming from an ignorant guy who shouldn't be like what an American should be like. Right. But in fact, what happened is as you move into reality television, you actually wind in, wind up with people who are making money at it, realize, oh, people love bad behavior. Yeah. Interesting. Let's see what we can get away with. So once you get that, and you combine it with the fact that television is everywhere and is on most of the time, you've actually

• 36:04Speaker 00

  changed the environment that people are living in. And when you change the environment that people are living in, they start accommodating to it. It's like going to Venice or going to Paris. After you've been there for a month, you will be acting much more French than you ever thought you would.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  Even even if you don't want to.

• 36:26Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 36:27Speaker 00

  Because it's a rhythm. It's something that's built into our genetics. It's something that makes us want to accommodate to whatever culture is around. And if you can change the culture through some medium,

• 36:44Speaker 00

  like television, then you have to be worried about it. So for computing, it's the ultimate double edged sword. Like, the printing press could print Mein Kampf. It could print

• 36:56Speaker 00

  books for and against evil.

• 36:58Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  But because of what we're talking about, because what we're doing here is something oral and visual. We're doing something that is much more human than McLuhan points out, one of the best things about reading is how alienating it is. Basically, when you got rid of illuminating books and went to exact same type, that its greatest power happened because people now start to be able to read for the first time internally and much faster and more efficiently than sounding out the letters as they did before.

• 37:39Mario Gabriele?

  How interesting.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's a big deal. And so, you know, we could spend the whole time just talking about McLuhan. But, you know, I think Anjan understood more of McLuhan when he first read him than I did. I couldn't deal with him, but I had a professor in college that I wanted to talk to. And he's like graduate students. And so, drinking beer with some of my fellow graduate students. How can I have a conversation with this? Because he was a genius and

• 38:08Mario Gabriele?

  Was this Bob Barton?

• 38:09Speaker 00

  This is Bob Barton.

• 38:09Mario Gabriele?

  Who I want to just, for those who haven't heard of him, I love the way you talk about him as this teacher who didn't necessarily, you know, you talk about how he was such an amazing teacher because he removed knowledge from you. And he allowed you

• 38:24Speaker 00

  Killed it.

• 38:24Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, and allowed you to think freely.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 38:28Mario Gabriele?

  Which I think is such a such a gift. But anyway, you were saying you used to drink with Bob Barton.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Well, I wanted I wanted to have a conversation with him and he'd gotten dragooned there by his friend, who is the head of the department and really didn't like being a professor. And, you know, he was a grumpy old guy.

• 38:47Speaker 00

  But somebody said, "Well, you know, Barton likes to read, and so do you, and he likes McLuhan." Always talks about McLuhan. I said, "Oh, no. I tried to read McLuhan last year, and I couldn't understand him." And so, the summer of 67, I spent most of that summer determined to actually understand McLuhan. So, I read all of his books and did little else that summer, but tried to get to the bottom of what the heck was this guy about. And when I finally got through the barriers, and it was actually by Gutenberg Galaxy book was the one that helped me the most, I realized,

• 39:31Speaker 00

  "Oh, this guy's insights are right up there with Shannon's and Einstein's. They're like the most important insights of the 20th century, and, you know, we're basically doomed unless we can understand them." So, they became a very important, not just the actual insights, but the, you know, McLuhan's approach. How was, how was he able to have them? What detachment did he have from what seemed to be real and definable right in front of us that allowed

• 40:10Speaker 00

  him to see what was actually going on and so forth? All of, all of those things were tremendously helpful. And, you know, as was this famous class with Bob Barton, where basically stomped into the room, and he gave us a sheet of paper that had about, I don't know, 15 things on it. He said, "There's very little known about advanced system design, but what is is written down in these, these books and papers." And he said, "I expect you to read them and understand them completely by the end of this course." Then he said, "But my job while we're in this class

• 40:49Speaker 00

  is to firmly disabuse you of any fond notions you might have brought into this classroom." And so, the class was finding out what we believed in relative to computing, and this very articulate, and he was an enormous guy. He's like 6'4", very articulate, super brainy.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  Giant of a man demolished any belief we had.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 41:19Speaker 00

  Completely. And I happen to know he demolished a few things he believed in. And so if you know the process of garbage collection in software, what he did was to garbage collect our brains.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Yes, right.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  So what he did was to remove this fallacy about knowledge. I was just talking to Anshin about it. And that, that, you know, knowledge is really processes rather than things. Our, our English language is too noun heavy.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  Yes, you, you talk about this in the Japanese word ma.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  Ma means what's in between. And then there's this interesting question of, once, once you learn a little science, you realize, oh, wait a minute, nothing is static. Everything is some kind of system and everything is in process. And so when they were trying to define computer science, what does, what could those two words mean together in the early 60s? One of the, the great men of our field said, well, computer science is the study of processes. Every kind of process, including biological process, you know, every kind of process in a system is the, the grist for the mill of, of computing.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  Also, the 60s was a good time in the US for getting loose of hard-nosed definitions. And categories have a real problem in that, once you put a label on something, you're more or less screwed because the label, the, a category is composed of the reasons why something is in the category. So once, like, when you, so when you're trying to think about something, putting a name on it can really hurt because it will cut down the kind of thinking you're able to do about it.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:09Speaker 00

  So you kind of have to encircle it.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  But before you go deeper into that, I just want to click on something he was saying and go up a level.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, please.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  Before I knew Alan's work well, like from sort of afar, call it Hacker News, Enquerra, and so on, and some of his talks, the two things I thought described him were as one, computer scientist, and number two was curmudgeon. And I think the most fascinating thing from the time of getting to know him and learning from him is Alan is humanistic. The actual key part, this is my interpretation, the actual key part is him bridging humanities and a deep understanding of the human into the world of technology or computers. And the second quality is one of being childlike.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  I find you unbelievably childlike. And it's interesting that we talk a lot about, and you have historically, computers apply to kids. But I did not expect how deeply you went into psychology, how deeply you went into anthropology.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  Well, I'm not a computer scientist. We talked about this before, you know, when somebody asks, what is your identity? Computer science isn't. Yeah, I'm curious about a lot of things. And basically, when you're interested in a lot of things, one of the things I learned when I was a kid is if you don't go into them deeply enough, you're basically just dicking around.

• 44:41Mario Gabriele?

  This episode of the Generalist Podcast is brought to you by our very own Generalist Plus, the premium newsletter that's redefining how investors and builders navigate the technological frontier. Generalist Plus delivers a mini MBA tier inbox at just a teeny fraction of the cost, just $22 a month or $220 annually. So what's included? One, tactical interviews where elite founders and investors reveal their actual strategies and decision frameworks. Two, comprehensive guides that distill hundreds of hours of research into actionable insights on investing and company building. Three, an exclusive database of emerging startups poised for significant growth.

• 45:26Mario Gabriele?

  And finally, complete access to our archive of meticulously crafted case studies. All of this comes wrapped in the distinctive storytelling and incisive analysis that readers have come to expect from the Generalist. We've designed Generalist Plus to level up your capabilities as an investor and operator through knowledge that matters, delivered with precision and depth. So join a community of strategic thinkers who are gaining an edge in understanding markets, technology, and business fundamentals by visiting thegeneralist.substack.com. That's thegeneralist.substack.com. I want to double click on the notion of computers and learning, though,

• 46:09Mario Gabriele?

  and specifically in the context of artificial intelligence. One of the things that Anjan, you've talked about, I think with Alan before, is this idea of, you know, computers can be this incredible amplifying learning instrument, but how much help is too much help?

• 46:29Speaker 00

  Yes, I think that's the operative phrase.

• 46:31Mario Gabriele?

  And how do you, how do you think about that, especially with AI today being more than willing to just give you the answer if you want it to? What are the like right ways to think about designing these systems?

• 46:43Speaker 00

  To me, what we're doing right now is not actually a podcast.

• 46:46Mario Gabriele?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  I would call it a video shoot.

• 46:48Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 46:50Speaker 00

  The term AI today means almost nothing overlapping with what the original coining of the term meant. When I grew up with the term AI in the 60s, it meant what today is called artificial general intelligence. And so this, changing the meaning of words for the cachet of a friend of mine, Rich Gold, called colonizing. So what lazy people do, and in this case it was academics, they wanted to write papers about artificial intelligence, but it's hard.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  And so they decided to write papers about a very limited subset and call it AI. Okay. This is similar to the revolution in teaching mathematics in the US that came about after Sputnik. So it's very, very difficult to do. It didn't happen, but they achieved it by renaming arithmetic mathematics. Right? So this is like putting Harvard on your dungarees. There's a brand of jeans, you know, it's called designer jeans. Right? So this has happened over and over and over again.

• 48:11Speaker 00

  So when we say AI, being an old fogey, I respond to it as McCarthy originally coined it. So here's a story from back in the 60s. So graduate students were used as the messenger particles between the 16 or 17 laboratories that ARPA ran around the country. So we were always traveling. And because they treated us like human beings, most places exposed their graduate students to what the grownups were doing, like they would take us to Washington when they were, when they needed more money. So we could see how you did that. Yeah, realizing we weren't going to be grad students forever.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  So in one case, I was at Technology Square in MIT and visiting Marvin Minsky and his grad students. And it just happened that day that three generals from the army were visiting. So this big, huge general with stars and decorations and everything. And I'd been in the air force, so I Right. I was somewhat amused about the, the whole thing. But so the general said, you know, we came to find out about our robot soldiers and intelligent tanks. They were making a system to do symbolic mathematics.

• 49:38Speaker 00

  He finally said, well, in three or four years, we might be able to make a pretty good robot dog. Wow.

• 49:46Speaker 00

  Another general said, "We don't even want ordinary human intelligence. We can dra- we have two and a half million, this is doing the, we have, you have two and a half million soldiers we've drafted. We can train them to do whatever we want. We already have robots of normal human intelligence." And the another gen- the third general said, "We need superhuman intelligence." One of my first thoughts was, uh, you know, have you ever thought about safety?

• 50:18Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  And the thing about doing, as anybody's ever done a software system, eventually finds out one way or another, if you want that system to be safe, you have to start off with it being safe. You cannot bolt on security from the outside in any pragmatic way. When you let the genie out of the bottle, you have to let it into another bottle where you can get the genie to do some things for you. But, so this is something that is completely understood by the culture that did the internet and personal computing, completely non- non-understood by the culture that did the web and what we have today. So it's really two completely different cultures in as different a way as you could

• 51:05Speaker 00

  possibly come out and have both be able to write a few lines of code. So that's something to think about.

• 51:11Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 51:12Speaker 00

  So, so the, um, so the interesting question here is what we don't need is something that mimics fallible human beings magnified by the industrial revolution. That is exactly what we don't need. It's bad enough having fallible human beings putting out garbage and having the internet multiplying it. What we don't need is a generator that is all, has the industrial revolution behind it putting out garbage.

• 51:52Mario Gabriele?

  Is it better to have, uh, let's say?

• 51:57Mario Gabriele?

  A thousand times more fallible human beings if they're in the top 20% of intelligence. At what stage of intelligence compared to humans?

• 52:07Speaker 00

  Well, I think the operative word is wisdom, not intelligence. And so if you go back and you take Anjan's journey. And what's interesting about we humans is how clever we are and how unwise we are. You know, what happened with us is in part because we had language and in part because we had writing. We were able to co-opt the ability to do that, to lay on much stronger methods. So these are sometimes called human non-universals.

• 52:43Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  So something like mathematics or science is a perfect example of an invented set of schemes.

• 52:53Mario Gabriele?

  Yep.

• 52:55Speaker 00

  That nobody is born with. But once you learn the things, you can put them on top of your language apparatus. And you can act much more widely and deeply than humans without it. And if you put together a community of scientists, you also have the possibility of debugging

• 53:18Speaker 00

  what's wrong with our brains.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  And all of a sudden, you have created exponential power. Couple that to engineering.

• 53:27Mario Gabriele?

  And you don't manage to scale wisdom as quickly.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  Wisdom is tricky, isn't it? Because it goes against almost every instinct our genetics endowed us with. Because, you know, our evolution made us, created us in the midst of scarcity and danger. And a whole bunch of other things that are normal triggered reactions.

• 53:56Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 53:57Speaker 00

  And we have hundreds of cognitive biases. We form neuroses almost at will.

• 54:06Speaker 00

  And so if you lay all of these things down, their wisdom has a really hard time functioning.

• 54:16Speaker 00

  Because it's, a lot of wisdom is just not acting when you feel like it.

• 54:22Mario Gabriele?

  How do you think about making a personal computer, which is what daylight is in, in, you know, sort of the most fundamental sense, that is intelligent and wise? Like, does that sort of distinction have to be thought of from, from your perspective as you start to engineer this, as you think about the operating system and how it works?

• 54:47Speaker 02

  For me, the first lesson of wisdom is humility. And I think the simplest application of that is less. You can't govern a bigger area until you've learned to govern a small area. You can't govern something hard until you can learn to govern something smaller and easier. And so

• 55:09Speaker 02

  at least when I think about the power of a computer, it's a lot easier to, to, to gain efficacy with something that is small. And so the point of daylight is to not bite off all of computing, but to bite off a certain subsection of it, sort of writing, reading, note taking, thinking, the sort of magical piece of paper aspect of being. And then from there, slowly grow it outwards. And in a similar sense, I think the reason of, you know, Alan always talks about, everybody thinks the Dynabook was him talking about a form factor, you know, the inventing the tablet, inventing something that's the size of a notebook, but he always says it's, it's the concepts behind it. And you know, the form may be a, a room that's got dynamic

• 55:55Speaker 02

  surfaces. I think one advantage of making a piece of hardware, of making a separate computer is you can have it separate from the rest of your existing unwise computing ecosystem. And one piece of wisdom is sort of Odysseus tying himself to the mast so he doesn't get pulled in by the sirens. By having something that does less, that is away from everything else, you don't need to constantly be making decisions about what to prioritize. And when you have junk food and candy, the dopamine that feeds in videos is, it's really hard to be this better version of yourself. And so there is an emergent wisdom, I think, that comes from a thoughtful application of constraints.

• 56:37Speaker 02

  And I think my job as a designer is to think of thoughtful constraints that allows you to make wiser decisions. And I think often, wiser decisions in this context means the things you want to do that you know are nourishing and good for you, but you don't end up doing. I always like Alan's definition of hard fun.

• 56:57Speaker 02

  It ends up being as fun.

• 56:58Speaker 00

  Seymour Papert.

• 56:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, if I can call it fun, one of the fun things of having cancer and getting to 85.

• 57:08Speaker 00

  Is, I think even without the cancer, what happens is your world starts shrinking, starts becoming smaller. And the fun things for me is

• 57:24Speaker 00

  that I'm very much enjoying the smaller nutshell. You know, Hamlet has this line, "I could be confined in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space." And I thought of that when I, a few years ago, when I was recovering from an operation, I was thinking, oh yeah.

• 57:43Speaker 00

  And it doesn't actually, he didn't say how big the nutshell was. It could be even a smaller nutshell. But Anjana and I have talked about, like, an interesting thing to do with the daylight.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  Is, like, if you just take one really important thing, that's a large job, but it's smaller than trying to do every important thing. So like, one important thing might be to... Take what the human factors are on it and say, oh, this is, it's really interesting to think of, could there be something like better than a moleskin?

• 58:25Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 58:26Speaker 00

  Notebook for ideating.

• 58:29Mario Gabriele?

  Mm hmm. I mean, I think it's already, I think Tyler Cowen said this, that this is arguably the best general reading and writing device that's ever been created.

• 58:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, the question is, what could it, so it's fabulous at any number of things.

• 58:48Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 58:48Speaker 00

  The interesting question goes back to this, how much help is too much help? For instance, one of the things we did at Xerox PARC early on, I did a fair amount of it, was to say, let's not give people something useful and that they'll want to use, but take something away when we do it. And that was a reference to how bad the typography was on CRTs back then. You couldn't really read a CRT. And because one of the scientists at Xerox PARC invented the laser printer right then, we were very interested in what would it mean not just to be able to print out like

• 59:29Speaker 00

  a book, but also to be able to compose, to write as though we're writing a book. And so then the question is, you know, how readable are these displays anyway? And would doing a careful job on the fonts make a big difference? And the answer is yes.

• 59:45Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 59:46Speaker 00

  And.

• 59:47Mario Gabriele?

  Which was a big part of Dynabook.

• 59:48Speaker 00

  Well, but then we, the, if you look at the early stuff that was written, one of the first fonts I wound up doing was a handwriting font. Because once you do the good fonts, it makes tentative thoughts look too official and is now a bot, because you need noise to think.

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

  So the question is, if this is a dynamic medium for creative thought, you have to ask questions like not just what is it as a retainer of stuff, but what should the actual markings be like? That gets you into this larger thing of user interfaces. Like, how crisp should the user interface, how machine-like? Should they, how organic?

• 1:00:39Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 1:00:40Speaker 00

  So, so many of the commercial companies went through a phase where they wanted their user interfaces to look as, as it was called Chrome at Disney. They wanted to really impress you with, you know, the 3D-ness of the boundaries of the windows and everything. Now we're in a thing where the, that is de-emphasized and we're into unsaturated colors and something like that. But I, I think the whole thing needs to be rethought.

• 1:01:14Mario Gabriele?

  You mentioned in, in preparation for this, how you and Anjan have talked about, you know, hardware is maybe 5% of it and the operating system is 95% of it. Like, how, like, what do those discussions look like as you guys talk through this and, and those sort of considerations?

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  Well, it took me six years to do the hardware and therefore people then defined this project similar to how the form factor of the Dynavox people think is a tablet. They defined this as a hardware project. But I sort of think if the goal here is to have a vector to bring this more humanistic perspective of personal computing to come to fruition, literally like fruit, the six years was to sort of remove the rubble and the rocks and the weeds until the soil and the ground was compacted and hard. And I sort of think of hardware as that. It is the actual underlying substrate.

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  And the reason we're sitting here is because of his idealism.

• 1:02:11Mario Gabriele?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  Now, I mean, the hardware is nice, but his idealism means there's a pathway.

• 1:02:18Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  It's not a place.

• 1:02:20Mario Gabriele?

  I totally agree.

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  That's the, that's the key thing on this. And I think we don't, you know, he's one of the few who have done something with a screen that you can write on and cared about what's called tooth or teeth.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  It's one of the attractions of the mole, particular mole skin that I use.

• 1:02:44Mario Gabriele?

  And by that you mean the feel?

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  Just the way the, if the drag is just right for you, makes a huge difference as to, like, one of the things we found out when we were experimenting with the Park version of the GUI was that the feeling of intimacy did not come from the fact that you were manipu-, you had a stylus or a, or a mouse and clicking on things, but feeling of intimacy came from being able to drag things.

• 1:03:14Mario Gabriele?

  Hmm. Because it was more tactile somehow?

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  Well, one, you know, one of the things we did at Apple that never got out as a product is we did several kinds of mice that gave tactile feedback.

• 1:03:29Speaker 00

  Uh, one of them, I think they could, they should have put out, which, you know, so when you dragged a folder, you could feel its mass.

• 1:03:38Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, interesting. Wow.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  So you had, so, uh, so I think one of the things that's been soiled in the, especially for children, is, uh, the haptics. Like, if you look at children playing games, most, most user interfaces of the past and in the games world are two-handed. Whereas the, uh, if you look at the iPhone, the only two-handed use of the iPhone is typing with your thumbs, which is completely retro, right? Because it's aimed at an audience that doesn't want to learn anything and it satisfies marketing people who do not want to have learning as being part of what their product is.

• 1:04:23Speaker 00

  And so this is a big drag on what Anjan and this notion of, uh, a real computer revolution. So the, the irony of it though is, uh, you know, when we were at Park, we used to say to each other, "Thank goodness we're doing, we're doing this. We're going to, we will remove the 200 years of bumbling between the printing press and, uh, the 17th century, because we're going to do it right."

• 1:04:53Mario Gabriele?

  Get it right the first?

• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  We're gonna, well, we're gonna work on it in the future. We're not gonna work on it in the present. We're going to build time machines. We're going to spend money to compute, do our computing physically in the seventies, but to have it on machines of the kind that will be sold in the late eighties. So it was a, so we had to spend about 25, you know, in today's terms, well over a hundred thousand bucks for each machine because it was essentially giving people, individuals in the seventy, seventies, a supercomputer that 15 years later would be affordable, right? So the whole flow there was software is difficult. User interface is even more difficult.

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  And if we try and do any of this work on current day, hardware will be screwed. We have to make the hardware of the future and just pay for it to do it. And but the irony is great because whoops.

• 1:05:53Speaker 00

  We thought we were going to get rid of those 200 years, but guess what? We got 200 more? We, it, it could take that. You think so? Wow. Well, it.

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  I don't think so.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, let's have that. Yeah, because the, so I would say I don't think so either because none of the intellectual revolutions hoped for in the sixties have taken place. We've got, uh, not just pandemics, but we have the climate problem, which has been known about for since, uh, publicly since 1963. So we're talking 60 some odd years. Yeah, yeah. But nobody's taking it seriously yet.

• 1:06:35Speaker 00

  And the problem is we've gotten, in 1990, we crossed where we should have kept it level. The threshold, yeah.

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  Would you say that's sort of the name of the game? Like us as a collective effort? We're sort of having seen what has actually happened versus our ideals. We now have a second shot to sort of start from scratch again with computing and build it up now with all the lessons we have and the wisdom. Is that, is that fair to say that's really the game we're playing?

• 1:07:05Speaker 00

  No, it's an interesting question.

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  Cause even the first computers, right? They talk about the friendly orange glow. Uh, and this is a friendly, orange glowing thing that's monochromatic. It's sort of where it started.

• 1:07:15Speaker 00

  So one, one of the props I use when I give a talk, actually up there, I, I have my globes. But I usually carry a bottle like that in after an empty one. And I point out, if you have it the way it is on a table and you poke it a little bit, it will rock back and forth, but everything is all right. If you turn it upside down and poke it a little bit, it will fall over. So a small amount of energy, put it into a state where an enormous amount of energy comparatively is going to be recorded. So one of the great difficulties is that the voting public,

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  its normal way of looking at things is through common sense and local

• 1:08:03Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  situations, which is something that goes all the way back to Paleolithic times. The idea of systems, of scaling, of great power and all of that stuff is not in most people's common sense.

• 1:08:19Mario Gabriele?

  Yes, it's hard for us to reason across a civilization.

• 1:08:22Speaker 00

  Brexit didn't take into account the actual situation. It was mainly a protest.

• 1:08:29Mario Gabriele?

  Hmm, yes.

• 1:08:30Speaker 00

  Take back controls, what the buses said. We were here when that was going on. And we see similar sentiments in the US about people feeling out of control, but not understanding the system they're in, as indeed the government itself did not understand the system it was entwined in.

• 1:08:49Mario Gabriele?

  And so to loop it back to the computing and the idea of, you know, this bottle being on the table where, you know, you give it a little bit of force versus a lot of force to tip it over, depending on how it's positioned, is the idea there that, you know, for us to avoid this being another 200 years, it's going to take a lot of force?

• 1:09:07Speaker 00

  It's not, I agree with Anshat, it's not going to be 200 years because the disasters that are possible are much more short term now.

• 1:09:19Mario Gabriele?

  Hmm, so it's more urgent than ever that we figure it out?

• 1:09:22Speaker 00

  Yes, it's beyond urgent.

• 1:09:23Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 1:09:24Speaker 00

  But neither the Guardian nor the Telegraph, for example, have a banner about the climate every day.

• 1:09:33Speaker 00

  Like that is the big news. And the problem is this acclimation. People have renormalized, you know, and at some point, as the bottle goes over, people will say, well, why weren't we informed about?

• 1:09:49Mario Gabriele?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:09:50Speaker 00

  And the whole point of science is to be able to reliably imagine what's going to happen before having to experience it. Right, that's what's being missed here. And one of the ideals in the 60s about what personal computing was about was to not just have something to do with education, but to have something to do with the new thinking that scaling and the industrial revolution and so forth have brought to the human dilemma.

• 1:10:24Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:25Speaker 00

  Right, that's the key. So, right now, we're in a situation where, certainly in the US, the attempts to even get school, like the attempts to even teach reading are failing. So what we have is a systemic problem of getting back to a normal that was desirable 100 years ago. Now, we're in a situation where we have to deal with some new normal that most people can't even understand is happening. So I think the, and I think people will, you know, to get back to your AI, quote, AI

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  thing, once you devalue a trusted source of knowledge, so that, and I think that's, we're close to that, that's what the use of the internet has actually done. Now, we're basically in a situation where something like a new religion, you know, because people are going to start relying on how they feel.

• 1:11:31Speaker 00

  Which is actually a good thing to pay attention to. But in fact, it doesn't flow into dealing with the how to deal with complex systems. Einstein pointed out that the kind of thinking we use to get into trouble is not going to be able to get us out of it. We need a different kind of thinking. That's a, that's a big thought there. So even trying to get back to zero is actually a disaster.

• 1:12:01Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah. Well, so many threads that I, I want to follow, but in the interest of time, we always like to end the podcast with one of my favorite questions to collect reading recommendations. And maybe I'll start with you, Anjan. If you were given the opportunity to assign a book for everyone on earth to read and understand, what book would you choose?

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  It would be this book by Kent Stanley called Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned.

• 1:12:31Speaker 02

  If it was for every bit in the world, I'd probably want to make a graphic novel version of it so it'd be more accessible to.

• 1:12:37Mario Gabriele?

  Well, you don't have to worry about that because everyone understands it, but that's implied in the question.

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  But really what the book speaks to is so much of the way we live our lives today is very top-down and convergent. We want to be on the cover of Forbes, we want to be a billionaire, we want to do this. And so what we do is we pick objectives and we try to reverse engineer our lives towards it. And the great beauty of his book is he sort of speaks to actually when we're trying to do something that is fundamentally creative or innovative, venturing into new possibility space, the best algorithm to do so is not the sort of reverse engineering optimization algorithm, working backwards from an objective, but actually is sort of bottom-up algorithms, what he calls open-endedness, or which your, you know, sort of old uncle wisdom would

• 1:13:23Speaker 02

  be pursue your passion, do what's interesting, notice your little instincts and intuitions to do stuff. And what's fascinating about the book is he shows computationally, not just anecdotally, he shows computationally how there's a class of problems that actually, when you try to do it in an objective-based way, you can't solve it the same way you can in this sort of open-ended way. They pursue novelty because it's not as easy to model interestingness. But for me, that is the big change in the world, is everybody sort of follows their own bottom-up instincts.

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  And that's how you get this beautiful blooming versus right now, everybody's trying to get into the same couple of spots and repeat the same couple of behaviors. And I think the essence of our conversations about education is sort of how do you help empower a child to take those bottom up instincts and curiosities and empower them to pursue that, to scaffold them such they can do it in ways that they wouldn't be able to do on their own. I'll learn everything that's the best from the past and everything that's the best from today. And so that would be, yeah.

• 1:14:28Mario Gabriele?

  Amazing. Alan, if you had the chance to.

• 1:14:32Speaker 00

  No, I wouldn't argue with Anjan. But my, my relationship with reading was, started early before I could remember doing it. And the two keys for reading were, uh, how many points of view there were. So I wouldn't recommend one book. So I think it's many books. Good books and bad books.

• 1:15:01Mario Gabriele?

  What's a bad book you would recommend?

• 1:15:03Speaker 00

  A book that probably isn't true.

• 1:15:05Mario Gabriele?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:06Speaker 00

  That is still provocative, uh, can be extremely useful. Like one of the books I most enjoyed, now mentioning one book, but one of the books I've most enjoyed that probably isn't true is a book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian James. Some of the best conversations I've had with other human beings have been with other people who've read that book a few times and have thought deeply about it.

• 1:15:42Speaker 00

  It's a book that by its premises and the nature of what the author drew on to make his premises plausible and by actual history.

• 1:16:02Speaker 00

  More or less contributing to making it plausible, makes this very implausible thing very, very provocative towards thinking. It's a very good catalyst. I don't know what my top 10 is, but that's one. But I think the other thing that's critical, most people have never seen what is called a McGuffey Reader.

• 1:16:26Mario Gabriele?

  I don't even know what that is.

• 1:16:27Speaker 00

  People have heard, so these are used in America, mostly, or much of the use was in one-room schools, which is a very interesting dynamic. It's done well. It's a great dynamic for kids. In many parts of the United States in the 19th century, the primary aim of teaching children to read was not to teach them to read English, but to teach them how to learn from reading English. Right? So it's not being able to read the words. It's not being able to see street signs, or read a pill bottle, or something like that. It was actually

• 1:17:08Speaker 00

  to be able to put together complex thoughts expressed in prose, usually. But the McGuffey Readers also had poetry, because the thought process of the people who were doing public education in the 19th century was, well, everybody's spread out. It's mostly agrarian. The knowledge has exploded, especially in the 18th century, and we're in the 19th century now. And we actually can't teach what we think children need to know in a school now.

• 1:17:46Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:46Speaker 00

  So we can't do it orally. So what we need to teach the children is something meta. It's not just to read, but it's how to learn from reading.

• 1:17:55Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 1:17:56Speaker 00

  And how to deal with that, and what do you do with other people thereby. I would do a yes and with Aja, because I think human beings, you know, following their own instincts is too anarchistic. I think the best things that we've come up were really hard inventions. And we should not require children to reinvent them without help.

• 1:18:27Speaker 00

  I think helping them to reinvent them is not a bad way of helping them to learn them. That's pretty good. But I think the, I think the, the things that actually convey a real perspective, and I think wisdom comes out of more perspective. I think that's a critical kind of idea. The, the, the problem with these thresholds, if this is reading scores in the US, every time it goes up, there's a yay, and every time it goes down, there's a boo.

• 1:18:56Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:57Speaker 00

  And the, but if you don't draw a threshold in there.

• 1:19:01Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:01Speaker 00

  What's going on? So the actual threshold in the US is this wavy thing is below threshold.

• 1:19:07Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 1:19:08Speaker 00

  The, the children are not learning how to read, whether this reading scores are going up or down.

• 1:19:13Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:13Speaker 00

  There's a threshold you have to get to. Like one of my slogans that people find popular is the best way to predict the future is to invent it.

• 1:19:21Mario Gabriele?

  Yes, that, you are famous for that one.

• 1:19:23Speaker 00

  Um, I'm, I have instructions that it not show up on my tombstone. But I've used it in, I used it in a talk not too long ago at, at the National Institute for Health, uh, which was, look, people right now in Washington, this is before the current day, but people right now in Washington are busily predicting the future by inventing it. The problem is they're inventing a bad future. They're predicting badly, they're inventing badly. And so there's nothing in the slogan that says you should take it in a positive way.

• 1:19:57Mario Gabriele?

  Yes, that's right.

• 1:19:58Speaker 00

  Right? Point of view is worth 80 IQ points. There's no sign, it could be minus 80 IQ points. We know plenty of people who act much stupider than they actually are because their point of view is so messed up.

• 1:20:12Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:13Speaker 00

  So this, these slogan things, I, I started making them up.

• 1:20:18Speaker 00

  Mea culpa because Xerox executives did not respond to paragraphs.

• 1:20:25Mario Gabriele?

  Hmm, you needed to give them.

• 1:20:28Speaker 00

  We need to give them

• 1:20:29Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:29Speaker 00

  Something to think with. And the first one I came up with was done spontaneously, but then I realized, oh, they actually responded to that. And this is more like advertising than I ever wanted it to be.

• 1:20:44Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 1:20:44Speaker 00

  If there's any cognitive bias humans have to the utmost, it has to be confirmation bias. We love anything that supports our opinion and we ignore as much as possible.

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  Can I ask a last question?

• 1:20:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, please.

• 1:21:00Speaker 02

  I sort of founded Daylight because I'm like, computers could be better for you and computing could make you a much better version of yourself. What I'm curious about is, let's say we do collectively pull off this computer revolution. We do actually get it right this time. What does it look like? Like, what is that world? What, what image do you have of what's on the other side?

• 1:21:24Speaker 00

  Well, so more than any other species, we are the species that does not put up with nature.

• 1:21:34Speaker 00

  That when we can think of something that will help us better than we think nature is helping us. So we make tools, we make housing, we make clothing.

• 1:21:47Speaker 00

  We don't let bad eyesight bring us down. We don't let getting cancer bring us down. And I think we have to encompass that in any theory of the future. That our basic premise is that we're not,

• 1:22:04Speaker 00

  we are animals, but we're not animals that wish to be pushed around. And we're occasionally overshot.

• 1:22:14Speaker 00

  We occasionally ruin nature when we're just trying to make things more convenient with ourselves. So that's a lack of wisdom. But I think we have to take this idea that a... So when I think of human beings, I don't think of them as in isolation. If you bring up a baby without any other humans around, you have something like a wolf child or worse. So I have a four or five books. Those are books... This is why I wouldn't go for one book. Yes. I have four or five books just on wolf children that everybody should read. Huh.

• 1:22:54Speaker 00

  And the bottom line there is you don't wind up with an adult that's recognizably human or even able to acquire a language in the way that children can acquire a language. So I always think of humans in relationship to some culture. I'm always interested in what that culture is. What is it doing for the individuals? What is... How is it hurting the individuals? How is it helping them? So I think that's a big deal. The culture is something that has co-evolved with us. So it's an extension of our biology. We can't live without it. We carry it along.

• 1:23:39Speaker 00

  And I think a lot of the things that are most interesting and most powerful are things where we've done the equivalent of inventing the bow and arrow or eyeglasses to ideas.

• 1:23:53Speaker 00

  So we invented a kind of mathematics that we're not born with. We invented ways of knowing about the world that we're not born with.

• 1:24:01Mario Gabriele?

  Just to return to the piece on like the computing revolution, to pull those threads that you just mentioned and what it might...

• 1:24:09Speaker 00

  Careful what you pull on.

• 1:24:10Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, I can imagine.

• 1:24:13Speaker 00

  Anja knows I go on and on.

• 1:24:14Mario Gabriele?

  No, no.

• 1:24:15Speaker 00

  Be careful.

• 1:24:16Mario Gabriele?

  We'll be... I'd be here happily all night, but...

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, what's the image?

• 1:24:20Mario Gabriele?

  Like, yeah.

• 1:24:21Speaker 02

  If 30 seconds, you close your eyes, just paint the image of...

• 1:24:24Speaker 00

  Well, I think...

• 1:24:25Speaker 02

  If you pull it off, what it looks like.

• 1:24:26Speaker 00

  I mean, Negro Potty was the first to have the, I think, to have the audacity...

• 1:24:36Speaker 00

  To partly because he was an architect, he wasn't worried about doing it, how do you do it? But he was worried, you know, what he was thinking about is people are living in this world, they're living in houses, they're living in... So he was the first one that I knew of in the late 60s who said, well, the, it's going to be inevitable that we're going to be living in a world that's active in a way that we've never experienced before.

• 1:25:06Mario Gabriele?

  This ubiquitous computing sort of...

• 1:25:08Speaker 00

  It's going to be, yeah. So he wrote his master's thesis in the late 60s, is a masterpiece, actually, because it, it was the first real thinking. It involved, he was a good friend of Marvin Minsky's, it involved how AI might be used. It led to him getting some of this great research money of doing examples, getting people thinking about it. He and I were on each other's advisory boards. He was the best man at my wedding. You know, we were, we were great, have been great friends for, you know, like almost 60 years now.

• 1:25:48Speaker 00

  So, so this guy was a guy who, in the late 60s, he was talking about Campbell's soup cans talking to you off the shelves of the supermarket. He didn't care how it was done, but to him, that was Moore's Law meant...

• 1:26:03Mario Gabriele?

  That's what would naturally happen.

• 1:26:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. That's where the, you know, when I first started thinking about how much help is too much help. There's a modern equivalent, but what, I went to an engineering high school, partly by circumstance. It was a very rigorous place. But a lot about, of engineering in those days was, you know, slide rule times. And there's this book called the CRC tables. And it was kind of the magic book. It had every important engineering formula in it. And part of becoming an engineer is learning how to use that book and how to use your slide rule. And modern equivalent of it is MATLAB.

• 1:26:46Speaker 00

  And the problem with it was back then, and really with MATLAB, is what MATLAB does for you, it has a hard time getting in here. So the ten, and this is true of, like even the language we did at Parc called Smalltalk.

• 1:27:05Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:06Speaker 00

  One of the reasons it became popular was not from goodness, but because, like many languages now, it was what the library had in it. So there are many things, many programmers would approach programming by asking themselves, what's in the library first? Rather than thinking, doing like a little mock-up or so on, asking, am I asking the right, am I even working on the right problem? Any of that stuff. So having this stuff, having a big store full of tools is often the last thing you want, until you've gone through some form of minimalism.

• 1:27:46Speaker 00

  The last cautionary sentence, I would say for this is, you know, above all else, understand scaling.

• 1:27:56Mario Gabriele?

  Well, so many threads that we could keep pulling on, but you guys have been, yeah, so, so, so kind. And I've enjoyed this very, very much. So, um, thank you. Thank you to you both. It's great to meet you. Lovely to meet you as well.

• 1:28:10Speaker 02

  Amazing to learn from you and try to do some things together.

• 1:28:13Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:13Speaker 02

  Thank you, Maria.

• 1:28:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:28:15Mario Gabriele?

  That's it. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Generalist Podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast app. Ratings and reviews help others discover these discussions. So if you enjoyed the conversation, I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one. For all past episodes and more, visit us at thegeneralist.substack.com. See you next time as we continue to explore the future.