Artificial intelligence is what we don’t know how to do yet
ALAN KAYWhen the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.
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I realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn’t been done.
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It’s all about long-term, sustaining relationships.
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Much of the debugging has to be done by others.
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I think the trick with knowledge is to “acquire it, and forget all except the perfume” – because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one’s own “brain voices”.
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Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual – not how to use it but why, when, and for what.
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But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
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Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.
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When I first prepared this particular talk…
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Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.
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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
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But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever.
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I fear – as far as I can tell – that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.
ALAN KAY