We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
ALAN KAYAny company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?
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And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web.
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[Computing] is just a fabulous place for that, because it’s a place where you don’t have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It’s a place where you can still be an artisan.
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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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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
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Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
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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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And to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.
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Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
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As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
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It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated.
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Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.
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Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in – the one that we think is reality.
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Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.
ALAN KAY