Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
ALAN KAYKnowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
ALAN KAYTechnology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.
ALAN KAYWhen was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?
ALAN KAYIn computers, every ‘new explosion’ was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
ALAN KAYIt 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.
ALAN KAYThe future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide.
ALAN KAYThe Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
ALAN KAYThere’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.”
ALAN KAYIt’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.
ALAN KAYEvery technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual – not how to use it but why, when, and for what.
ALAN KAYThe soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.
ALAN KAYI 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.
ALAN KAYI 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”.
ALAN KAYI fear – as far as I can tell – that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.
ALAN KAYThe biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
ALAN KAYI knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view.
ALAN KAY