By Karen A. Frenkel

I recently covered two 40^th anniversary celebrations of the demonstration of the computer mouse, hypertext, and other interactive computing features we take for granted today. Computing luminaries hailed Doug Engelbart, the computer scientist at SRI in Menlo Park, CA who invented those features. Moreover, they lauded his greater vision, which reached far beyond the sum of those parts. Engelbart’s contribution was an entire system devoted to augmenting collective human intellect. If computers were going to be good at anything, Engelbart thought, they should be used to boost every effort to solve important problems. They were supposed to help us make the world a better place. Click here for the demo.

Alan Kay was among those who honored Engelbart in the Stanford University and the Program for the Future commemorations. He detailed Engelbart’s dream, analyzed why computers and computer science have not fulfilled the potential Engelbart saw, and also commented generally on science and society. Kay himself holds a prominent place in the history of computing; in the late 1960s he invented the seminal computing language SmallTalk and the Dynabook, a personal computer for children. He ran Xerox PARC during the 1970s, where icons and other features his team developed were later commercialized by Apple Computer. Kay is now President of the nonprofit Viewpoints Research Institute, mandated to improve technology for education. Below are highlights from his speech. Here are videos of all the presentations.

Kay began by describing Henry David Thoreau’s reaction, in 1865, when the first transatlantic cable was installed. He was “afraid he’d find out that a European Princess had just gotten an new hat.” With that remark, the naturalist and philosopher “nailed the two sides of technology,” Kay said, “he understood exactly who humans beings are and what they’re likely to do with any great idea.” In other words, use it to amuse themselves.

Thoreau also said we become the tools of our tools, an idea Marshall McLuhan elaborated on many years later. As Kay summarized it, “We first shape tools and then they turn around and re-shape us.” Ideas are double-edged, because every technology is intended to amplify a skill, but each amplification can also act as a prosthetic; a prosthetic on a healthy limb causes it to whither.

This presents a dilemma, Kay said, because when an innovation is made to augment us, how can we avoid using it to replace something we already have, somehow winding up with less? “I believe this is the fundamental problem of 20th century and our era now,” he said.

Looking at the past, he sited the printing press, which mimicked the work of scribes. The Guttenberg Bible contained 253 fonts and was illuminated manually to make it appear to have been completely handmade Kay noted. Similarly, today’s electronic technologies mimic printing, recordings, movies, and other media. Our electronic games would be familiar to cave people 100,000 years ago, Kay said, because they are a return to oral modes of thought. Electronic devices produce the withering effects of prosthetics because they can be used to avoid modes of thought associated with reading.

But Engelbart asked what computers could do that was different–that would allow us to organize and filter ideas in a new way. Those watching the 1968 demo saw “a strong set of ideas that could improve our process––an amplification of the relationship between us and this new technology, rather than a prosthetic and sapping one,” Kay said. That is why Engelbart’s vision for what computing and computer science could achieve was so significant.

Kay then segued to democratic ideals and science itself. “No invented system of thought has been more successful than science,” he said. “It’s probably the greatest single invention of the human race and it’s only about 400 years old.” And yet it is poorly taught in most countries, especially ours. This most successful endeavor that has changed our lives tremendously—just because it has paired with technology but because it has changed our way of looking at things–despite all its success, remains a backwater for the vast majority. “This is dangerous in a democracy where majorities count,” said Kay, “We’re in a very dangerous era now, where the power of our tools has completely outstripped the pace at which education can absorb the ideas and to teach in the mass.” He lamented the result, the “sparest, thinnest distribution of understanding–certainly the ratio between power and understanding is at its worst right now.”

This seems paradoxical, however, because “we have the Internet and 1 billion nodes on it and everyone has computers and is connected. Yet the commercial explosion of very good inventions in the ‘60s and ‘70s has trumped almost all of powerful ideas that fostered them.”

The problem is us, said Kay. We are, in fact, interested in whether a European princess got a new hat. And we impose that kind of interest on every medium invented in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Furthermore, because the computer is a great imitator, the current media milieu could stanch competitors with deep ideas, he said. With a nod to late media critic Neil Postman, who in 1985 wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, Kay warned we may have created “the most powerful medium for distracting ourselves to death.” Kay therefore called on mathematicians, computer scientists, and scientists to volunteer to teach in elementary schools so that kids get exposed to the ideas behind the technologies they use.

Perhaps video games are merely distractions, but what about virtual worlds? There is talk of using virtual worlds for collaborative work, meetings, education, and training. It seems that these applications of technology, and social networking too, may not be just imitative. They may yield activities uniquely enabled by computers and the Web. Maybe they will enhance us in some of the ways Engelbart and Kay would wish. What do you think?

For information about me, please visit Karenafrenkel.com.