CES: Apple Fellow Alan Kay Explains “All Human Thinking” At CES
2:23 pm, January 7th, 2010, Leander Kahney
LAS VEGAS — It was too early for most hungover CES attendees, but the brilliant computer scientist and former Apple Fellow Alan Kay explained the basis of all knowledge at a 9AM keynote speech here.
All human knowledge can be explained by the simple logical expression NOT BOTH, Kay said.
“It’s a logical expression that explains all thinking,” he said in the middle of his speech, which was about the failures of computers in modern education.
Unfortunately, Kay, who is perhaps one of the foremost living computer scientists and an unlikely presence at the CES gadget orgy, stopped there.
“I’m not going to get into that now,” he said. “it’s beyond the scope of this talk.”
Kay is famous for the Dynabook concept — the “DYNAmic BOOK” idea underlyimg laptops and tablets. He was a researcher at Xerox PARC in the seventies on technologies that Apple later commercialized in the Lisa and Mac. Among many honors, Kay has won the Turing Award for work on object-oriented programming. During the mid-1980s he was an Apple Fellow at Apple’s Advanced Technology Group.
His talk was a scathing indictment of the education system, which has squandered 30 years of technology in classrooms. He likened the modern factory educatory system to a monkey looking at its reflection in a microscope — the monkey utterly misses the point.
Computers have become tools of distraction, Kay said, instead of education. He singled out Guitar Hero as the best example of this — players get the fantasy of virtuoso guitar playing without learning a single note.
“When I look at computers in schools, this is what I see. It’s all Guitar Hero.”
Posted by Leander Kahney in Apple, CES 2010, News | Comment on this article
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Did anybody find a video or transcription of this speech?
Brad, on January 7th, 2010 at 4:22 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_NAND
Joe Smith, on January 7th, 2010 at 5:27 pm
Hilarious!
Nothing cooler than giving a speech and throwing out a high level concept like that but refusing to explain it. Wish I was there to see the faces.
)))
Gazoobee, on January 8th, 2010 at 10:16 am
Hi Leander
Thanks for your writeup on my talk yesterday.
One little correction is that I didn’t say:
>”All human knowledge can be explained by the simple logical expression NOT BOTH, Kay said.
>“It’s a logical expression that explains all thinking,” he said in the middle of his speech”
What I said was that all human symbol/logical REPRESENTATION systems and all computers past present and future can be made from NOT BOTH.
I committed the classic error of letting the clock pressure me into using one sentence where I should have used either none or a few.
The analogy is that all living things we know about on the planet are made from just a few kinds of atoms (roughly six kinds). This didn’t explain life, because it is the complex dynamic architecture of those atoms which explains life, not the atoms themselves. Similarly, we can make arches from bricks, but it is very hard to invent an arch from looking at a brick (took humans thousands of years to have the idea and figure out how to do it).
The NOT BOTH operator (called NAND in computerdom) was first realized by American mathematician Charles Peirce around 1880 when he was looking at Boole’s book on logic, which showed how all logical operations could be made from AND, OR, and NOT. Peirce realize that NOT BOTH on all the possible values of inputs A and B was sufficient to do what the three more understandable operations of Boole and other logicians did.
Today, this operation is often called the “Sheffer Stroke” (ca. early 1900s) because Peirce’s work got lost for a while.
Examples
I think that using 0 and 1 is easier to understand than false and true (or off and on, or no or yes) so let:
0 be used to signify false or off or no
1 be used to signify true or on or yes
(here please use a monofont)
———————————————————–
Define op = NOT BOTH as
A op B = C
— — —
0 0 = 1
0 1 = 1
1 0 = 1
1 1 = 0
————————————————————
We sometimes use this operation in ordinary life.
For example, if we are talking about the life support of a patient, and A is the patient’s family, and B is the doctor, and C means should be the life support of the patient be on (1) or off (0), then the logic we want to perform is that we can only turn off the life support if both the family and the doctor concur.
That is A:Yes B:Yes C:Off
Of course most people wouldn’t think this way, because our nervous systems are terrible at NOT (and negation of all kinds). (We can’t say to someone “Don’t think about the pink elephant” without conjuring one — or “The jury will disregard the last remark”.)
The universality of this for making representations is easier to see now than in Peirce’s time, because we can make every element in a computer (both memory and processing logic) from just NOT BOTH. And people now have an informal sense by using computers that they can represent “everything” (all written languages, anything that can be made from marks, text, pictures, movies, sounds, and representation systems that are more obscure, etc.).
And, back to the analogy of the relation between a few kinds of atoms and making life, in theory one should be able to make machines that think as well (and better than us) from architectures completely fashioned from the single kind of brick of NOT BOTH. But both science and engineering require real examples of models that work — so these are conjectures (but good ones) at this point.
You can see why I should have kept my mouth shut about this (or given a different talk).
Cheers,
Alan
Alan Kay, on January 8th, 2010 at 1:33 pm
What a thrill, LEANDER
I’m GONNA copy and keep this post from ALAN KAY
Thank you both
Hugh C
iFanboy, on January 8th, 2010 at 6:09 pm