Alan Kay

Globally networked, easy-to-use computers can enhance learning, but only within an educational environment that encourages students to question "facts" and seek challenges.

The physicist Murray Gell-Mann has remarked that education in the 20th century is like being taken to the world's greatest restaurant and being fed the menu. He meant that representations of ideas have replaced the ideas themselves; students are taught superficially about great discoveries instead of being helped to learn deeply for themselves.

In the near future, all the representations that human beings have invented will be instantly accessible anywhere in the world on intimate, notebook-size computers. But will we be able to get from the menu to the food? Or will we no longer understand the difference between the two? Worse, will we lose even the ability to read the menu and be satisfied just to recognize that it is one?

There has always been confusion between carriers and contents. Pianists know that music is not in the piano. It begins inside human beings as special urges to communicate feelings. But many children are forced to "take piano" before their musical impulses develop; then they turn away from music for life. The piano at its best can only be an amplifier of existing feelings, bringing forth multiple notes in harmony and polyphony that the unaided voice cannot produce.

The computer is the greatest "piano" ever invented, for it is the master carrier of representations of every kind. Now there is a rush to have people, especially schoolchildren, "take computer." Computers can amplify yearnings in ways even more profound than can musical instruments. But if teachers do not nourish the romance of learning and expressing, any external mandate for a new "literacy" becomes as much a crushing burden as being forced to perform Beethoven's sonatas while having no sense of their beauty. Instant access to the world's information will probably have an effect opposite to what is hoped: students will become numb instead of enlightened.

In addition to the notion that the mere presence of computers will improve learning, several other misconceptions about learning often hinder modern education. Stronger ideas need to replace them before any teaching aid, be it a computer or pencil and paper, will be of most service. One misconception might be called the fluidic theory of education: students are empty vessels that must be given knowledge drop by drop from the full teacher-vessel. A related idea is that education is a bitter pill that can be made palatable only by sugarcoating-a view that misses the deep joy brought by learning itself.

Another mistaken view holds that humans, like other animals, have to make do only with nature's mental bricks, or innate ways of thinking, in the construction of our minds. Equally worrisome is the naive idea that reality is solely what the senses reveal. Finally, and perhaps most misguided, is the view that the mind is unitary, that it has a seamless "I"-ness. Quite the contrary. Minds are far from unitary: they consist of a patchwork of different mentalities.

Hewlett-Packard's Alan Kay, who played a pivotal role in the invention of the personal computer, says business should think more creatively about the potential of technology.

I have a soft spot for people who say things like "The computer revolution hasn't started yet...we're not even close to what we should have." I'm prone to agree. But when the speaker is Alan Kay, who invented a huge proportion of what we do have today, I enthusiastically grant him credence.

This is the guy who, working for the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the late '60s and at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the early '70s, invented or contributed heavily to the invention of: the personal computer, windows-type graphical user interfaces, personal computer networks, and object-oriented computer programming. All of these seminal creations are baked into today's computing environment, which Kay casually disparages. They say that great inventors are often easily dissatisfied. An hour or so with Kay would suggest there's truth in that.

Kay is now a senior fellow at HP Labs, where he continues his work. I was talking to him recently, though, because he has just been awarded an extraordinary trio of prizes—sort of a triple crown of computing—in honor of his many years of extraordinary breakthroughs. First, in February, he was one of four former PARC researchers to be given the nation's top engineering award—the Charles Stark Draper Prize—by the National Academy of Engineering. Then in April the Association for Computing Machinery gave him its Turing Award, sometimes called the "Nobel Prize of Computing." Finally, in June, he won the annual Kyoto Prize given by the Inamori Foundation of Japan, which comes with a cash award of approximately $450,000 and aims to recognize those who not only contribute to technical progress but also to "human development." This is a man with plenty of laurels to rest on.

But I was struck most by how much he thinks we haven't yet done. "We're running on fumes technologically today," he says. "The sad truth is that 20 years or so of commercialization have almost completely missed the point of what personal computing is about."

But what about all those great things he invented? Aren't we getting any mileage from all that? Not nearly enough, Kay believes. For him, computers should be tools for creativity and learning, and they are falling short. At Xerox PARC the aim of much of Kay's research was to develop systems to aid in education. But business, instead, has been the primary user of personal computers since their invention. And business, he says, "is basically not interested in creative uses for computers."

If business users were less shortsighted, Kay says, they would seek to create computer models of their companies and constantly simulate potential changes. But the computers most business people use today are not suited for that. That's because, he says, today's PC is too dedicated to replicating earlier tools, like ink and paper. "The PC has a slightly better erase function but it isn't as nice to look at as a printed thing. The chances that in the last week or year or month you've used the computer to simulate some interesting idea is zero—but that's what it's for."

Kay also decries what he sees as a fundamental failing of the web—it is primarily an environment for displaying information, not for authoring it. "You can read a document in Microsoft Word, and write a document in Microsoft Word. But the people who did web browsers I think were too lazy to do the authoring part."

Though Kay claims he's "not trying to sound like a crab here," he does border on it, especially when shortly thereafter he asserts "pretty much everything that's believed is bullshit."

But a man like this cannot be dismissed merely because he occasionally creeps toward arrogance. What's much more important is that he does not merely complain. He has a vision and a team working to bring his alternate vision to reality. Over the past three decades Kay has worked at Apple, Atari, Disney and now Hewlett-Packard. Some of the researchers in his team have moved with him from company to company. At HP, he may have found the best fit yet. The world's second-largest computing company, it has the deepest pockets of any research outfit he's ever worked for, and far more ways to bring innovations to the market.

So what is Kay trying to build now? Nothing less than "a new way of doing objects, operating systems, and networks, that makes use of the infrastructure we already have." Kay's ultimate dream is to completely remake the way we communicate with each other. At the least, he wants to enable people to collaborate and work together simply and elegantly. For him, "the primary task of the Internet is to connect every person to every other person." In techie terms, he is working on an infinitely scalable system for "real-time immersive collaboration done entirely as peer-to-peer machines." In other words, a system by which anybody could connect to anybody else at any time without having to go through some server.