tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29868932.post6295489516054707572..comments2024-02-14T22:50:48.749+10:30Comments on Bill Kerr: alan kay: after 40 years the dynabook is not here yetBill Kerrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00206808014093631762noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29868932.post-79134309742992852552009-01-04T08:56:00.000+10:302009-01-04T08:56:00.000+10:30@Bill:An interesting anecdote related to this, is ...@Bill:<BR/><BR/>An interesting anecdote related to this, is that according to Doug Engelbart, Licklider was actually one of the people who ended up standing in the way of his progress for this very reason. In an interview Engelbart did with Robert Cringely at http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/shows/ (see show #11) he said that he had received funding to proceed with developing his NLS system further, after the 1968 demo. In the 1970s he met with Licklider and described how he was using human trainers to educate people on how to use the system, and Licklider froze. He asked something like, "Why aren't you developing an artificial intelligence to do this?" Engelbart said something like, "That's something that hasn't been developed sufficiently yet." He wanted to use people as trainers rather than the computer, to compensate for this. Licklider opposed this vigorously, and actually denied Engelbart further funding, at least from the sources he had influence over. Engelbart chalked this up to the AI researchers having such a hold on the imagination of the computer science community at the time. They had grandiose visions of what was possible. He saw those visions for what they were. In the long run AI ended up falling far short of them. It's a sad tale. I got this sense that as a result of this infighting, commercial computing was able to take over the sense that most people had about where real computing was at. "The theoreticians can fight over phantoms," so the thinking probably went, "We'll focus on what can really be accomplished."Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29868932.post-31536966077772215172008-12-19T01:07:00.000+10:302008-12-19T01:07:00.000+10:30check out:http://commonsense.media.mit.edu/check out:<BR/>http://commonsense.media.mit.edu/Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29868932.post-66902545177742650492008-12-08T20:34:00.000+10:302008-12-08T20:34:00.000+10:30hi Mark,At 21-22 minutes of the video Alan Kay ref...hi Mark,<BR/><BR/>At 21-22 minutes of the video Alan Kay refers to John McCarthy as anticipating computers as interactive machines - interacting with "advice takers" who would have to deal with computers in terms of their common sense, that McCarthy saw computers as AI entities<BR/><BR/>He then goes onto lament the fact that LISP, although 50 years old, is still better than many other programming languages today<BR/><BR/>There is so much ground covered in this presentation and some of it is just snippets that are easy to miss and would warrant much detailed study - because it's all interconnected with many cross referencesBill Kerrhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00206808014093631762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29868932.post-84097650319634655122008-12-07T22:28:00.000+10:302008-12-07T22:28:00.000+10:30This answers a question I had about Alan Kay's con...This answers a question I had about Alan Kay's concept of the user interface sensing where the user was in terms of knowledge, and then communicating knowledge that was encoded within the system in a way that the user could understand. He communicated this idea to me this way in correspondence we had more than a year ago:<BR/><BR/><I>"The other thing to think about is that most ideas are mediocre down to really bad! (This is because good and really good ideas are quite novel and low probability even when geniuses are trying to think them up.) So a really important feature of any communications system is not so much to capture an idea, but to help other people understand it. ... This is a much bigger problem than just facilitating communication and remembering in various ways."</I><BR/><BR/>In another piece of correspondence he had with both you and me around the same time he said:<BR/><BR/><I>"One of McCarthy's first papers in computing (ca. 1958) was 'Computers With Common Sense' in which he proposed that the best way to deal with humans and to scale what could be done with computers was to make a model of human common sense and embody it in an agent that could be given goals and advice by the end-user (the "Advice Taker"). A really good one of these would be like a (myriad of) grad student(s) who could be summoned, commanded, and who would then carry out tasks, write programs, etc. <BR/><BR/>We still don't know how to do that today, so I'm interested in what the next real steps in programming might be without a real human-level AI to do the scut work. In our NSF project - http://www.vpri.org/pdf/NSF_prop_RN-2006-002.pdf - we propose to take "personal computing" and make the most compact and understandable and programmable working model that we are able to do. We set some targets - 20,000 lines of code - that will prevent today's programming styles from being used as the main solutions, in order to force some needed new insights and inventions. ... If doable, this would constitute a 2 to 3 orders of magnitude (a "Moore's Law") improvement in programming expression -- and would certainly provide much more illumination into the mysteries of programming."</I><BR/><BR/>So it sounds like he sees programming as a "band aid" until real AI surfaces.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com