The HLF Portraits: Alan Kay
Kay, Alan
The Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation presents the HLF Portraits: Alan Kay; ACM A.M. Turing Award, 2003 Recipients of the ACM A.M. Turing Award and the Abel Prize in discussion with Marc Pachter, Director Emeritus National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, about their lives, their research, their careers and the circumstances that led to the awards. Video interviews produced for the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation by the Berlin photographer Peter Badge. The opinions expressed in this video do not necessarily reflect the views of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation or any other person or associated institution involved in the making and distribution of the video. Background: The Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation (HLFF) annually organizes the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF), which is a networking event for mathematicians and computer scientists from all over the world. The HLFF was established and is funded by the German foundation the Klaus Tschira Stiftung (KTS), which promotes natural sciences, mathematics and computer science. The HLF is strongly supported by the award-granting institutions, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM: ACM A.M. Turing Award, ACM Prize in Computing), the International Mathematical Union (IMU: Fields Medal, Nevanlinna Prize), and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (DNVA: Abel Prize). The Scientific Partners of the HLFF are the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) and Heidelberg University.
 What kind of family were you born into? I was born into a bookish family. My grandfather was a farmer who wrote books. He wrote over a hundred books. In his lifetime? If I had met him and said, what do you do? He'd probably say I'm a farmer. I don't know what he would say. I missed him. He died the year I was born, but he was one of the early photographers. He wrote maybe the definitive essay on photography for the Saturday evening post in the early 1900s on whether photography could be an art. Was this the father of your mother or your father? Father of my mother. Your mother, I think, was particularly artistic? Yeah. That's the right word. Yeah, he was. I mean, he was a very good musician. He was the... This is your grandfather. My grandfather. But I want to get you born. She was a good musician. And so... She was a good artist. She followed in his footsteps. She was interested in the artistic education of her children, presumably. No, I don't... The... No, it was an old New England family. I don't think they thought about things that way. It was just... It was in the house, as naturally. When I came to America after Australia, we lived in what had been my grandfather's house and there are thousands of books in it. Many of his drawings and the Parla Piano, which my mother... I mean, it was... My father was a physiologist, so there were science books around. And there wasn't really anything about parents overtly attending to their son's education. Well, let's talk about their son. What kind of a child were you? I think difficult. Difficult? Yeah. Still, presumably. Willful. Very immature, very small for my age. Happy to compete with adults in things that would impress adults. I think this is already famous about you, that you're going to read pretty... I did.... pretty early. Yes. This was, again, not being pushed because I'm hearing that that's not what your family did. But I think even reading off the back of cereal cartons growing up in Australia and we would get a life magazine in the mail every week or so delayed from the United States. And that was a perfect thing to learn to read from because it had pictures that helped understand what the captions were about. And of course I was read to. That is probably the biggest way of getting any child to read early. Did this begin to shape in you this... I'm going to call it percussity. You may or may not. But this percussity, did it affect your view of grownups, of your schooling? Yes. Well, certainly when I went to school, I went to school a year early, which is probably a mistake, but I read more than a hundred books. Most of them not adult books. I probably read only a few adult books. One of them was Eith Hamilton's Mythology, which is a favorite of my classic, fabulous book. And I... It was probably the first one I read all the way to the end and that was important because I love the Greek myths, but what was important about that book for me was she had the Norse myths at the end of it, and they were very, very similar to the Greek myths. And that was the first time I'd ever run into the idea that these are just stories. How old are you at this time, at this point? Oh, probably around... When I read that book, probably around five, I would say. I can't remember exactly whether I read it in Australia or in the U.S. Probably that age in your life. And then the second adult book I read all the way through had a huge effect on me, which was another one of my fathers, which was called Ancient Times, A History of the Early World by James Henry Breasted. I still have that book, and it was just a great account. It was a book that he had had in school for some class, but it was a great comprehensive account of early civilizations starting from the Eolithic times. It was perfectly readable by anybody who could read it. There's nothing esoteric about it. And again, you got this comparison. The author did not take pains to talk about things like civilizations have similar structures. He just sort of laid it out. Here's what the Egyptians did, and here's what the Assyrians did, and here's what the Babylonians did. And that was huge. I'm putting myself in the mind of your parents. How do you educate a kid like this? They may not be pushing you, but you go to the local public school once you come back to the United States. That was probably a mistake. But we were not well off. My father was a university professor. Actually in those days he was finishing his degree. And yeah, probably you would have done better in a different setup, but they just fed me books. It happened that the family, also my grandfather. My grandfather did a lot of things. One of the things he did was to start what for many, many years, decades and decades, was the largest bookstore in New England called Johnson's Bookstore in Springfield. And besides being an enormous regular bookstore, they also had a used bookstore in another building which was even larger. And so my uncle lived across the road at the base of Mount Holyoke where we lived there, and he had books. I'm going to chase you back to school, but I'm beginning to get the idea that your real education happened with your family and at home. But yeah, I was kind of a natural autodidact. And basically what autodidacts need is a feeling of quality threshold. Because the hardest thing to know is whether when you're learning a lot by yourself, whether even the question doesn't come up when you're gobbling the stuff up is, am I actually learning the real deal or am I just learning glosses on the real deal? This is a huge problem. So here's a guess on my part, just based on what your later career is going to achieve, and that is that education in a formal sense disappointed you. Now, except for a couple of times. Except for a couple of times. I wouldn't, I'm not quite in the Ilich camp because I, but when I encountered a good version of it, it was fantastic because it was a lot like graduate school was going to be later on. The teachers had a sense of that the children are actually like adults exploring things for the first time. And so that is a completely different theory of school. And then the idea that you may be the smartest person in the room, but you're generally not smarter than the 10 smartest people in the room. And certainly, you know, expanding outwards, you're not smarter than the 100 smartest people in history. And so this auto-didact impulse is something that anybody who gets really interested in the way the world, you know, just a million different things. Quickly there's a human element that comes in, even if you happen to be an introvert like I was. Okay, we're going to get to how that actually affects your theory of the use of the computer. So right now, am I going to find any mentor outside your family or your history, personal history in your life until you get to graduate school? Is there anyone along the way? Oh, sure. High school. Yeah. My fourth grade teacher, Mary Quirk, was one of these very, very special teachers. She died young when I started doing education things myself. My first impulse was to track her down and found that she had died, I guess, at the age of 49. But what did she have? She had, well, one of her things was we never knew what she knew. Because her whole process was, well, she was obviously playing a game with the state, New York state educational thing. But her... You mean their requirements? Yeah. And she made that happen. But basically her whole game was to set up situations that would select out children. And she had a wide variety so that virtually every child in a class would find something that they kind of got really interested in and they would own. And she would set up what we'd call today a research group of other children around that child. And by the time fourth grade was half over, I would say more than 50% of the class time was spent dealing with that whole thing. And then she had what you call big themes. She had a...one of the ideas was to have a class theme where everybody found out something and then try to represent what this was in the form of what she called a fresco, which was not done in Fred. It's like the wall of the Sistine Chapel and every child would wind up doing a...that happened to be the oceans when I was there. So every child got to find out something special about it, report on it. But then the whole class project was organized together. And the kids that could see perspective like me helped do the organization. Is that what you have called social thinking when sort of the individual elements come together? Yeah, it's not like democracy. It's a rather different kind of thing. At that time I hadn't really...in fact, I delayed kind of really understanding how the Constitution was put together just because I hated the way history was taught. I liked my ancient history stuff, but it wasn't until I was in my twenties and into my thirties that I really went to town on just how this country got invented. And of course, Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention were very complete and released fifty years after his death and there are some annotated books on this also. So I was able to look at that rather closely and it reminded me very much of this class. It reminded me very much of grad school, the ARPA research community. I know we're going to talk about that. Yeah, we'll get there. But this is very important, it's the foundation. I may be very literal minded, but so far I'm talking to a humanist. Yeah. And whatever that means. Whatever that means, fair enough, and to use another whatever that means, I want somehow to introduce technology into your education or aspiration. Where does that show up? Well, I think the first thing is you know the Greek root of technology is their term for anything humans make. You know what era of Greece you looked at, sometimes they held off the fine arts from it, but most of the time they meant anything. And the Latin root ARS, ours, is meant the same thing. So when Ben Franklin uttered this old Latin motto, life is short and art is long, what he meant by art was not just fine arts, but art. But in our time of specialists, and of course that it's not only classical, but post-Jefersonian, there's a point where somebody sends you, this is really a question, somebody sends you into either engineering or technology where you can at least master the formal tools. Sure, that was easy. I don't know exactly what the root of it was, but as early as I can remember, which is certainly four or five, I was interested in jet planes, which were a new thing. I was interested in rockets. So the uncle who now owned the family bookstore got me, I think when I was seven, a copy of Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel by Willie Lay, who wrote actually many editions of that book. And so I avidly devoured it. It was partly about German weapons, because a lot of them used rocketry in one form or another. Part of it was about how these things actually worked, which I didn't completely understand. The thing that stuck in my mind was these things that are called Hohmann orbits. And these are a guy in the 20s sketched out, well, if you're going to get from the Earth to Mars, which I was very interested in, you can't just fly the rockets, point the rocket ship at Mars in, because both the Earth and Mars are moving, and they're moving at a fairly good rate. So in order to get there, you have to point the rocket in a direction that will eventually forms you into an orbit. It will anticipate. And so that was one of the first times I got introduced with what I would call nonlinear thinking, in that the world of gravitational fields is not the world that we experience on Earth, and you just don't point a name, you have this other thing going. That made a huge impression on me. And yeah, but I think- You went to a technical high school. I did, right across the river here. How did you decide on that? I mean, I thought you might have- Well, I was more or less in trouble in my junior high school. So there were a bunch of special high schools, and the high school for me was really Brock's high school of science, but it was only a three-year high school in those days, and Brooklyn Tech was a four-year high school. And so I was encouraged, and they all had the same test. So I was encouraged very, very strongly to take that test, pass it, and get out of that before I really got into trouble out there. So I did take the test, and I did pass it. It made out to be a mixed blessing, but basically a blessing because my mind is more of- Engineering and science and math have an incredible overlap epistemologically. They have a lot of the same ways of thinking about how the hip bone is connected to the thigh bone. And a lot of the difference between the fields is the temperament of the people. My temperament was more along the lines of science than engineering. So it was tremendously helpful to be forced to take a gazillion engineering courses. Tech really didn't have any optional courses except you could choose French or German. And if you chose the college prep thing, they basically squeezed six years of education into four, and they could throw you out whenever they felt like it. So it was just a kind of a grind of 6,000 boys who had passed this test. Brooklyn Block Long and Brooklyn Block Wide, and eight stories high and incredible facilities. Later on it helped tremendously because it allowed me to work with really great engineers in a way I think I would have had a hard time doing if I hadn't learned kind of engineering as a scientist might learn it. So you're deciding about going to college, presumably you're expecting to at this point. Not really. I mean, I expected that I would go to college, but I had a disease that was close to romantic fever if it wasn't romantic fever when I was in my senior year. So I went back to school to read. Now I was out on Long Island, and I had gotten thrown out of Brooklyn Tech actually for insubordination. Which was not unknown in your life? Not unknown. Not unknown. So I went back to repeat my senior year, and they gave me my diploma, and they informed me that I had actually bought enough credits from three years at Brooklyn Tech to more than graduate from this high school. And I said, well, why did you make me go? But anyway, it was good that I did because that was where I fell in with a bunch of jazz musicians, and I had a very good time my senior year in spite of being ill. And so I just hung around playing music. Ever assuming that that would be your career? No. Not really. And you were in the same team as an avocation. Yeah. Music is a tricky deal. It's, I felt I was working harder than somebody should to keep up with people who were a lot better than I was. So I was endlessly grateful that I was able to be good enough that they would let me play with them. So I'd gotten up to some level. And this included some famous musicians we played at jazz festivals, and we did other kinds of things. By the way, what was your answer? A lot of jazz guitar. But the, no, so I didn't have any, pretty much my entire life has been a series of eventually lucky accidents because I'm kind of lazy and indolent. So with capacity to respond productively, may I add that? Yeah. No, I would agree. When something interesting happened that caught my interest, I would occasionally put forth some real effort. And eventually in graduate school, I put forth a lot of effort. How do I get you into college? How do you decide that? Well, I just, you know, my parents are going to force me to get a job or something. And I definitely did not want a job. And I didn't, I was playing with people who were much better than I was, and they were more or less starving. So that wasn't going to be the route? Well, you know, I sort of eeked out stuff, but I just picked a college at random. And that would turn out to be Colorado. No, that was Bethany College. Oh, Bethany College, that was your first? Yeah, just, they just happened to come by. I see. And they had a good reputation, so I just went there. Did you expect, again, an engineering direction? No, I had no, no, no, I was interested in a lot of things. And I went to college because you likely brush up against lots of things. But for instance, I knew a lot of biology, but I had not ever thought about majoring in it, but I had a good experience my first semester in this college. I went off a year. And... But you dropped out. No, I got thrown out. Why? I'm beginning to see a pattern here. Well, this one is complicated to... Because basically, you could say I was an early protester of certain kinds of discrimination and made my protests known. And there were a variety of forces inside the college that I was surprised I'd gone home for Easter vacation. I got a call from the dean saying I was no longer welcome there because I had to drive all the way back and get myself... Later on, the head of the biology department wrote me a great letter to get into the University of Colorado while I was in the Air Force. Let's spend some time in the Air Force because I think that's important in your development as a computer thinker. Well, it gave... It was an outlet. It was an outlet. So, one thing about computers, I had read a very good book called Faster Than Thought in 1956. And now we're getting thrown out. It was like 1961 or something, 1960. And so I knew what they were. I knew a little bit. I'd done a little plugboard programming with my friend, fellow jazz musician who was working for United Airlines. So I knew a little bit. But I actually got drafted. And I did not want to go into the Army. And so I turned to my reading skills and I started reading things. And one of the things I found out fairly easily was that if you're drafted into the Army, you had the option of passing a test for officer training of some kind to one of the volunteer services. And then I went to talk to the Air Force people and read their stuff. And they had a program for flying, becoming an officer flying for a year. And they put you through the rest of college. So I thought, oh, that's good. It makes sense. What I may be overemphasizing in my expectations is... Yeah, you're hoping kind of a story. Well, you know, I want to get you to the point where you're making a lot of money. A lot of contributions. But I love the journey to that point. And whether the Air Force was critical in anything that they made... It helped. Look, I think the way, you know, for young people, the basic... John Lennon had this great line. He says, life is what happens to you while you're making plans. And I was even further than that because I didn't make that many plans. And so I was just sort of the leaf on the stream there. But the one constant thing was that I was learning about stuff in the world. And I was also learning about music. I kept on learning about music. And when I had done some musical composition in college, I did a lot more when I was in University of Colorado. And the theater there was really great. I like theater, so I spent most of my time in the theater when I should have been doing math. When you had gone and... Yeah, I was supposed to be doing math and molecular biology. But actually, the thing that was really super rich at the University of Colorado was the theater and the amount of stuff that they did. And that is a whole other area which has to do with learning how to fool people and learning why people like to be fooled and why they pay to be fooled and why they're uplifted by being fooled. And why we have to get better in a sense at fooling them on the one hand, but teaching them science so that they know when not to be fooled on the other. So that was... So I'm sitting on your graduate school admissions committee at Utah. I don't... There wasn't a committee. Well, the metaphor for the committee. There's one guy. One guy. And why is he letting you in? Well, I asked him a couple of years down the road. David Evans, who was the guy behind the invention of 3D graphics as we know it today. The Evans of Evans and Sutherland. Great man. And I asked him, I guess not too long before I was about to graduate, why had he actually admitted me? Because I had a scatter thing. He says, well, I don't look at transcripts. They don't predict back straight A's as an undergraduate. It's not a terribly good sign if you're going to a research university. Means you're too compliant, too willing to cope with it. He says, I only like resumes. And you had an interesting resume. And I found out later, because I got on the faculty after I got my PhD. So I got to see it from the other side. What would happen at about the two-year point, so what Dave would do is bring in people. He would over admit, because he had lots of money from ARPA. He'd over admit. He wouldn't try to figure things out ahead of time. He treated the graduate students like they were made out of gold. We all had huge travel budgets. We were encouraged to travel around. All the graduate students in the ARPA community were treated like researchers who just hadn't gotten their PhDs yet. So there wasn't a class system the way there is today. And at the two-year point, the faculty would sit around and discuss a grad student. The term they would use is, is this a real person or not? And if they decided that person was a real person, they would go on to get their PhD. And if they weren't a real person, that person would get a master's and would go out through the other door. A lot of different graduate programs did that in those days. That's the way they did it. But I want to just step outside for a moment and say this, that you're also lucky. Things happen to you. Very lucky. No, but lucky for a generation too. I'm not just talking about an individual. No, no. Since that money was available. You mentioned ARPA. Absolutely. And the viewers of this might not even know what ARPA is. So what is happening in the support of technological thinking and research at this point? To make it as simple as possible, technology had a lot to do with World War II. It wasn't the atomic bomb that was the big factor, but radar. And a lot of the good ideas in radar were invented in different places in the world. But the British had come up with a device that would produce really high energy electromagnetic waves at a good frequency. And they gave it to the Americans who developed it at MIT. And so the entire zeitgeist that happened in building 20 at MIT that resulted in almost 200 different radar systems in just three and a half years, invented and engineered and manufactured and installed in this short period where World War II turned the tide because it allowed them to get after the submarines and keep the supply line. Ruler is actually unglamorous when you actually look at the logistics of it. It's all about supply lines. And so that group, and Vannevar Bush, who was President Roosevelt Science, who was also a professor at MIT, there was an old boys' club, really was. And they were a good one for us because they were caretakers. So it's the Department of Defense that after the war is shepherding. The war never ended because the Cold War started almost immediately. And a lot of the people who had been even junior researchers, like one of them was Jerome Reesner, who became President of MIT and President Kennedy's Science Advisor 15, 17 years later. So there was a continuity. And so there was a whole bunch of money spent during the 50s for the sage early warning system that is now our flight control for airlines, but was originally done to detect Russian bombers and required some serious computer design and some serious computer manufacturing. And a bunch of things like that happened in the 50s. Then the 60s happened and they had money left over from the Moon program as it moved to NASA. And they decided to fund a psychologist at MIT and in that area by the name of Licklider, who set up the information processing part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the DARPA, which had been set up to deal with Sputnik and rocket missiles and space travel for real. And this guy happened to be completely enlightened. And he was wise to not try to define goals. He had a vision. The vision was big. And what he wanted was the smartest people he could find who had ideas about how to make that vision real. He didn't care if they disagreed with each other. And so he set up a community of about 17 places of intercommunicating, particularly through the graduate students that flowed freely through all of these places, not terribly in agreement but sometimes, but a community that really knew how to argue in a productive way, a way that I wish everybody knew how to do because that form of argument is not designed to work and win the argument. It's designed to look at every side of something using the fact that people have different perspectives. And so that was what I fell into accidentally when I went to Utah. I had no idea of it. Again, we know the accident and then we know the response. And the response was a very creative period in your life. Yeah, I went crazy. I absolutely went crazy. And out of that, what was the sustaining idea of the Utah time for you? Well, it was two periods. The first one was what was called the ARPA dream, which was in Licklider when they asked him, what are you doing? He always had a sentence that went sort of like this. He said, well, the destiny of computers are to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for everybody pervasively network worldwide. So it had this idea that there's something that you're interacting with that's going to amplify your ability to think. They're all going to be hooked up worldwide, what he called the intergalactic network. They asked him, why do you call it an intergalactic network? He says, well, engineers always give you the minimum. I want one that covers the entire earth densely. And so I'm asking for an intergalactic one. So when they pass it through the low pass filter of reality, I'll still get what I want. So this guy was, and that was what I had just accidentally fallen into. Accidentally. Totally. You made something of it. And I want to know what you made of it. Well, you'd be a fool because, like I said, they treated their graduate students like gold. That was a new experience for me. And any graduate student that was going to do something that would reveal that they actually weren't gold was a nut. Complete nut. Or what could you do? Well, first thing was, I got there out of, as usual, I got there out of sequence. And so Dave had a couple of months before classes started. Dave asked me, what do you want to do? And I said, well, offer it up to me because I haven't, I've programmed for four years in the Air Force, but I don't know anything. I'd go to the library and read everything that's been written about computing, going back into the 50s. And Xerox, anything interesting for rereading later. So he gave me a budget and that's what I did. So I spent my first two months there reading, jeez, I don't know, thousands, decades worth of stuff, thousands of papers. So the second one came maybe a year and a half after I got into grad school. I had heard a talk by Marvin Minsky, the AI guy from MIT, he'd come out to Utah. It was a fantastic talk. And anybody who's interested can look at his Turing Award lecture, which came a little bit later, but many of the same themes. And quite a bit of that talk was about the work that he had been doing with Seymour Pappert and the work that Seymour Pappert had been doing with children and this language that they had come up with called Logo. And because I was designing my thesis project, it was a desktop computer with windows and an object-oriented language. Was this a shocking goal or natural? I mean, did you? Well, the object idea came from a lot of different places and it would exhaust an hour to explain where they all came from. But unfortunately, I wrote them all down in a history, which is readily available, called the Early History of Small Talk for people who are interested. But just a bunch of different kinds of things, especially from seeing this Ivan Sutherland thesis about computer graphics, which had a kind of a use of objects. Math background and biology, you can think of cells as being like objects. They are kind of containers of process and state. Anyway, so I started thinking about modeling everything because the simplest way of thinking about modeling things is if you only use computers to model things with, you can never run out of expressive power. They connect to each other, you go inside, you have more of them. So it's a very simple idea. I started doing things with it and then another set of lucky circumstances got me to have to use these ideas right away and doing this early desktop computer. The idea of windows was kind of around then and we used it and this was an object oriented. So it's a whole set of stuff there that would be eerily like the present. There was kind of a first pass to what we later did at Xerox Park. Why even think about a personal computer? Why isn't it enough at this stage to think about its mass use? Well I think so the question of if you could interact with a computer, what is that going to be, especially if you're interested in amplification of one. You should be able to design something you haven't built yet and simulate it and when you build a bridge you won't fall down. That was what Sketchpad was all about. So Ivan had the whole deal and it was on a computer of this maybe half an acre in size. So it was a personal computer for one person at three o'clock in the morning. It was one of these air defense computers and the prevailing idea was computers are so expensive we have to timeshare them. The problem with timesharing them is it is very hard to do interaction in terms of milliseconds when the computer is trying to deal with 50 or 60 people on it. And so people started building smart terminals but the terminals weren't smart enough. And there was this joke that if you build a smart enough terminal it's a computer all by itself and eventually buds off like a bacterium dividing. And the guy who did this big computer that Ivan Sutherland worked on also did for my money the first personal computer which was done for biomedical people who needed to do real time experiments on nerve cells of various kinds. And he did it as it wasn't small by today's standards. It was kind of a cabinet and a thing on a desk. But it had everything that we would assign to a personal computer and quite a few of them were built. The early ones were all assembled by the people who were going to use them because this guy Wes Clark did it as a kit. And so this idea was around. The problem was you didn't get enough computing power. There was this money thing. On the other hand there was this Moore's Law idea which came about the year before it went to graduate school in 65 on a kind of silicon that was too slow at that time for computers. But if you made it smaller it got faster. And it was very, very simple to look at. And so Moore was able to put a castle in the cloud of saying, boy, if we could just learn how to make these things smaller on integrated circuits they're going to speed up and pretty soon we can do everything. It turned out to be the case. If he had enough physics to understand his argument what remained was engineering. And engineers can usually figure out a way to do things. So I was working away on that because the romance of not just interacting with the computer but romance of being able to interact with the computer whenever the hell you wanted. We already had that because we had time sharing terminals into some of the computers on the West Coast at Utah. And I had a teletype in my apartment. So any time of the day or night I could log on to Engelbart's computer in Menlo Park and use it. Couldn't do much on it. But it was when I got the itch. So it was personal, it was personal media. And there's a romance behind that, it's the romance of having a musical instrument at your disposal. And so that was already well along. And a paper that I heard about from Minsky was doing something just astounding to me. Partly because I actually understood everything he was doing. I was an mathematician, he was an mathematician. And he was doing something I understood full well about computing. It never occurred to me to apply it to the plight of children and mathematics. But Papert had spent time with Piaget after he got his PhD in math. And he had this perspective and realized that a certain very powerful form of math, one of the most used forms of math in science, with embodied on a computer all of a sudden became a play thing for an eight or ten year old child. So I saw that in 68. And that year I'd also seen a little one inch square flat panel display. And I thought about putting my desktop computer on the back of that display someday. But that was just an engineering idea. Like it would be really nice to have a computer you could hold in your hands. When I saw the children thing, it became an imperative. Children must be able to take their computer outside. They must have their computer. It's a dynamic medium for creative thought. It's going to change the way they think? Yes. Well, it's an interesting thing that having a writing system per se isn't quite enough to change the way you think. Having a writing system with a literacy and the discussions that go along with it does change the way you think. So literate societies don't think in qualitatively the same ways as pre-literate societies. So in the end the medium can affect? In yes. And that was McLuhan's whole notion. His idea was what's important about any medium is what you have to become in order to make fluent use of it. Because something has to happen in here. And Papert was showing me something that I knew completely full well. But it was the first time I thought about, wow, you could actually bypass ten years of bad school and you could start children. And Papert was interested in mathematics, but I was interested in science. And not just science about the physical world, but I was interested in science as the set of heuristics that allow us to get around what's bad about our brains. So this is an idea that Francis Bacon had in the early 17th century. And when I saw what Papert is doing, I realized, OK, this is the best idea anybody's ever had for what a computer is for. It really is the next big thing after the printing press. And it has an epistemology that is not just taking on what a printing press is. Unfortunately, that's what most people use the thing for today. Science uses it for what it's really good for. And it would be tremendous to have children generally learn real science with the aid of the kind of modeling that computers can help. How optimistic were you at that point? Nobody who does, I'm still optimistic because nobody who gets into this game, into the research game is other than optimistic. Believe me. Pessimism, even if it's well-aimed, is exactly the thing you don't want because it tends to make you depressed. What if I used the word disappointed? Wouldn't you have expected that young man in Utah that by now in the 21st century, you would be in a different place? So in the first paper I wrote about the Dynabook, there's a line in there that the first piece of software an end user will write is one to suppress advertising. Because remember, I read McLuhan. And I also did a lot of the early font design at Xerox PARC because I wanted to be able to deal with all the media of the past. But what we really wanted was, as this was happening, we wanted schools to start understanding what was new and special about it. And that hasn't happened yet. Although, if you look at the printing press, the printing press was around 1450 or so. And there were a lot of presses in Europe 50 years later, but then we had a century full of religious wars partly fomented by being able to print Bibles and the vernacular and a whole bunch of other stuff. And it wasn't until the 17th century that the real fruits of the press started happening, which were changes in ideas about governance and changes in ideas about how to find out things about the world. So we're just at the Bible publishing stage of the computer? Yeah. That's what I've said that many times. And so the disappointing part was we put a lot of effort at PARC not to do just demos. We actually built hundreds, actually thousands of the machine that influenced the Macintosh ten years later. We invented the Ethernet to connect it. There was a lot of inventions. And so when people came there to see a demo like Steve Jobs did, we were showing an entire system and Steve was seeing it six years after we'd done it. So he was seeing a mature thing in 79. So the commercialization in the 80s for a variety of different reasons trimmed the old low-pass filter. We almost got a dial tone out of it. So what was done is one dream that came out of the ARPA. We PARC considered itself one of the ARPA projects even though it was sponsored by Xerox. And what was a relatively coherent set of things, well, you've got to do pervasive networking around the world. You've got to do local area network. You've got to do wireless. ARPA was doing wireless back in the early 70s. You've got to do this. You've got to do this. You've got to invent a user interface. You have to have end-user programming. You need desktop media. Those were all done as one thing. PARC, the central group that did most of these things at PARC was about two dozen people. It's like 25 people. But these are people who are actually, what you might call, they have chops in the engineering and sciences, but they're also philosophically elevated also because of their growing up in the ARPA. Clearly, we shouldn't blame the computer for the lowering of proficiency and possibly even... Well, do you blame the printing press for taking away the power of the Catholic Church? Right. Is that the printing press's fault? Well... Something. But the computer hasn't solved the problem. I mean, where is the computer? Every big deal creates a problem only it can solve. So no, the thing is for most people what they think of as a computer is a convenience that is basically automating old media for them in a variety of different ways. And the communicative aspects of them, of it, allow them to indulge in genetically induced social drives like for status and intercommunication, we're not hermits and all those things. And so it's an amplifier for a lot of the things in our genes. As an amplifier for some of the kinds of thinking that we've invented, almost every form of science today, real science, is not possible without being able to have moved from classical mathematics to the stronger notion of computer simulation. So the computer is actually bringing to life stuff that was symbols on the page and it can bring it to life in a stronger way. So on the symbols on the page, if you're calculating planetary orbits, it's hard to calculate three bodies in motion except in special cases. The computer can do n bodies trivially. And that's what we use today. It is the thing that is helping us deal with understanding what's going on with the climate. And no form of classical mathematics comes close to be able to do that because we're talking about billions and billions of little sections of the atmosphere and of the ocean modeled and interconnecting and being run faster in time than the world is running to give us some early warning on things that are very, very important. This goes across the board. So as an idea, it fits very strongly into this idea that whereas we're set up by a large part of our brain to react quickly to stimuli. What Kahneman calls System One in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. Most of the things that are required of us these days except maybe driving a car require us to do slow thinking. And slow thinking is something that we had to, you know, it's there but we had to learn how to do it. Most of the intellectual inventions of the last three or four thousand years are in the slow thinking vein. And what slow thinking is delay action. Delay action. McLuhan had a great line. He said, hey, don't ask whether something's true or false or right or wrong. Try to find out what's going on. So a lot of what learning how to think is about is to find even training to try to get past what our common sense is trying to make of the world and try to find a way of modeling things that our brains were not set up by nature to model. That's what's powerful. And so it has some of the things that we're powerful about the printing press, about mathematics and about science. But the level of reality that you can actually start probing because you have a computer helping you see. It's like the world's greatest microscope and the world's greatest telescope but intellectually. What is your hope for the role of computer in learning as maybe education catches up with the capacity of the computer? Yeah, well I think the I think public education is about a lot of things besides training for jobs. If we are to remain a republic backed up by a democracy, the citizens, maybe 80% of the citizens have to be able to argue in a reasonable way. And they have to be able to argue about ideas that are important. So the number one thing in public education is a large percentage of the population has to be brought into the main conversations in a way that their opinions are not completely trivial. So that's a, another one is every adult has the responsibility to help the next generation happen whether or not you have a child of your own. This has been let go terribly. And just what does that even mean? What does it mean to be a parent, a teacher or somebody who doesn't have children but this is part of the responsibility we have? Third thing is richness. A rich life in adults is one of the best ways of teaching children. And the reason is that it is hard to learn important things in school to a brain that is set up to learn a culture. That's what our brains are set up to do at birth. So we're used to being immersed in the ideas. So our school is the environment around us. Montessori used this in a very powerful way. She understood it. Most school, schooling people in America today have no idea about this. So they have this, this old idea of knowledge being some fluid that you're pouring in somebody's ear. And it's, it's a, it's a very weak way of doing things. And especially when you're dealing with modern knowledge, modern and vented knowledge. Yeah. And then there are vocational kinds of things. But you don't want to let vocational things that might be or even college things that might be an issue the last two years in high school have anything to do with the epistemologic, epistemological things you want to do in say K through 8. That's where you should actually set, help the children have a really powerful view of the world. The most powerful view of the world that we have is the one that we should instill in them. Because it is really hard to learn. Most people, when they're presented with that powerful view of the world later in life, they're going to have to go through this. Because most people identify with their beliefs as reality. Their beliefs, their identity and what they think of as reality are all the same thing. And they're none of the kind. But by the time you have committed to that for decades, it is really tough to shake. And that's the problem with education because you don't get, you have to do a bootstrapping operation. So if you could just move all the adults aside for a while, or put all the kids in a special eaten or harrow, do what the Brits did when they created the administrators of the colonial empire, take the kids away from the parents, and then you can impose your own epistemological set of ideas. But right now what the children, what adults want is the children to grow up more or less like them. And the adults are way off. They're living centuries behind where we are and centuries behind the problems that we have. So this is kind of a dead end, I think, unless some form of intervention can be done that allows, you know, remember what Loyola said, give me the child until the age of seven and I will give you the man. And he wasn't kidding because that is actually up to the age of seven, is kind of where a lot of the entrenched world views, so if you're going to teach science and math, you want to make a kind of a foray into the early grades. And the problem with that is you need really great adults to help. So even in the educational stuff we've done, we occasionally get to do stuff in the very early grades, but most of the time we looked at fourth or fifth grade because the kids, although we have to talk them out of a few things, they are actually in a good enough state. So the kids plus some stuff for them to do are actually a balance for the adults that are around them. Because ideally you'd like to go much, much, much earlier.
 What kind of family were you born into?  I was born into a bookish family.  My grandfather was a farmer who wrote books.  He wrote over a hundred books.  In his lifetime?  If I had met him and said, what do you do?  He'd probably say I'm a farmer.  I don't know what he would say.  I missed him.  He died the year I was born, but he was one of the early photographers.  He wrote maybe the definitive essay on photography for the Saturday evening post in the early  1900s on whether photography could be an art.  Was this the father of your mother or your father?  Father of my mother.  Your mother, I think, was particularly artistic?  Yeah.  That's the right word.  Yeah, he was.  I mean, he was a very good musician.  He was the...  This is your grandfather.  My grandfather.  But I want to get you born.  She was a good musician.  And so...  She was a good artist.  She followed in his footsteps.  She was interested in the artistic education of her children, presumably.  No, I don't...  The...  No, it was an old New England family.  I don't think they thought about things that way.  It was just...  It was in the house, as naturally.  When I came to America after Australia, we lived in what had been my grandfather's house  and there are thousands of books in it.  Many of his drawings and the Parla Piano, which my mother...  I mean, it was...  My father was a physiologist, so there were science books around.  And there wasn't really anything about parents overtly attending to their son's education.  Well, let's talk about their son.  What kind of a child were you?  I think difficult.  Difficult?  Yeah.  Still, presumably.  Willful.  Very immature, very small for my age.  Happy to compete with adults in things that would impress adults.  I think this is already famous about you, that you're going to read pretty...  I did. ... pretty early.  Yes.  This was, again, not being pushed because I'm hearing that that's not what your family  did.  But I think even reading off the back of cereal cartons growing up in Australia and we would  get a life magazine in the mail every week or so delayed from the United States.  And that was a perfect thing to learn to read from because it had pictures that helped  understand what the captions were about.  And of course I was read to.  That is probably the biggest way of getting any child to read early.  Did this begin to shape in you this...  I'm going to call it percussity.  You may or may not.  But this percussity, did it affect your view of grownups, of your schooling?  Yes.  Well, certainly when I went to school, I went to school a year early, which is probably  a mistake, but I read more than a hundred books.  Most of them not adult books.  I probably read only a few adult books.  One of them was Eith Hamilton's Mythology, which is a favorite of my classic, fabulous  book.  And I...  It was probably the first one I read all the way to the end and that was important because  I love the Greek myths, but what was important about that book for me was she had the Norse  myths at the end of it, and they were very, very similar to the Greek myths.  And that was the first time I'd ever run into the idea that these are just stories.  How old are you at this time, at this point?  Oh, probably around...  When I read that book, probably around five, I would say.  I can't remember exactly whether I read it in Australia or in the U.S.  Probably that age in your life.  And then the second adult book I read all the way through had a huge effect on me, which  was another one of my fathers, which was called Ancient Times, A History of the Early World  by James Henry Breasted.  I still have that book, and it was just a great account.  It was a book that he had had in school for some class, but it was a great comprehensive  account of early civilizations starting from the Eolithic times.  It was perfectly readable by anybody who could read it.  There's nothing esoteric about it.  And again, you got this comparison.  The author did not take pains to talk about things like civilizations have similar structures.  He just sort of laid it out.  Here's what the Egyptians did, and here's what the Assyrians did, and here's what the  Babylonians did.  And that was huge.  I'm putting myself in the mind of your parents.  How do you educate a kid like this?  They may not be pushing you, but you go to the local public school once you come back  to the United States.  That was probably a mistake.  But we were not well off.  My father was a university professor.  Actually in those days he was finishing his degree.  And yeah, probably you would have done better in a different setup, but they just fed me  books.  It happened that the family, also my grandfather.  My grandfather did a lot of things.  One of the things he did was to start what for many, many years, decades and decades,  was the largest bookstore in New England called Johnson's Bookstore in Springfield.  And besides being an enormous regular bookstore, they also had a used bookstore in another  building which was even larger.  And so my uncle lived across the road at the base of Mount Holyoke where we lived there,  and he had books.  I'm going to chase you back to school, but I'm beginning to get the idea that your real  education happened with your family and at home.  But yeah, I was kind of a natural autodidact.  And basically what autodidacts need is a feeling of quality threshold.  Because the hardest thing to know is whether when you're learning a lot by yourself, whether  even the question doesn't come up when you're gobbling the stuff up is, am I actually learning  the real deal or am I just learning glosses on the real deal?  This is a huge problem.  So here's a guess on my part, just based on what your later career is going to achieve,  and that is that education in a formal sense disappointed you.  Now, except for a couple of times.  Except for a couple of times.  I wouldn't, I'm not quite in the Ilich camp because I, but when I encountered a good version  of it, it was fantastic because it was a lot like graduate school was going to be later  on.  The teachers had a sense of that the children are actually like adults exploring things for  the first time.  And so that is a completely different theory of school.  And then the idea that you may be the smartest person in the room, but you're generally not  smarter than the 10 smartest people in the room.  And certainly, you know, expanding outwards, you're not smarter than the 100 smartest people  in history.  And so this auto-didact impulse is something that anybody who gets really interested in  the way the world, you know, just a million different things.  Quickly there's a human element that comes in, even if you happen to be an introvert  like I was.  Okay, we're going to get to how that actually affects your theory of the use of the computer.  So right now, am I going to find any mentor outside your family or your history, personal  history in your life until you get to graduate school?  Is there anyone along the way?  Oh, sure.  High school.  Yeah.  My fourth grade teacher, Mary Quirk, was one of these very, very special teachers.  She died young when I started doing education things myself.  My first impulse was to track her down and found that she had died, I guess, at the age  of 49.  But what did she have?  She had, well, one of her things was we never knew what she knew.  Because her whole process was, well, she was obviously playing a game with the state, New  York state educational thing.  But her...  You mean their requirements?  Yeah.  And she made that happen.  But basically her whole game was to set up situations that would select out children.  And she had a wide variety so that virtually every child in a class would find something  that they kind of got really interested in and they would own.  And she would set up what we'd call today a research group of other children around  that child.  And by the time fourth grade was half over, I would say more than 50% of the class time  was spent dealing with that whole thing.  And then she had what you call big themes.  She had a...one of the ideas was to have a class theme where everybody found out something  and then try to represent what this was in the form of what she called a fresco, which  was not done in Fred.  It's like the wall of the Sistine Chapel and every child would wind up doing a...that  happened to be the oceans when I was there.  So every child got to find out something special about it, report on it.  But then the whole class project was organized together.  And the kids that could see perspective like me helped do the organization.  Is that what you have called social thinking when sort of the individual elements come  together?  Yeah, it's not like democracy.  It's a rather different kind of thing.  At that time I hadn't really...in fact, I delayed kind of really understanding how the Constitution  was put together just because I hated the way history was taught.  I liked my ancient history stuff, but it wasn't until I was in my twenties and into my thirties  that I really went to town on just how this country got invented.  And of course, Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention were very complete and released  fifty years after his death and there are some annotated books on this also.  So I was able to look at that rather closely and it reminded me very much of this class.  It reminded me very much of grad school, the ARPA research community.  I know we're going to talk about that.  Yeah, we'll get there.  But this is very important, it's the foundation.  I may be very literal minded, but so far I'm talking to a humanist.  Yeah.  And whatever that means.  Whatever that means, fair enough, and to use another whatever that means, I want somehow  to introduce technology into your education or aspiration.  Where does that show up?  Well, I think the first thing is you know the Greek root of technology is their term  for anything humans make.  You know what era of Greece you looked at, sometimes they held off the fine arts from  it, but most of the time they meant anything.  And the Latin root ARS, ours, is meant the same thing.  So when Ben Franklin uttered this old Latin motto, life is short and art is long, what  he meant by art was not just fine arts, but art.  But in our time of specialists, and of course that it's not only classical, but post-Jefersonian,  there's a point where somebody sends you, this is really a question, somebody sends  you into either engineering or technology where you can at least master the formal tools.  Sure, that was easy.  I don't know exactly what the root of it was, but as early as I can remember, which  is certainly four or five, I was interested in jet planes, which were a new thing.  I was interested in rockets.  So the uncle who now owned the family bookstore got me, I think when I was seven, a copy of  Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel by Willie Lay, who wrote actually many editions of that  book.  And so I avidly devoured it.  It was partly about German weapons, because a lot of them used rocketry in one form or  another.  Part of it was about how these things actually worked, which I didn't completely understand.  The thing that stuck in my mind was these things that are called Hohmann orbits.  And these are a guy in the 20s sketched out, well, if you're going to get from the Earth  to Mars, which I was very interested in, you can't just fly the rockets, point the rocket  ship at Mars in, because both the Earth and Mars are moving, and they're moving at a fairly  good rate.  So in order to get there, you have to point the rocket in a direction that will eventually  forms you into an orbit.  It will anticipate.  And so that was one of the first times I got introduced with what I would call nonlinear  thinking, in that the world of gravitational fields is not the world that we experience  on Earth, and you just don't point a name, you have this other thing going.  That made a huge impression on me.  And yeah, but I think-  You went to a technical high school.  I did, right across the river here.  How did you decide on that?  I mean, I thought you might have-  Well, I was more or less in trouble in my junior high school.  So there were a bunch of special high schools, and the high school for me was really Brock's  high school of science, but it was only a three-year high school in those days, and  Brooklyn Tech was a four-year high school.  And so I was encouraged, and they all had the same test.  So I was encouraged very, very strongly to take that test, pass it, and get out of that  before I really got into trouble out there.  So I did take the test, and I did pass it.  It made out to be a mixed blessing, but basically a blessing because my mind is more of-  Engineering and science and math have an incredible overlap epistemologically.  They have a lot of the same ways of thinking about how the hip bone is connected to the  thigh bone.  And a lot of the difference between the fields is the temperament of the people.  My temperament was more along the lines of science than engineering.  So it was tremendously helpful to be forced to take a gazillion engineering courses.  Tech really didn't have any optional courses except you could choose French or German.  And if you chose the college prep thing, they basically squeezed six years of education  into four, and they could throw you out whenever they felt like it.  So it was just a kind of a grind of 6,000 boys who had passed this test.  Brooklyn Block Long and Brooklyn Block Wide, and eight stories high and incredible facilities.  Later on it helped tremendously because it allowed me to work with really great engineers  in a way I think I would have had a hard time doing if I hadn't learned kind of engineering  as a scientist might learn it.  So you're deciding about going to college, presumably you're expecting to at this point.  Not really.  I mean, I expected that I would go to college, but I had a disease that was close to romantic  fever if it wasn't romantic fever when I was in my senior year.  So I went back to school to read.  Now I was out on Long Island, and I had gotten thrown out of Brooklyn Tech actually for  insubordination.  Which was not unknown in your life?  Not unknown.  Not unknown.  So I went back to repeat my senior year, and they gave me my diploma, and they informed  me that I had actually bought enough credits from three years at Brooklyn Tech to more  than graduate from this high school.  And I said, well, why did you make me go?  But anyway, it was good that I did because that was where I fell in with a bunch of jazz  musicians, and I had a very good time my senior year in spite of being ill.  And so I just hung around playing music.  Ever assuming that that would be your career?  No.  Not really.  And you were in the same team as an avocation.  Yeah.  Music is a tricky deal.  It's, I felt I was working harder than somebody should to keep up with people who were a lot  better than I was.  So I was endlessly grateful that I was able to be good enough that they would let me play  with them.  So I'd gotten up to some level.  And this included some famous musicians we played at jazz festivals, and we did other  kinds of things.  By the way, what was your answer?  A lot of jazz guitar.  But the, no, so I didn't have any, pretty much my entire life has been a series of eventually  lucky accidents because I'm kind of lazy and indolent.  So with capacity to respond productively, may I add that?  Yeah.  No, I would agree.  When something interesting happened that caught my interest, I would occasionally put forth  some real effort.  And eventually in graduate school, I put forth a lot of effort.  How do I get you into college?  How do you decide that?  Well, I just, you know, my parents are going to force me to get a job or something.  And I definitely did not want a job.  And I didn't, I was playing with people who were much better than I was, and they were  more or less starving.  So that wasn't going to be the route?  Well, you know, I sort of eeked out stuff, but I just picked a college at random.  And that would turn out to be Colorado.  No, that was Bethany College.  Oh, Bethany College, that was your first?  Yeah, just, they just happened to come by.  I see.  And they had a good reputation, so I just went there.  Did you expect, again, an engineering direction?  No, I had no, no, no, I was interested in a lot of things.  And I went to college because you likely brush up against lots of things.  But for instance, I knew a lot of biology, but I had not ever thought about majoring  in it, but I had a good experience my first semester in this college.  I went off a year.  And...  But you dropped out.  No, I got thrown out.  Why?  I'm beginning to see a pattern here.  Well, this one is complicated to...  Because basically, you could say I was an early protester of certain kinds of discrimination  and made my protests known.  And there were a variety of forces inside the college that I was surprised I'd gone  home for Easter vacation.  I got a call from the dean saying I was no longer welcome there because I had to drive  all the way back and get myself...  Later on, the head of the biology department wrote me a great letter to get into the University  of Colorado while I was in the Air Force.  Let's spend some time in the Air Force because I think that's important in your development  as a computer thinker.  Well, it gave...  It was an outlet.  It was an outlet.  So, one thing about computers, I had read a very good book called Faster Than Thought  in 1956.  And now we're getting thrown out.  It was like 1961 or something, 1960.  And so I knew what they were.  I knew a little bit.  I'd done a little plugboard programming with my friend, fellow jazz musician who was working  for United Airlines.  So I knew a little bit.  But I actually got drafted.  And I did not want to go into the Army.  And so I turned to my reading skills and I started reading things.  And one of the things I found out fairly easily was that if you're drafted into the Army,  you had the option of passing a test for officer training of some kind to one of the volunteer  services.  And then I went to talk to the Air Force people and read their stuff.  And they had a program for flying, becoming an officer flying for a year.  And they put you through the rest of college.  So I thought, oh, that's good.  It makes sense.  What I may be overemphasizing in my expectations is...  Yeah, you're hoping kind of a story.  Well, you know, I want to get you to the point where you're making a lot of money.  A lot of contributions.  But I love the journey to that point.  And whether the Air Force was critical in anything that they made...  It helped.  Look, I think the way, you know, for young people, the basic...  John Lennon had this great line.  He says, life is what happens to you while you're making plans.  And I was even further than that because I didn't make that many plans.  And so I was just sort of the leaf on the stream there.  But the one constant thing was that I was learning about stuff in the world.  And I was also learning about music.  I kept on learning about music.  And when I had done some musical composition in college, I did a lot more when I was in  University of Colorado.  And the theater there was really great.  I like theater, so I spent most of my time in the theater when I should have been doing  math.  When you had gone and...  Yeah, I was supposed to be doing math and molecular biology.  But actually, the thing that was really super rich at the University of Colorado was the  theater and the amount of stuff that they did.  And that is a whole other area which has to do with learning how to fool people and learning  why people like to be fooled and why they pay to be fooled and why they're uplifted by being  fooled.  And why we have to get better in a sense at fooling them on the one hand, but teaching  them science so that they know when not to be fooled on the other.  So that was...  So I'm sitting on your graduate school admissions committee at Utah.  I don't...  There wasn't a committee.  Well, the metaphor for the committee.  There's one guy.  One guy.  And why is he letting you in?  Well, I asked him a couple of years down the road.  David Evans, who was the guy behind the invention of 3D graphics as we know it today.  The Evans of Evans and Sutherland.  Great man.  And I asked him, I guess not too long before I was about to graduate, why had he actually  admitted me?  Because I had a scatter thing.  He says, well, I don't look at transcripts.  They don't predict back straight A's as an undergraduate.  It's not a terribly good sign if you're going to a research university.  Means you're too compliant, too willing to cope with it.  He says, I only like resumes.  And you had an interesting resume.  And I found out later, because I got on the faculty after I got my PhD.  So I got to see it from the other side.  What would happen at about the two-year point, so what Dave would do is bring in people.  He would over admit, because he had lots of money from ARPA.  He'd over admit.  He wouldn't try to figure things out ahead of time.  He treated the graduate students like they were made out of gold.  We all had huge travel budgets.  We were encouraged to travel around.  All the graduate students in the ARPA community were treated like researchers who just hadn't  gotten their PhDs yet.  So there wasn't a class system the way there is today.  And at the two-year point, the faculty would sit around and discuss a grad student.  The term they would use is, is this a real person or not?  And if they decided that person was a real person, they would go on to get their PhD.  And if they weren't a real person, that person would get a master's and would go out through  the other door.  A lot of different graduate programs did that in those days.  That's the way they did it.  But I want to just step outside for a moment and say this, that you're also lucky.  Things happen to you.  Very lucky.  No, but lucky for a generation too.  I'm not just talking about an individual.  No, no.  Since that money was available.  You mentioned ARPA.  Absolutely.  And the viewers of this might not even know what ARPA is.  So what is happening in the support of technological thinking and research at this point?  To make it as simple as possible, technology had a lot to do with World War II.  It wasn't the atomic bomb that was the big factor, but radar.  And a lot of the good ideas in radar were invented in different places in the world.  But the British had come up with a device that would produce really high energy electromagnetic  waves at a good frequency.  And they gave it to the Americans who developed it at MIT.  And so the entire zeitgeist that happened in building 20 at MIT that resulted in almost  200 different radar systems in just three and a half years, invented and engineered and  manufactured and installed in this short period where World War II turned the tide because  it allowed them to get after the submarines and keep the supply line.  Ruler is actually unglamorous when you actually look at the logistics of it.  It's all about supply lines.  And so that group, and Vannevar Bush, who was President Roosevelt Science, who was also  a professor at MIT, there was an old boys' club, really was.  And they were a good one for us because they were caretakers.  So it's the Department of Defense that after the war is shepherding.  The war never ended because the Cold War started almost immediately.  And a lot of the people who had been even junior researchers, like one of them was Jerome  Reesner, who became President of MIT and President Kennedy's Science Advisor 15, 17 years later.  So there was a continuity.  And so there was a whole bunch of money spent during the 50s for the sage early warning  system that is now our flight control for airlines, but was originally done to detect  Russian bombers and required some serious computer design and some serious computer manufacturing.  And a bunch of things like that happened in the 50s.  Then the 60s happened and they had money left over from the Moon program as it moved to  NASA.  And they decided to fund a psychologist at MIT and in that area by the name of Licklider,  who set up the information processing part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency,  the DARPA, which had been set up to deal with Sputnik and rocket missiles and space travel  for real.  And this guy happened to be completely enlightened.  And he was wise to not try to define goals.  He had a vision.  The vision was big.  And what he wanted was the smartest people he could find who had ideas about how to make  that vision real.  He didn't care if they disagreed with each other.  And so he set up a community of about 17 places of intercommunicating, particularly through  the graduate students that flowed freely through all of these places, not terribly in agreement  but sometimes, but a community that really knew how to argue in a productive way, a way  that I wish everybody knew how to do because that form of argument is not designed to work  and win the argument.  It's designed to look at every side of something using the fact that people have different  perspectives.  And so that was what I fell into accidentally when I went to Utah.  I had no idea of it.  Again, we know the accident and then we know the response.  And the response was a very creative period in your life.  Yeah, I went crazy.  I absolutely went crazy.  And out of that, what was the sustaining idea of the Utah time for you?  Well, it was two periods.  The first one was what was called the ARPA dream, which was in Licklider when they asked  him, what are you doing?  He always had a sentence that went sort of like this.  He said, well, the destiny of computers are to become interactive intellectual amplifiers  for everybody pervasively network worldwide.  So it had this idea that there's something that you're interacting with that's going  to amplify your ability to think.  They're all going to be hooked up worldwide, what he called the intergalactic network.  They asked him, why do you call it an intergalactic network?  He says, well, engineers always give you the minimum.  I want one that covers the entire earth densely.  And so I'm asking for an intergalactic one.  So when they pass it through the low pass filter of reality, I'll still get what I  want.  So this guy was, and that was what I had just accidentally fallen into.  Accidentally.  Totally.  You made something of it.  And I want to know what you made of it.  Well, you'd be a fool because, like I said, they treated their graduate students like  gold.  That was a new experience for me.  And any graduate student that was going to do something that would reveal that they actually  weren't gold was a nut.  Complete nut.  Or what could you do?  Well, first thing was, I got there out of, as usual, I got there out of sequence.  And so Dave had a couple of months before classes started.  Dave asked me, what do you want to do?  And I said, well, offer it up to me because I haven't, I've programmed for four years  in the Air Force, but I don't know anything.  I'd go to the library and read everything that's been written about computing, going  back into the 50s.  And Xerox, anything interesting for rereading later.  So he gave me a budget and that's what I did.  So I spent my first two months there reading, jeez, I don't know, thousands, decades worth  of stuff, thousands of papers.  So the second one came maybe a year and a half after I got into grad school.  I had heard a talk by Marvin Minsky, the AI guy from MIT, he'd come out to Utah.  It was a fantastic talk.  And anybody who's interested can look at his Turing Award lecture, which came a little  bit later, but many of the same themes.  And quite a bit of that talk was about the work that he had been doing with Seymour  Pappert and the work that Seymour Pappert had been doing with children and this language  that they had come up with called Logo.  And because I was designing my thesis project, it was a desktop computer with windows and  an object-oriented language.  Was this a shocking goal or natural?  I mean, did you?  Well, the object idea came from a lot of different places and it would exhaust an hour to explain  where they all came from.  But unfortunately, I wrote them all down in a history, which is readily available, called  the Early History of Small Talk for people who are interested.  But just a bunch of different kinds of things, especially from seeing this Ivan Sutherland  thesis about computer graphics, which had a kind of a use of objects.  Math background and biology, you can think of cells as being like objects.  They are kind of containers of process and state.  Anyway, so I started thinking about modeling everything because the simplest way of thinking  about modeling things is if you only use computers to model things with, you can never run out  of expressive power.  They connect to each other, you go inside, you have more of them.  So it's a very simple idea.  I started doing things with it and then another set of lucky circumstances got me to have  to use these ideas right away and doing this early desktop computer.  The idea of windows was kind of around then and we used it and this was an object oriented.  So it's a whole set of stuff there that would be eerily like the present.  There was kind of a first pass to what we later did at Xerox Park.  Why even think about a personal computer?  Why isn't it enough at this stage to think about its mass use?  Well I think so the question of if you could interact with a computer, what is that going  to be, especially if you're interested in amplification of one.  You should be able to design something you haven't built yet and simulate it and when  you build a bridge you won't fall down.  That was what Sketchpad was all about.  So Ivan had the whole deal and it was on a computer of this maybe half an acre in size.  So it was a personal computer for one person at three o'clock in the morning.  It was one of these air defense computers and the prevailing idea was computers are  so expensive we have to timeshare them.  The problem with timesharing them is it is very hard to do interaction in terms of milliseconds  when the computer is trying to deal with 50 or 60 people on it.  And so people started building smart terminals but the terminals weren't smart enough.  And there was this joke that if you build a smart enough terminal it's a computer all  by itself and eventually buds off like a bacterium dividing.  And the guy who did this big computer that Ivan Sutherland worked on also did for my  money the first personal computer which was done for biomedical people who needed to do  real time experiments on nerve cells of various kinds.  And he did it as it wasn't small by today's standards.  It was kind of a cabinet and a thing on a desk.  But it had everything that we would assign to a personal computer and quite a few of  them were built.  The early ones were all assembled by the people who were going to use them because this guy  Wes Clark did it as a kit.  And so this idea was around.  The problem was you didn't get enough computing power.  There was this money thing.  On the other hand there was this Moore's Law idea which came about the year before it went  to graduate school in 65 on a kind of silicon that was too slow at that time for computers.  But if you made it smaller it got faster.  And it was very, very simple to look at.  And so Moore was able to put a castle in the cloud of saying, boy, if we could just learn  how to make these things smaller on integrated circuits they're going to speed up and pretty  soon we can do everything.  It turned out to be the case.  If he had enough physics to understand his argument what remained was engineering.  And engineers can usually figure out a way to do things.  So I was working away on that because the romance of not just interacting with the computer  but romance of being able to interact with the computer whenever the hell you wanted.  We already had that because we had time sharing terminals into some of the computers on the  West Coast at Utah.  And I had a teletype in my apartment.  So any time of the day or night I could log on to Engelbart's computer in Menlo Park and  use it.  Couldn't do much on it.  But it was when I got the itch.  So it was personal, it was personal media.  And there's a romance behind that, it's the romance of having a musical instrument at  your disposal.  And so that was already well along.  And a paper that I heard about from Minsky was doing something just astounding to me.  Partly because I actually understood everything he was doing.  I was an mathematician, he was an mathematician.  And he was doing something I understood full well about computing.  It never occurred to me to apply it to the plight of children and mathematics.  But Papert had spent time with Piaget after he got his PhD in math.  And he had this perspective and realized that a certain very powerful form of math, one  of the most used forms of math in science, with embodied on a computer all of a sudden  became a play thing for an eight or ten year old child.  So I saw that in 68.  And that year I'd also seen a little one inch square flat panel display.  And I thought about putting my desktop computer on the back of that display someday.  But that was just an engineering idea.  Like it would be really nice to have a computer you could hold in your hands.  When I saw the children thing, it became an imperative.  Children must be able to take their computer outside.  They must have their computer.  It's a dynamic medium for creative thought.  It's going to change the way they think?  Yes.  Well, it's an interesting thing that having a writing system per se isn't quite enough  to change the way you think.  Having a writing system with a literacy and the discussions that go along with it does  change the way you think.  So literate societies don't think in qualitatively the same ways as pre-literate societies.  So in the end the medium can affect?  In yes.  And that was McLuhan's whole notion.  His idea was what's important about any medium is what you have to become in order to make  fluent use of it.  Because something has to happen in here.  And Papert was showing me something that I knew completely full well.  But it was the first time I thought about, wow, you could actually bypass ten years of  bad school and you could start children.  And Papert was interested in mathematics, but I was interested in science.  And not just science about the physical world, but I was interested in science as the set  of heuristics that allow us to get around what's bad about our brains.  So this is an idea that Francis Bacon had in the early 17th century.  And when I saw what Papert is doing, I realized, OK, this is the best idea anybody's ever  had for what a computer is for.  It really is the next big thing after the printing press.  And it has an epistemology that is not just taking on what a printing press is.  Unfortunately, that's what most people use the thing for today.  Science uses it for what it's really good for.  And it would be tremendous to have children generally learn real science with the aid  of the kind of modeling that computers can help.  How optimistic were you at that point?  Nobody who does, I'm still optimistic because nobody who gets into this game, into the research  game is other than optimistic.  Believe me.  Pessimism, even if it's well-aimed, is exactly the thing you don't want because it tends  to make you depressed.  What if I used the word disappointed?  Wouldn't you have expected that young man in Utah that by now in the 21st century,  you would be in a different place?  So in the first paper I wrote about the Dynabook, there's a line in there that the first piece  of software an end user will write is one to suppress advertising.  Because remember, I read McLuhan.  And I also did a lot of the early font design at Xerox PARC because I wanted to be able  to deal with all the media of the past.  But what we really wanted was, as this was happening, we wanted schools to start understanding  what was new and special about it.  And that hasn't happened yet.  Although, if you look at the printing press, the printing press was around 1450 or so.  And there were a lot of presses in Europe 50 years later, but then we had a century  full of religious wars partly fomented by being able to print Bibles and the vernacular  and a whole bunch of other stuff.  And it wasn't until the 17th century that the real fruits of the press started happening,  which were changes in ideas about governance and changes in ideas about how to find out  things about the world.  So we're just at the Bible publishing stage of the computer?  Yeah.  That's what I've said that many times.  And so the disappointing part was we put a lot of effort at PARC not to do just demos.  We actually built hundreds, actually thousands of the machine that influenced the Macintosh  ten years later.  We invented the Ethernet to connect it.  There was a lot of inventions.  And so when people came there to see a demo like Steve Jobs did, we were showing an entire  system and Steve was seeing it six years after we'd done it.  So he was seeing a mature thing in 79.  So the commercialization in the 80s for a variety of different reasons trimmed the old  low-pass filter.  We almost got a dial tone out of it.  So what was done is one dream that came out of the ARPA.  We PARC considered itself one of the ARPA projects even though it was sponsored by Xerox.  And what was a relatively coherent set of things, well, you've got to do pervasive networking  around the world.  You've got to do local area network.  You've got to do wireless.  ARPA was doing wireless back in the early 70s.  You've got to do this.  You've got to do this.  You've got to invent a user interface.  You have to have end-user programming.  You need desktop media.  Those were all done as one thing.  PARC, the central group that did most of these things at PARC was about two dozen people.  It's like 25 people.  But these are people who are actually, what you might call, they have chops in the engineering  and sciences, but they're also philosophically elevated also because of their growing up  in the ARPA.  Clearly, we shouldn't blame the computer for the lowering of proficiency and possibly even...  Well, do you blame the printing press for taking away the power of the Catholic Church?  Right.  Is that the printing press's fault?  Well...  Something.  But the computer hasn't solved the problem.  I mean, where is the computer?  Every big deal creates a problem only it can solve.  So no, the thing is for most people what they think of as a computer is a convenience that  is basically automating old media for them in a variety of different ways.  And the communicative aspects of them, of it, allow them to indulge in genetically induced  social drives like for status and intercommunication, we're not hermits and all those things.  And so it's an amplifier for a lot of the things in our genes.  As an amplifier for some of the kinds of thinking that we've invented, almost every  form of science today, real science, is not possible without being able to have moved  from classical mathematics to the stronger notion of computer simulation.  So the computer is actually bringing to life stuff that was symbols on the page and it  can bring it to life in a stronger way.  So on the symbols on the page, if you're calculating planetary orbits, it's hard to  calculate three bodies in motion except in special cases.  The computer can do n bodies trivially.  And that's what we use today.  It is the thing that is helping us deal with understanding what's going on with the climate.  And no form of classical mathematics comes close to be able to do that because we're  talking about billions and billions of little sections of the atmosphere and of the ocean  modeled and interconnecting and being run faster in time than the world is running to  give us some early warning on things that are very, very important.  This goes across the board.  So as an idea, it fits very strongly into this idea that whereas we're set up by a  large part of our brain to react quickly to stimuli.  What Kahneman calls System One in his book Thinking Fast and Slow.  Most of the things that are required of us these days except maybe driving a car require  us to do slow thinking.  And slow thinking is something that we had to, you know, it's there but we had to learn  how to do it.  Most of the intellectual inventions of the last three or four thousand years are in the  slow thinking vein.  And what slow thinking is delay action.  Delay action.  McLuhan had a great line.  He said, hey, don't ask whether something's true or false or right or wrong.  Try to find out what's going on.  So a lot of what learning how to think is about is to find even training to try to get  past what our common sense is trying to make of the world and try to find a way of modeling  things that our brains were not set up by nature to model.  That's what's powerful.  And so it has some of the things that we're powerful about the printing press, about mathematics  and about science.  But the level of reality that you can actually start probing because you have a computer  helping you see.  It's like the world's greatest microscope and the world's greatest telescope but intellectually.  What is your hope for the role of computer in learning as maybe education catches up  with the capacity of the computer?  Yeah, well I think the I think public education is about a lot of things besides training  for jobs.  If we are to remain a republic backed up by a democracy, the citizens, maybe 80% of the  citizens have to be able to argue in a reasonable way.  And they have to be able to argue about ideas that are important.  So the number one thing in public education is a large percentage of the population has  to be brought into the main conversations in a way that their opinions are not completely  trivial.  So that's a, another one is every adult has the responsibility to help the next generation  happen whether or not you have a child of your own.  This has been let go terribly.  And just what does that even mean?  What does it mean to be a parent, a teacher or somebody who doesn't have children but  this is part of the responsibility we have?  Third thing is richness.  A rich life in adults is one of the best ways of teaching children.  And the reason is that it is hard to learn important things in school to a brain that  is set up to learn a culture.  That's what our brains are set up to do at birth.  So we're used to being immersed in the ideas.  So our school is the environment around us.  Montessori used this in a very powerful way.  She understood it.  Most school, schooling people in America today have no idea about this.  So they have this, this old idea of knowledge being some fluid that you're pouring in somebody's  ear.  And it's, it's a, it's a very weak way of doing things.  And especially when you're dealing with modern knowledge, modern and vented knowledge.  Yeah.  And then there are vocational kinds of things.  But you don't want to let vocational things that might be or even college things that  might be an issue the last two years in high school have anything to do with the epistemologic,  epistemological things you want to do in say K through 8.  That's where you should actually set, help the children have a really powerful view of  the world.  The most powerful view of the world that we have is the one that we should instill in them.  Because it is really hard to learn.  Most people, when they're presented with that powerful view of the world later in life,  they're going to have to go through this.  Because most people identify with their beliefs as reality.  Their beliefs, their identity and what they think of as reality are all the same thing.  And they're none of the kind.  But by the time you have committed to that for decades, it is really tough to shake.  And that's the problem with education because you don't get, you have to do a bootstrapping  operation.  So if you could just move all the adults aside for a while, or put all the kids in a special  eaten or harrow, do what the Brits did when they created the administrators of the colonial  empire, take the kids away from the parents, and then you can impose your own epistemological  set of ideas.  But right now what the children, what adults want is the children to grow up more or less  like them.  And the adults are way off.  They're living centuries behind where we are and centuries behind the problems that we  have.  So this is kind of a dead end, I think, unless some form of intervention can be done that  allows, you know, remember what Loyola said, give me the child until the age of seven and  I will give you the man.  And he wasn't kidding because that is actually up to the age of seven, is kind of where a  lot of the entrenched world views, so if you're going to teach science and math, you want  to make a kind of a foray into the early grades.  And the problem with that is you need really great adults to help.  So even in the educational stuff we've done, we occasionally get to do stuff in the very  early grades, but most of the time we looked at fourth or fifth grade because the kids,  although we have to talk them out of a few things, they are actually in a good enough  state.  So the kids plus some stuff for them to do are actually a balance for the adults that  are around them.  Because ideally you'd like to go much, much, much earlier.
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What kind of family were you born into? I was born into a bookish family. My grandfather was a farmer who wrote books. He wrote over a hundred books. In his lifetime? If I had met him and said, what do you do? He'd probably say I'm a farmer. I don't know what he would say. I missed him. He died the year I was born, but he was one of the early photographers. He wrote maybe the definitive essay on photography for the Saturday evening post in the early 1900s on whether photography could be an art. Was this the father of your mother or your father? Father of my mother. Your mother, I think, was particularly artistic? Yeah. That's the right word. Yeah, he was. I mean, he was a very good musician. He was the... This is your grandfather. My grandfather. But I want to get you born. She was a good musician. And so... She was a good artist. She followed in his footsteps. She was interested in the artistic education of her children, presumably. No, I don't... The... No, it was an old New England family. I don't think they thought about things that way. It was just... It was in the house, as naturally. When I came to America after Australia, we lived in what had been my grandfather's house and there are thousands of books in it. Many of his drawings and the Parla Piano, which my mother... I mean, it was... My father was a physiologist, so there were science books around. And there wasn't really anything about parents overtly attending to their son's education. Well, let's talk about their son. What kind of a child were you? I think difficult. Difficult? Yeah. Still, presumably. Willful. Very immature, very small for my age. Happy to compete with adults in things that would impress adults. I think this is already famous about you, that you're going to read pretty... I did.... pretty early. Yes. This was, again, not being pushed because I'm hearing that that's not what your family did. But I think even reading off the back of cereal cartons growing up in Australia and we would get a life magazine in the mail every week or so delayed from the United States. And that was a perfect thing to learn to read from because it had pictures that helped understand what the captions were about. And of course I was read to. That is probably the biggest way of getting any child to read early. Did this begin to shape in you this... I'm going to call it percussity. You may or may not. But this percussity, did it affect your view of grownups, of your schooling? Yes. Well, certainly when I went to school, I went to school a year early, which is probably a mistake, but I read more than a hundred books. Most of them not adult books. I probably read only a few adult books. One of them was Eith Hamilton's Mythology, which is a favorite of my classic, fabulous book. And I... It was probably the first one I read all the way to the end and that was important because I love the Greek myths, but what was important about that book for me was she had the Norse myths at the end of it, and they were very, very similar to the Greek myths. And that was the first time I'd ever run into the idea that these are just stories. How old are you at this time, at this point? Oh, probably around... When I read that book, probably around five, I would say. I can't remember exactly whether I read it in Australia or in the U.S. Probably that age in your life. And then the second adult book I read all the way through had a huge effect on me, which was another one of my fathers, which was called Ancient Times, A History of the Early World by James Henry Breasted. I still have that book, and it was just a great account. It was a book that he had had in school for some class, but it was a great comprehensive account of early civilizations starting from the Eolithic times. It was perfectly readable by anybody who could read it. There's nothing esoteric about it. And again, you got this comparison. The author did not take pains to talk about things like civilizations have similar structures. He just sort of laid it out. Here's what the Egyptians did, and here's what the Assyrians did, and here's what the Babylonians did. And that was huge. I'm putting myself in the mind of your parents. How do you educate a kid like this? They may not be pushing you, but you go to the local public school once you come back to the United States. That was probably a mistake. But we were not well off. My father was a university professor. Actually in those days he was finishing his degree. And yeah, probably you would have done better in a different setup, but they just fed me books. It happened that the family, also my grandfather. My grandfather did a lot of things. One of the things he did was to start what for many, many years, decades and decades, was the largest bookstore in New England called Johnson's Bookstore in Springfield. And besides being an enormous regular bookstore, they also had a used bookstore in another building which was even larger. And so my uncle lived across the road at the base of Mount Holyoke where we lived there, and he had books. I'm going to chase you back to school, but I'm beginning to get the idea that your real education happened with your family and at home. But yeah, I was kind of a natural autodidact. And basically what autodidacts need is a feeling of quality threshold. Because the hardest thing to know is whether when you're learning a lot by yourself, whether even the question doesn't come up when you're gobbling the stuff up is, am I actually learning the real deal or am I just learning glosses on the real deal? This is a huge problem. So here's a guess on my part, just based on what your later career is going to achieve, and that is that education in a formal sense disappointed you. Now, except for a couple of times. Except for a couple of times. I wouldn't, I'm not quite in the Ilich camp because I, but when I encountered a good version of it, it was fantastic because it was a lot like graduate school was going to be later on. The teachers had a sense of that the children are actually like adults exploring things for the first time. And so that is a completely different theory of school. And then the idea that you may be the smartest person in the room, but you're generally not smarter than the 10 smartest people in the room. And certainly, you know, expanding outwards, you're not smarter than the 100 smartest people in history. And so this auto-didact impulse is something that anybody who gets really interested in the way the world, you know, just a million different things. Quickly there's a human element that comes in, even if you happen to be an introvert like I was. Okay, we're going to get to how that actually affects your theory of the use of the computer. So right now, am I going to find any mentor outside your family or your history, personal history in your life until you get to graduate school? Is there anyone along the way? Oh, sure. High school. Yeah. My fourth grade teacher, Mary Quirk, was one of these very, very special teachers. She died young when I started doing education things myself. My first impulse was to track her down and found that she had died, I guess, at the age of 49. But what did she have? She had, well, one of her things was we never knew what she knew. Because her whole process was, well, she was obviously playing a game with the state, New York state educational thing. But her... You mean their requirements? Yeah. And she made that happen. But basically her whole game was to set up situations that would select out children. And she had a wide variety so that virtually every child in a class would find something that they kind of got really interested in and they would own. And she would set up what we'd call today a research group of other children around that child. And by the time fourth grade was half over, I would say more than 50% of the class time was spent dealing with that whole thing. And then she had what you call big themes. She had a...one of the ideas was to have a class theme where everybody found out something and then try to represent what this was in the form of what she called a fresco, which was not done in Fred. It's like the wall of the Sistine Chapel and every child would wind up doing a...that happened to be the oceans when I was there. So every child got to find out something special about it, report on it. But then the whole class project was organized together. And the kids that could see perspective like me helped do the organization. Is that what you have called social thinking when sort of the individual elements come together? Yeah, it's not like democracy. It's a rather different kind of thing. At that time I hadn't really...in fact, I delayed kind of really understanding how the Constitution was put together just because I hated the way history was taught. I liked my ancient history stuff, but it wasn't until I was in my twenties and into my thirties that I really went to town on just how this country got invented. And of course, Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention were very complete and released fifty years after his death and there are some annotated books on this also. So I was able to look at that rather closely and it reminded me very much of this class. It reminded me very much of grad school, the ARPA research community. I know we're going to talk about that. Yeah, we'll get there. But this is very important, it's the foundation. I may be very literal minded, but so far I'm talking to a humanist. Yeah. And whatever that means. Whatever that means, fair enough, and to use another whatever that means, I want somehow to introduce technology into your education or aspiration. Where does that show up? Well, I think the first thing is you know the Greek root of technology is their term for anything humans make. You know what era of Greece you looked at, sometimes they held off the fine arts from it, but most of the time they meant anything. And the Latin root ARS, ours, is meant the same thing. So when Ben Franklin uttered this old Latin motto, life is short and art is long, what he meant by art was not just fine arts, but art. But in our time of specialists, and of course that it's not only classical, but post-Jefersonian, there's a point where somebody sends you, this is really a question, somebody sends you into either engineering or technology where you can at least master the formal tools. Sure, that was easy. I don't know exactly what the root of it was, but as early as I can remember, which is certainly four or five, I was interested in jet planes, which were a new thing. I was interested in rockets. So the uncle who now owned the family bookstore got me, I think when I was seven, a copy of Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel by Willie Lay, who wrote actually many editions of that book. And so I avidly devoured it. It was partly about German weapons, because a lot of them used rocketry in one form or another. Part of it was about how these things actually worked, which I didn't completely understand. The thing that stuck in my mind was these things that are called Hohmann orbits. And these are a guy in the 20s sketched out, well, if you're going to get from the Earth to Mars, which I was very interested in, you can't just fly the rockets, point the rocket ship at Mars in, because both the Earth and Mars are moving, and they're moving at a fairly good rate. So in order to get there, you have to point the rocket in a direction that will eventually forms you into an orbit. It will anticipate. And so that was one of the first times I got introduced with what I would call nonlinear thinking, in that the world of gravitational fields is not the world that we experience on Earth, and you just don't point a name, you have this other thing going. That made a huge impression on me. And yeah, but I think- You went to a technical high school. I did, right across the river here. How did you decide on that? I mean, I thought you might have- Well, I was more or less in trouble in my junior high school. So there were a bunch of special high schools, and the high school for me was really Brock's high school of science, but it was only a three-year high school in those days, and Brooklyn Tech was a four-year high school. And so I was encouraged, and they all had the same test. So I was encouraged very, very strongly to take that test, pass it, and get out of that before I really got into trouble out there. So I did take the test, and I did pass it. It made out to be a mixed blessing, but basically a blessing because my mind is more of- Engineering and science and math have an incredible overlap epistemologically. They have a lot of the same ways of thinking about how the hip bone is connected to the thigh bone. And a lot of the difference between the fields is the temperament of the people. My temperament was more along the lines of science than engineering. So it was tremendously helpful to be forced to take a gazillion engineering courses. Tech really didn't have any optional courses except you could choose French or German. And if you chose the college prep thing, they basically squeezed six years of education into four, and they could throw you out whenever they felt like it. So it was just a kind of a grind of 6,000 boys who had passed this test. Brooklyn Block Long and Brooklyn Block Wide, and eight stories high and incredible facilities. Later on it helped tremendously because it allowed me to work with really great engineers in a way I think I would have had a hard time doing if I hadn't learned kind of engineering as a scientist might learn it. So you're deciding about going to college, presumably you're expecting to at this point. Not really. I mean, I expected that I would go to college, but I had a disease that was close to romantic fever if it wasn't romantic fever when I was in my senior year. So I went back to school to read. Now I was out on Long Island, and I had gotten thrown out of Brooklyn Tech actually for insubordination. Which was not unknown in your life? Not unknown. Not unknown. So I went back to repeat my senior year, and they gave me my diploma, and they informed me that I had actually bought enough credits from three years at Brooklyn Tech to more than graduate from this high school. And I said, well, why did you make me go? But anyway, it was good that I did because that was where I fell in with a bunch of jazz musicians, and I had a very good time my senior year in spite of being ill. And so I just hung around playing music. Ever assuming that that would be your career? No. Not really. And you were in the same team as an avocation. Yeah. Music is a tricky deal. It's, I felt I was working harder than somebody should to keep up with people who were a lot better than I was. So I was endlessly grateful that I was able to be good enough that they would let me play with them. So I'd gotten up to some level. And this included some famous musicians we played at jazz festivals, and we did other kinds of things. By the way, what was your answer? A lot of jazz guitar. But the, no, so I didn't have any, pretty much my entire life has been a series of eventually lucky accidents because I'm kind of lazy and indolent. So with capacity to respond productively, may I add that? Yeah. No, I would agree. When something interesting happened that caught my interest, I would occasionally put forth some real effort. And eventually in graduate school, I put forth a lot of effort. How do I get you into college? How do you decide that? Well, I just, you know, my parents are going to force me to get a job or something. And I definitely did not want a job. And I didn't, I was playing with people who were much better than I was, and they were more or less starving. So that wasn't going to be the route? Well, you know, I sort of eeked out stuff, but I just picked a college at random. And that would turn out to be Colorado. No, that was Bethany College. Oh, Bethany College, that was your first? Yeah, just, they just happened to come by. I see. And they had a good reputation, so I just went there. Did you expect, again, an engineering direction? No, I had no, no, no, I was interested in a lot of things. And I went to college because you likely brush up against lots of things. But for instance, I knew a lot of biology, but I had not ever thought about majoring in it, but I had a good experience my first semester in this college. I went off a year. And... But you dropped out. No, I got thrown out. Why? I'm beginning to see a pattern here. Well, this one is complicated to... Because basically, you could say I was an early protester of certain kinds of discrimination and made my protests known. And there were a variety of forces inside the college that I was surprised I'd gone home for Easter vacation. I got a call from the dean saying I was no longer welcome there because I had to drive all the way back and get myself... Later on, the head of the biology department wrote me a great letter to get into the University of Colorado while I was in the Air Force. Let's spend some time in the Air Force because I think that's important in your development as a computer thinker. Well, it gave... It was an outlet. It was an outlet. So, one thing about computers, I had read a very good book called Faster Than Thought in 1956. And now we're getting thrown out. It was like 1961 or something, 1960. And so I knew what they were. I knew a little bit. I'd done a little plugboard programming with my friend, fellow jazz musician who was working for United Airlines. So I knew a little bit. But I actually got drafted. And I did not want to go into the Army. And so I turned to my reading skills and I started reading things. And one of the things I found out fairly easily was that if you're drafted into the Army, you had the option of passing a test for officer training of some kind to one of the volunteer services. And then I went to talk to the Air Force people and read their stuff. And they had a program for flying, becoming an officer flying for a year. And they put you through the rest of college. So I thought, oh, that's good. It makes sense. What I may be overemphasizing in my expectations is... Yeah, you're hoping kind of a story. Well, you know, I want to get you to the point where you're making a lot of money. A lot of contributions. But I love the journey to that point. And whether the Air Force was critical in anything that they made... It helped. Look, I think the way, you know, for young people, the basic... John Lennon had this great line. He says, life is what happens to you while you're making plans. And I was even further than that because I didn't make that many plans. And so I was just sort of the leaf on the stream there. But the one constant thing was that I was learning about stuff in the world. And I was also learning about music. I kept on learning about music. And when I had done some musical composition in college, I did a lot more when I was in University of Colorado. And the theater there was really great. I like theater, so I spent most of my time in the theater when I should have been doing math. When you had gone and... Yeah, I was supposed to be doing math and molecular biology. But actually, the thing that was really super rich at the University of Colorado was the theater and the amount of stuff that they did. And that is a whole other area which has to do with learning how to fool people and learning why people like to be fooled and why they pay to be fooled and why they're uplifted by being fooled. And why we have to get better in a sense at fooling them on the one hand, but teaching them science so that they know when not to be fooled on the other. So that was... So I'm sitting on your graduate school admissions committee at Utah. I don't... There wasn't a committee. Well, the metaphor for the committee. There's one guy. One guy. And why is he letting you in? Well, I asked him a couple of years down the road. David Evans, who was the guy behind the invention of 3D graphics as we know it today. The Evans of Evans and Sutherland. Great man. And I asked him, I guess not too long before I was about to graduate, why had he actually admitted me? Because I had a scatter thing. He says, well, I don't look at transcripts. They don't predict back straight A's as an undergraduate. It's not a terribly good sign if you're going to a research university. Means you're too compliant, too willing to cope with it. He says, I only like resumes. And you had an interesting resume. And I found out later, because I got on the faculty after I got my PhD. So I got to see it from the other side. What would happen at about the two-year point, so what Dave would do is bring in people. He would over admit, because he had lots of money from ARPA. He'd over admit. He wouldn't try to figure things out ahead of time. He treated the graduate students like they were made out of gold. We all had huge travel budgets. We were encouraged to travel around. All the graduate students in the ARPA community were treated like researchers who just hadn't gotten their PhDs yet. So there wasn't a class system the way there is today. And at the two-year point, the faculty would sit around and discuss a grad student. The term they would use is, is this a real person or not? And if they decided that person was a real person, they would go on to get their PhD. And if they weren't a real person, that person would get a master's and would go out through the other door. A lot of different graduate programs did that in those days. That's the way they did it. But I want to just step outside for a moment and say this, that you're also lucky. Things happen to you. Very lucky. No, but lucky for a generation too. I'm not just talking about an individual. No, no. Since that money was available. You mentioned ARPA. Absolutely. And the viewers of this might not even know what ARPA is. So what is happening in the support of technological thinking and research at this point? To make it as simple as possible, technology had a lot to do with World War II. It wasn't the atomic bomb that was the big factor, but radar. And a lot of the good ideas in radar were invented in different places in the world. But the British had come up with a device that would produce really high energy electromagnetic waves at a good frequency. And they gave it to the Americans who developed it at MIT. And so the entire zeitgeist that happened in building 20 at MIT that resulted in almost 200 different radar systems in just three and a half years, invented and engineered and manufactured and installed in this short period where World War II turned the tide because it allowed them to get after the submarines and keep the supply line. Ruler is actually unglamorous when you actually look at the logistics of it. It's all about supply lines. And so that group, and Vannevar Bush, who was President Roosevelt Science, who was also a professor at MIT, there was an old boys' club, really was. And they were a good one for us because they were caretakers. So it's the Department of Defense that after the war is shepherding. The war never ended because the Cold War started almost immediately. And a lot of the people who had been even junior researchers, like one of them was Jerome Reesner, who became President of MIT and President Kennedy's Science Advisor 15, 17 years later. So there was a continuity. And so there was a whole bunch of money spent during the 50s for the sage early warning system that is now our flight control for airlines, but was originally done to detect Russian bombers and required some serious computer design and some serious computer manufacturing. And a bunch of things like that happened in the 50s. Then the 60s happened and they had money left over from the Moon program as it moved to NASA. And they decided to fund a psychologist at MIT and in that area by the name of Licklider, who set up the information processing part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the DARPA, which had been set up to deal with Sputnik and rocket missiles and space travel for real. And this guy happened to be completely enlightened. And he was wise to not try to define goals. He had a vision. The vision was big. And what he wanted was the smartest people he could find who had ideas about how to make that vision real. He didn't care if they disagreed with each other. And so he set up a community of about 17 places of intercommunicating, particularly through the graduate students that flowed freely through all of these places, not terribly in agreement but sometimes, but a community that really knew how to argue in a productive way, a way that I wish everybody knew how to do because that form of argument is not designed to work and win the argument. It's designed to look at every side of something using the fact that people have different perspectives. And so that was what I fell into accidentally when I went to Utah. I had no idea of it. Again, we know the accident and then we know the response. And the response was a very creative period in your life. Yeah, I went crazy. I absolutely went crazy. And out of that, what was the sustaining idea of the Utah time for you? Well, it was two periods. The first one was what was called the ARPA dream, which was in Licklider when they asked him, what are you doing? He always had a sentence that went sort of like this. He said, well, the destiny of computers are to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for everybody pervasively network worldwide. So it had this idea that there's something that you're interacting with that's going to amplify your ability to think. They're all going to be hooked up worldwide, what he called the intergalactic network. They asked him, why do you call it an intergalactic network? He says, well, engineers always give you the minimum. I want one that covers the entire earth densely. And so I'm asking for an intergalactic one. So when they pass it through the low pass filter of reality, I'll still get what I want. So this guy was, and that was what I had just accidentally fallen into. Accidentally. Totally. You made something of it. And I want to know what you made of it. Well, you'd be a fool because, like I said, they treated their graduate students like gold. That was a new experience for me. And any graduate student that was going to do something that would reveal that they actually weren't gold was a nut. Complete nut. Or what could you do? Well, first thing was, I got there out of, as usual, I got there out of sequence. And so Dave had a couple of months before classes started. Dave asked me, what do you want to do? And I said, well, offer it up to me because I haven't, I've programmed for four years in the Air Force, but I don't know anything. I'd go to the library and read everything that's been written about computing, going back into the 50s. And Xerox, anything interesting for rereading later. So he gave me a budget and that's what I did. So I spent my first two months there reading, jeez, I don't know, thousands, decades worth of stuff, thousands of papers. So the second one came maybe a year and a half after I got into grad school. I had heard a talk by Marvin Minsky, the AI guy from MIT, he'd come out to Utah. It was a fantastic talk. And anybody who's interested can look at his Turing Award lecture, which came a little bit later, but many of the same themes. And quite a bit of that talk was about the work that he had been doing with Seymour Pappert and the work that Seymour Pappert had been doing with children and this language that they had come up with called Logo. And because I was designing my thesis project, it was a desktop computer with windows and an object-oriented language. Was this a shocking goal or natural? I mean, did you? Well, the object idea came from a lot of different places and it would exhaust an hour to explain where they all came from. But unfortunately, I wrote them all down in a history, which is readily available, called the Early History of Small Talk for people who are interested. But just a bunch of different kinds of things, especially from seeing this Ivan Sutherland thesis about computer graphics, which had a kind of a use of objects. Math background and biology, you can think of cells as being like objects. They are kind of containers of process and state. Anyway, so I started thinking about modeling everything because the simplest way of thinking about modeling things is if you only use computers to model things with, you can never run out of expressive power. They connect to each other, you go inside, you have more of them. So it's a very simple idea. I started doing things with it and then another set of lucky circumstances got me to have to use these ideas right away and doing this early desktop computer. The idea of windows was kind of around then and we used it and this was an object oriented. So it's a whole set of stuff there that would be eerily like the present. There was kind of a first pass to what we later did at Xerox Park. Why even think about a personal computer? Why isn't it enough at this stage to think about its mass use? Well I think so the question of if you could interact with a computer, what is that going to be, especially if you're interested in amplification of one. You should be able to design something you haven't built yet and simulate it and when you build a bridge you won't fall down. That was what Sketchpad was all about. So Ivan had the whole deal and it was on a computer of this maybe half an acre in size. So it was a personal computer for one person at three o'clock in the morning. It was one of these air defense computers and the prevailing idea was computers are so expensive we have to timeshare them. The problem with timesharing them is it is very hard to do interaction in terms of milliseconds when the computer is trying to deal with 50 or 60 people on it. And so people started building smart terminals but the terminals weren't smart enough. And there was this joke that if you build a smart enough terminal it's a computer all by itself and eventually buds off like a bacterium dividing. And the guy who did this big computer that Ivan Sutherland worked on also did for my money the first personal computer which was done for biomedical people who needed to do real time experiments on nerve cells of various kinds. And he did it as it wasn't small by today's standards. It was kind of a cabinet and a thing on a desk. But it had everything that we would assign to a personal computer and quite a few of them were built. The early ones were all assembled by the people who were going to use them because this guy Wes Clark did it as a kit. And so this idea was around. The problem was you didn't get enough computing power. There was this money thing. On the other hand there was this Moore's Law idea which came about the year before it went to graduate school in 65 on a kind of silicon that was too slow at that time for computers. But if you made it smaller it got faster. And it was very, very simple to look at. And so Moore was able to put a castle in the cloud of saying, boy, if we could just learn how to make these things smaller on integrated circuits they're going to speed up and pretty soon we can do everything. It turned out to be the case. If he had enough physics to understand his argument what remained was engineering. And engineers can usually figure out a way to do things. So I was working away on that because the romance of not just interacting with the computer but romance of being able to interact with the computer whenever the hell you wanted. We already had that because we had time sharing terminals into some of the computers on the West Coast at Utah. And I had a teletype in my apartment. So any time of the day or night I could log on to Engelbart's computer in Menlo Park and use it. Couldn't do much on it. But it was when I got the itch. So it was personal, it was personal media. And there's a romance behind that, it's the romance of having a musical instrument at your disposal. And so that was already well along. And a paper that I heard about from Minsky was doing something just astounding to me. Partly because I actually understood everything he was doing. I was an mathematician, he was an mathematician. And he was doing something I understood full well about computing. It never occurred to me to apply it to the plight of children and mathematics. But Papert had spent time with Piaget after he got his PhD in math. And he had this perspective and realized that a certain very powerful form of math, one of the most used forms of math in science, with embodied on a computer all of a sudden became a play thing for an eight or ten year old child. So I saw that in 68. And that year I'd also seen a little one inch square flat panel display. And I thought about putting my desktop computer on the back of that display someday. But that was just an engineering idea. Like it would be really nice to have a computer you could hold in your hands. When I saw the children thing, it became an imperative. Children must be able to take their computer outside. They must have their computer. It's a dynamic medium for creative thought. It's going to change the way they think? Yes. Well, it's an interesting thing that having a writing system per se isn't quite enough to change the way you think. Having a writing system with a literacy and the discussions that go along with it does change the way you think. So literate societies don't think in qualitatively the same ways as pre-literate societies. So in the end the medium can affect? In yes. And that was McLuhan's whole notion. His idea was what's important about any medium is what you have to become in order to make fluent use of it. Because something has to happen in here. And Papert was showing me something that I knew completely full well. But it was the first time I thought about, wow, you could actually bypass ten years of bad school and you could start children. And Papert was interested in mathematics, but I was interested in science. And not just science about the physical world, but I was interested in science as the set of heuristics that allow us to get around what's bad about our brains. So this is an idea that Francis Bacon had in the early 17th century. And when I saw what Papert is doing, I realized, OK, this is the best idea anybody's ever had for what a computer is for. It really is the next big thing after the printing press. And it has an epistemology that is not just taking on what a printing press is. Unfortunately, that's what most people use the thing for today. Science uses it for what it's really good for. And it would be tremendous to have children generally learn real science with the aid of the kind of modeling that computers can help. How optimistic were you at that point? Nobody who does, I'm still optimistic because nobody who gets into this game, into the research game is other than optimistic. Believe me. Pessimism, even if it's well-aimed, is exactly the thing you don't want because it tends to make you depressed. What if I used the word disappointed? Wouldn't you have expected that young man in Utah that by now in the 21st century, you would be in a different place? So in the first paper I wrote about the Dynabook, there's a line in there that the first piece of software an end user will write is one to suppress advertising. Because remember, I read McLuhan. And I also did a lot of the early font design at Xerox PARC because I wanted to be able to deal with all the media of the past. But what we really wanted was, as this was happening, we wanted schools to start understanding what was new and special about it. And that hasn't happened yet. Although, if you look at the printing press, the printing press was around 1450 or so. And there were a lot of presses in Europe 50 years later, but then we had a century full of religious wars partly fomented by being able to print Bibles and the vernacular and a whole bunch of other stuff. And it wasn't until the 17th century that the real fruits of the press started happening, which were changes in ideas about governance and changes in ideas about how to find out things about the world. So we're just at the Bible publishing stage of the computer? Yeah. That's what I've said that many times. And so the disappointing part was we put a lot of effort at PARC not to do just demos. We actually built hundreds, actually thousands of the machine that influenced the Macintosh ten years later. We invented the Ethernet to connect it. There was a lot of inventions. And so when people came there to see a demo like Steve Jobs did, we were showing an entire system and Steve was seeing it six years after we'd done it. So he was seeing a mature thing in 79. So the commercialization in the 80s for a variety of different reasons trimmed the old low-pass filter. We almost got a dial tone out of it. So what was done is one dream that came out of the ARPA. We PARC considered itself one of the ARPA projects even though it was sponsored by Xerox. And what was a relatively coherent set of things, well, you've got to do pervasive networking around the world. You've got to do local area network. You've got to do wireless. ARPA was doing wireless back in the early 70s. You've got to do this. You've got to do this. You've got to invent a user interface. You have to have end-user programming. You need desktop media. Those were all done as one thing. PARC, the central group that did most of these things at PARC was about two dozen people. It's like 25 people. But these are people who are actually, what you might call, they have chops in the engineering and sciences, but they're also philosophically elevated also because of their growing up in the ARPA. Clearly, we shouldn't blame the computer for the lowering of proficiency and possibly even... Well, do you blame the printing press for taking away the power of the Catholic Church? Right. Is that the printing press's fault? Well... Something. But the computer hasn't solved the problem. I mean, where is the computer? Every big deal creates a problem only it can solve. So no, the thing is for most people what they think of as a computer is a convenience that is basically automating old media for them in a variety of different ways. And the communicative aspects of them, of it, allow them to indulge in genetically induced social drives like for status and intercommunication, we're not hermits and all those things. And so it's an amplifier for a lot of the things in our genes. As an amplifier for some of the kinds of thinking that we've invented, almost every form of science today, real science, is not possible without being able to have moved from classical mathematics to the stronger notion of computer simulation. So the computer is actually bringing to life stuff that was symbols on the page and it can bring it to life in a stronger way. So on the symbols on the page, if you're calculating planetary orbits, it's hard to calculate three bodies in motion except in special cases. The computer can do n bodies trivially. And that's what we use today. It is the thing that is helping us deal with understanding what's going on with the climate. And no form of classical mathematics comes close to be able to do that because we're talking about billions and billions of little sections of the atmosphere and of the ocean modeled and interconnecting and being run faster in time than the world is running to give us some early warning on things that are very, very important. This goes across the board. So as an idea, it fits very strongly into this idea that whereas we're set up by a large part of our brain to react quickly to stimuli. What Kahneman calls System One in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. Most of the things that are required of us these days except maybe driving a car require us to do slow thinking. And slow thinking is something that we had to, you know, it's there but we had to learn how to do it. Most of the intellectual inventions of the last three or four thousand years are in the slow thinking vein. And what slow thinking is delay action. Delay action. McLuhan had a great line. He said, hey, don't ask whether something's true or false or right or wrong. Try to find out what's going on. So a lot of what learning how to think is about is to find even training to try to get past what our common sense is trying to make of the world and try to find a way of modeling things that our brains were not set up by nature to model. That's what's powerful. And so it has some of the things that we're powerful about the printing press, about mathematics and about science. But the level of reality that you can actually start probing because you have a computer helping you see. It's like the world's greatest microscope and the world's greatest telescope but intellectually. What is your hope for the role of computer in learning as maybe education catches up with the capacity of the computer? Yeah, well I think the I think public education is about a lot of things besides training for jobs. If we are to remain a republic backed up by a democracy, the citizens, maybe 80% of the citizens have to be able to argue in a reasonable way. And they have to be able to argue about ideas that are important. So the number one thing in public education is a large percentage of the population has to be brought into the main conversations in a way that their opinions are not completely trivial. So that's a, another one is every adult has the responsibility to help the next generation happen whether or not you have a child of your own. This has been let go terribly. And just what does that even mean? What does it mean to be a parent, a teacher or somebody who doesn't have children but this is part of the responsibility we have? Third thing is richness. A rich life in adults is one of the best ways of teaching children. And the reason is that it is hard to learn important things in school to a brain that is set up to learn a culture. That's what our brains are set up to do at birth. So we're used to being immersed in the ideas. So our school is the environment around us. Montessori used this in a very powerful way. She understood it. Most school, schooling people in America today have no idea about this. So they have this, this old idea of knowledge being some fluid that you're pouring in somebody's ear. And it's, it's a, it's a very weak way of doing things. And especially when you're dealing with modern knowledge, modern and vented knowledge. Yeah. And then there are vocational kinds of things. But you don't want to let vocational things that might be or even college things that might be an issue the last two years in high school have anything to do with the epistemologic, epistemological things you want to do in say K through 8. That's where you should actually set, help the children have a really powerful view of the world. The most powerful view of the world that we have is the one that we should instill in them. Because it is really hard to learn. Most people, when they're presented with that powerful view of the world later in life, they're going to have to go through this. Because most people identify with their beliefs as reality. Their beliefs, their identity and what they think of as reality are all the same thing. And they're none of the kind. But by the time you have committed to that for decades, it is really tough to shake. And that's the problem with education because you don't get, you have to do a bootstrapping operation. So if you could just move all the adults aside for a while, or put all the kids in a special eaten or harrow, do what the Brits did when they created the administrators of the colonial empire, take the kids away from the parents, and then you can impose your own epistemological set of ideas. But right now what the children, what adults want is the children to grow up more or less like them. And the adults are way off. They're living centuries behind where we are and centuries behind the problems that we have. So this is kind of a dead end, I think, unless some form of intervention can be done that allows, you know, remember what Loyola said, give me the child until the age of seven and I will give you the man. And he wasn't kidding because that is actually up to the age of seven, is kind of where a lot of the entrenched world views, so if you're going to teach science and math, you want to make a kind of a foray into the early grades. And the problem with that is you need really great adults to help. So even in the educational stuff we've done, we occasionally get to do stuff in the very early grades, but most of the time we looked at fourth or fifth grade because the kids, although we have to talk them out of a few things, they are actually in a good enough state. So the kids plus some stuff for them to do are actually a balance for the adults that are around them. Because ideally you'd like to go much, much, much earlier.
gets really interested in the way the world, you research group of other children around that University of Colorado was the theater and the would use is, is this a real person or not? And any graduate student that was going to do who's interested can look at his Turing Award them all down in a history, which is readily blame the computer for the lowering of to have moved from classical mathematics to the mathematics and about science. But the level of their opinions are not completely trivial. So really powerful view of the world. The most presented with that powerful view of the world But by the time you have committed to that for