Haegwan Kim (HK); What is your definition of success?
Alan Kay (AK); In my late 20s I gradually moved to judging myself on how well I was sustaining focus and effort on goals I was trying to make happen. This allowed for many more failures, but also allowed sustained processes on more important and longer term goals.
HK; I’m very impressed by your saying “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. Do you still believe the future is what we make rather than what it will come to us?
AK; The key word in the phrase is “best”. For example, “the *easiest* way to predict the future is to *prevent* it”. And this is what most people do by sticking to the past when the past is not the best way to do things.
The trick in invention is “to invent above important thresholds” (because most inventions and ideas are mediocre down to bad). So discretion and discernment are the central factors to go along with energy, will, and ideas.
HK; In you whole career as a computer scientist, what is the biggest lesson?
AK; “Architecture dominates materials”. That is, most important things are important by virtue of their organization rather than the specifics of their parts. Many of the problems in computing stem from people being distracted by unimportant details and lack of architectural design in the large.
HK; For you, what is the most important thing for creativity?
AK; There is “New” and there is “News”. “News” is incremental to what people know and has just enough novelty to be remarked on — it can be told in a few minutes. “New” is not easily associated with what people know, and may take years to teach and learn. However, quite a bit of “New” is quite poor — it is very hard to think up a really good idea! There is a paradox.
The more you know the more you will be pulled towards News. If you know very little you will either reinvent — perhaps not to “reinvent the wheel” but only to “reinvent the flat tire” — or you might come up with a novel idea that is likely not to be very good. Somehow you have to “know everything” but then “forget it except for its perfume”. This can create a context in which something New can also transcend the best of what has already been done.
HK; You started a non-profit organization – Viewpoints Research Institute -, which focuses on education to enhance the power of idea. Was there anything you wanted to do before you retire?
AK; I don’t have any plans for retirement, and the problems of education will easily be able to occupy me for the rest of my life.
HK; Why is education important for people? Do you have any opinion on how it changes human life?
AK; Anthropology and psychology reveal us to be a creature born with a limited set of abilities and propensities (for example for language, stories, forming a culture to gather and pass on ways to survive and live, religion, competition, rivalries, status seeking, coping, etc.). What is interesting about us seems to be very rare and often hard to learn inventions not found everywhere (reading and writing, self-consciousness, deductive mathematics, empirical model based science, the idea of equal rights, etc.).
The learning and internalization of these “powerful ideas” has almost the effect of “adding new parts to our biological brain”. For example, we are not born with any feeling for calculus or deep thinking about change, but once we learn it fluently we can think in ways about important topics that the greatest geniuses of antiquity could not.
So the real fruits of real education are great increases in awareness, of “making the invisible a little more visible”, of being able to take multiple perspectives rather than viewing through a narrow single belief system, of being able to exchange belief for real thinking, to be able to insert real thinking between stimuli and actions, to gaining an understanding of ourselves than is not clouded by fond opinions.
Haegwan Kim is a writer who was born in Osaka, Japan in 1989 and grew up near Tokyo where went to a Korean school for 12 years.
