Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc. In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary. Alan Kay Read Quote
I’ve been a Fellow in a number of companies: Xerox, Apple, Disney, HP. There are certain similarities because all the Fellows programs were derived from IBM’s, which itself was derived from the MIT ‘Institute Professor’ program. Alan Kay Read Quote
In the commercial world, you have this problem that the amount of research you can do in a company is based on how well your current business is going, whereas there actually should be an inverse relationship: when things are going worse, you should do more research. Alan Kay Read Quote
I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me. Alan Kay Read Quote
Because people don’t understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that ‘Guitar Hero’ is the same as a real guitar. Alan Kay Read Quote
Social thinking requires very exacting thresholds to be powerful. For example, we’ve had social thinking for 200,000 years, and hardly anything happened that could be considered progress over most of that time. This is because what is most pervasive about social thinking is ‘how to get along and mutually cope.’ Alan Kay Read Quote
Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories – much of the debugging has to be done by others. Alan Kay Read Quote
As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984. Alan Kay Read Quote
All the companies I’ve worked for have this deep problem of devolving to something like the hunting and gathering cultures of 100,000 years ago. If businesses could find a way to invent ‘agriculture,’ we could put the world back together and all would prosper. Alan Kay Read Quote
When I first got to Apple, which was in ’84, the Mac was already out, and ‘Newsweek’ contacted me and asked me what I thought of the Mac. I said, ‘Well, the Mac is the first personal computer good enough to be criticized.’ Alan Kay Read Quote
