The Future of Text (Alan Kay)

Compiled from: "The Future of Text" by Alan Kay is one of the latest collections released on Future Text Publishing.

We are the most inventing species, carrying our ongoing inventions over time and space to invent and reshape our future through exogenetics that create language and culture.

But "inventing the future" doesn't always mean a better future. Most ideas are mediocre, or even bad, when pushed forward and outward, giving birth to what we now consider an unfortunate history of the future. In an age of near-infinite copying and dissemination, bad ideas create lower "normals" that keep us away from our best impulses and interests.

In our time, many new technologies provide seemingly "more natural" alternatives to literate discourse - eg: telephone, radio, TV, chat/twitter, etc. In other words, these techniques allow oral modes of thought to be re-established. We need to ask whether the "oral societies" of the past, or when they appear to be re-emerging, are in the best interests of humanity. It is often observed that many attributes of 'civilisation' are inventions - including deep literacies - which are inconsistent with our genetic endowments, but rather attempts to provide alternatives that enhance all our developmental possibilities Alternatives. In other words, "civilization" is not a state of being, but a constant attempt to "becoming more civilised": the next stage in human exogenetic evolution. Compared to oral cultures, which are closer to our genes, "civilization" is very unnaturalness and artificiality—that's its advantage. One way to look at modern education is that its main goal should be to help children embrace and master these "unnaturals", allowing us to collaborate and grow in more ways than one.

Plato made Socrates complain that writing robs people of memory, allows bad ideas to circulate after the author's death, and that dead authors can no longer be chased and "argued right" . But both love sarcasm, so we should note that Plato used writing to make this point, and I think I hope the reader will realize that anyone who wants to remember will benefit greatly from writing because it provides more There are so many ideas worth putting into practice between our ears, rather than storing them in a page on a bookshelf. Writing just forces us to choose whether or not to remember, and when we decide to do so, it gives us more.

Another part of Socrates' complaint worth pondering is that writing does not allow for dialogue and negotiation of meaning between people, and in fact seems to preclude what he considers a reasonable argument. Likewise, Plato was one of the first inventors of the new structures needed to allow written descriptions, expositions, and arguments when he came up with this idea, and used many of these structures in dialogue. It's hard to imagine that he didn't fully realize that by making Socrates object to the idea, he was demonstrating a powerful way of making arguments in writing .

What Plato doesn't mention is that writing almost magically adds some additional gifts, even if it looks like word after word, like speech. In addition to transcending time and space, writing can also make longer and more complex arguments , especially when errors of reproduction are no longer necessary to guard against, such as the invention of the printing press. This property was noticed by Erasmus and his friend the printer Aldus Manutius in the early 16th century, and they decided to add page numbers to the book to help with longer arguments See the preceding and following sections (this was years after the first printed books appeared, many years after the marginalized Jewish culture, which used page numbers for the same purpose when studying and cross-referencing the Talmud ).

Most subtly, we need to ask: what exactly happens to our brains/minds when we learn to become very proficient at something that is not directly related to our genetic makeup? Especially if we become very proficient in many very different ways of using languages besides storytelling and bookkeeping?

McLuhan , Innis, and Havelock, the most well-known, began to ask how the human mind, through writing and reading, was not only enhanced, but fundamentally altered, And how this affects the development of what we call civilization.

McLuhan started out as a literary critic, and one aspect of this path that he did not explore is that a new way of thinking can be invented/co-evolved, embedded in language, especially written language, Learning proficiently is almost like adding a new brain—a “brainlet”—that can take us far beyond biology. There are many examples of this now, but a simple one is calculus, which allows for a kind of thinking that even ancient geniuses could not. Much mathematical thinking "piggybacks" onto our normal language expressions, which in computer terms are general-purpose, allowing more expressive and powerful high-level languages and ideas to run in a much simpler mechanism.

A great piggy-back invention is science, which, as Bacon called 400 years ago in 1620, is the collection of the best methods and heuristics to get around our "bad brains" (bad brains, which he called "Idols of the Mind", endlessly confuse and confuse our thinking). This larger notion that science is not just a poking at nature but deals with our mental deficiencies is regrettably ignored in many important ways.

A really big context for these views is how 'architecture' (the proper organization of things and ideas) qualitatively elevates the simplest of materials to unimaginable heights. For example, it's hard for most people to think about the idea that life itself is an amazing organization of just 6 simple atoms plus a few trace elements.

Likewise, a computer can be made entirely of a simple component that can be compared: if both inputs are true, the output is false, otherwise the output is true. All that's left is the "just organisation" elements. A powerful approach is to set up components so that they manifest a symbolic machine (software), which can then be further organized into higher-level software "machines".

This brings us to the big arena of "Systems" : organizations of dynamic interconnected parts that are found everywhere in nature and in the invention of natural creatures, of varying scales. "systems perspectives" are a new set of ideas and methods not found in most standard children's curriculums, although "the systems we live in, and the systems we are) are intertwined , including the universe, our planet, our society, our technology, our bodies, and our brains/minds: all unified in a systems perspective.

Closely related to our theme here is that system organization simply does not fit our normal language use , especially our deep need to explain in stories, which have a beginning, middle, and end. Systems are usually displayed in the form of large diagrams that organize the visual and textual language in this way, while associating views and communications of the parts showing their relationships. These views often include "loops", so most The system has no starting and ending point or only one path to take through.

Systems themselves are dynamic , even though they appear to be stationary, so to understand them it is necessary to be able to move forward and backward in time. The circularity and complexity of systems —like science—often frustrate our normal, common-sense ways of thinking, and we need all sorts of help to begin to understand what might be going on.

Two key examples right now are pandemics and our planet's climate. Our normal commonsense reasoning, mostly inherited from our genes, is visible, small, few, fast, fast, near, social, stable, legendary, and set countermeasures. Not so with epidemics and climate. It is difficult to notice and take seriously the onset of a pandemic or climate crisis early enough to take steps to deal with it. Nothing seems to happen, and normal commonsense thinking doesn't even notice, or denies it when it does. McLuhan: "Unless I believe it, I can't see it".

Scientists also need and use tools to help them think because they have the same genetic makeup as all humans are born with. One of the uses of mathematics is to calculate unimaginable progressions. For example, the exponential growth of compound interest is beyond our imagination, but we can easily calculate the growth. Epidemics have similar properties and can also be counted. Still, governments and most individuals are always surprised and ill-prepared for what pandemics and indebtedness mean.

Climate is a much more complex set of interconnected systems that are difficult to understand—even to identify all of them, and simple calculations with simple math don’t work. But one of the most important properties of computers is that their media are dynamic descriptions of any number of relationships that can evolve over time: they provide the means to represent, process, and understand various The lingua franca (lingua franca) of the system.

This is a new kind of literacy , and although it is a kind of mathematics, it is so different from classical mathematics that it constitutes a whole new mathematics and a new science.

However, it still "piggybacks" the various languages that humans have been using for tens of thousands of years, but with new organizations that allow for further expression and thinking.

Back to climate: In the late 50s, Charles Keeling did the first high-quality scientific research to accurately measure CO₂, the main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere (without it, the Earth's temperature would be reduced to about 33°C). Five years of measurements produced data precise enough to create the first models to describe the situation at the time. That was enough to prompt the National Science Foundation to warn in 1963 that Earth was likely to be in trouble in less than 100 years, and it was time to start mitigating the problem.

A recent study shows that even the puny supercomputer of the 1960s (actually tens of millions of times slower than an iPhone 6), all climate simulations made at the time proved to be within 1 percent accuracy within a few. So science and computing have done their job, providing (as of 2020) some 55+ years of accurate predictions about the future that we are just starting to deal with today. Since then, many things could be done, but not done.

For the purposes of this book, this is one of the most important "futures of representations"—the ability to represent, simulate, and understand complex dynamic systems , especially those that are literally about life and death. system. This was invented and used by very few people in the world 60 years ago. To paraphrase William Gibson , "The future was already there, but just not distributed evenly ."

Not now. Plato, for example, must have understood the irony here: I have described a very important future on the computer - the computer is the tool of this future - and although everyone has one now, they will not be able to experience the example I describe , because they'll end up reading it in a book (or e-book) printed on paper.

Now, we can better simulate extremely realistic futures—both good and terrifying—years in advance. But one of the oldest stories in our culture—the Cassandra story—played out before our eyes once again.

Not all uses of languages and scripts need to be elevated. But any culture that abandons the more difficult, and embraces only simple, mostly spoken language use, is not just throwing away the past, but burying the worst possible future for itself.