Elon University

Archives: Expert Predictions

Kay + Hillis: Wired Brings Together Two Legendary Minds: Alan Kay and Danny Hillis

I was thinking about ecological computing … Pretty soon we’re going to have to grow software, and we should start learning how to do that. We should have software that won’t break when something is wrong with it. As a friend of mine once said, if you try to make a Boeing 747 six inches longer, you have a problem; but a baby gets six inches longer 10 or more times during its life, and you never have to take it down for maintenance.

Kay + Hillis: Wired Brings Together Two Legendary Minds: Alan Kay and Danny Hillis

I want to build a place that’s accessible from the network, and let the hackers homestead there. Let’s see what they create. I want to do this as a real-estate deal and get somebody to fund it on the grounds that they’ll just own a lot of the real estate there. And these hackers will make it valuable in exchange for getting some plots of land. I’m a believer that this ought to be done commercially. For a while you support the economy by hiring them to do useful things in the universe, like, touring people around, building the library, or some of the basic community facilities for accessing data and seeing what’s going on. But then you allow them to set up their own businesses of creating tools or creating personas, and so on.

Kay + Hillis: Wired Brings Together Two Legendary Minds: Alan Kay and Danny Hillis

Everybody has gotten so enamored with the decentralization of computers, and the idea that they can put a computer on their desks, that they’re missing the countertrend, which is that all these computers are starting to talk to each other, and that the computing resource that they have available to them is a utility in a sense. So in fact there’s a sort of countertrend to the decentralization of computers, which is this amazing centralization of the computing resource. As communication gets good enough, where something gets done becomes less and less relevant.

Fire in the Valley

The fact that these people are kidding themselves into thinking they know how to do this is terrifying to me. It’s not like you’re walking into a proven market, where you know there are 50 million people who are just waking up every morning saying, “I’ve got to have interactive TV today.” They don’t know what it is. They don’t know to want it.

Direct Democracy: Are You Ready for the Democracy Channel?

Most advocates of ETMs [Electronic Town Meetings] … see the technology as a way to supplement, not supplant, the existing system. Yet, could it be possible that we’ve simply outgrown our current model of government? In the early days of the republic, each House member represented about 30,000 people. Today, each member represents an unwieldy 575,000 constituents. To better represent the views of all those people, the U.S. Constitution could be amended to place national issues such as gun control on federal election ballots – to be voted on either electronically or in the conventional way.