Quotes from Alan Kay

Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough.

It's easier to invent the future than to predict it.

Artificial intelligence is what we don't know how to do yet

If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It's just secret to this pop culture.

Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.

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.'

I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.

I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

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.

The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.

In the old days, you would chastise people for reinventing the wheel. Now we beg, 'Oh, please, please reinvent the wheel.'

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.

School is basically about one point of view - the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view.

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.'

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.

Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.

Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.

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.

If you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.

Computer science inverts the normal. In normal science, you're given a world, and your job is to find out the rules. In computer science, you give the computer the rules, and it creates the world.

As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.

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.