Quotes from Alan Kay

Context is worth 80 IQ points.

There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Perspective is worth 80 I.Q. points.

It's hard to change information in books, but if we have everything online, then a somewhat untrustworthy group of people controlling the thing - which I think is what we have - gives us '1984.'

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.

To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.

Steve was perfectly aware of the Dynabook. That was one of the reasons he wanted me to come to Apple.

Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning.

The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet.

The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

Yaz?l?m konusunda iddial? insanlar kendi donan?mlar?n? yapmal?lar.

Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

The only way you can predict the future is to build it.