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.
Predictor: Kay, Alan
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly and Steven Levy quote Alan Kay, a man who pioneered the concept of a graphical user interface, led research at Xerox PARC, and at this point in time was a fellow at Apple Computer. Kay says: ”I was thinking about ecological computing. When I was working with computers in the late ’60s, all of the computer power on Earth could fit into a bacterium. The bacterium is only 1/500th of a mammalian cell, and we have 10 trillion of those cells in our bodies. Nothing that we have fashioned directly is even close to that in power. 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.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Kay + Hillis: Wired Brings Together Two Legendary Minds: Alan Kay and Danny Hillis
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.01/kay.hillis_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney