[Cuis-dev] Inventing the next Licklider

[Casey Ransberger]

This is still somewhat off-topic but I don’t care about that anymore. 

There are a preponderance of people here who can understand Alan’s paper and we have very limited time to make use of his insights. 

Also, look, I understand that hero-worship doesn’t jive with what we think or what we do. I understand why my call for ideas about how to “create the next Licklider” has been rejected on general principle. This crap with the next “person X” is bloody tiresome. 

We have maybe ten years to sort ourselves out. Alan’s paper is worth reading, but really: what are *we* going to do, as a global community, to address these concerns?

If we are to be the inheritors of the Smalltalk legacy, if that’s how we want to style ourselves as a community: how many of us have read the PDF file Alan Kay has been circulating?

Can we pull our heads out of our asses and save our species? Because the clock is ticking. 

I came to Cuis because Juan understood the goals behind Smalltalk. We had a good time cutting Squeak 3 down to size. After I’d shipped Squeak 4. 

We’re out of time. The solution isn’t computer science. Maybe computer scientists can contribute to the ultimate solution that ensures our grandchildren will still have a planet. 

Please, do whatever you can. 

—Casey

> On Jan 1, 2022, at 8:51 PM, Casey Ransberger <bahweep at icloud.com> wrote:
> 
> We’re in an emergency. 
> 
> I’m not talking about the Pandemic. 
> 
> There was an amazing person once who probably coulda licked the problem. (Sorry.) Just knocked it out. He assembled a huge team of incredibly curious do-ers, people who said #doIt: a lot. 
> 
> One of the things we got out of it was the internet, which I used to find the other thing we got out of it, Smalltalk. 
> 
> I think maybe we spend too much effort trying to groom “the next Alan Kay” (and mostly without funding.) My view at last is that we were looking for the wrong person. Tap a community with polymaths in it and you’ll find a replacement for Alan Kay; what we need now is someone who can find the research funding for “people, not projects” and this person has been elusive. 
> 
> We probably have a decade (if we’re lucky) to identify and support a suitable replacement for JCR Licklider before our species is on an inevitable road to extinction. With each passing day, that person has less time to work with. 
> 
> So I posit this question: how do we forster, shepherd, and above all *teach* a human to think like Lick did? How do we fund it?
> 
> I’m starting to get the idea in my head that we’re dead without a well-funded thought leader and I’m disinclined that it should be anyone with smaller ideas that Licklider’s. 
> 
> Sorry if this seems off topic, but I promise you that if you read enough, it isn’t. We’re arguably a splinter group created when ARPA became DARPA and funding for individual scientists dried up. 
> 
> We still have a whole planet to rescue. How should we go about that?
> 
> —Casey