(2024-03-21) Martin Kay Build It Quickly

Jess Martin says Alan Kay's advice for inventing the future has a surprising nuance: build it quickly.

Here's the detailed roadmap:

• 1. have some "woowoo" intuition about a future technology
• 2. identify a "favorable exponential" that will make the intuition possible in the future (moore's law, llm improvements, etc)
• 3. take that intuition out 30 years and imagine a concrete version
• 4. find something concrete that would be ridiculous if we didn't have it by 30 yrs from now
• 5. bring the idea back to 10 yrs from now (what's the 10 yrs step towards that 30 yr version)
• 6. BUILD THAT NOW so that you can "live in the future"
• 7. invent the future while living in the future

Here's the surprising bit: "you better do this really quickly, or else you're going to get submerged into tool-building. You're going to be doing just computers and operating systems, you're not going to be doing what you originally tried to do. So you have have chops to do this. In fact, the Alto was done in a period of about 3.5 months by an absolute genius, Chuck Thacker. And once you've got this, you could start inventing the software of the future."

cf Douglas Engelbart BootStrapping, also BandWagon