PERSON
Alan Kay
The Turing Award computer scientist who designed the Dynabook in 1972—a portable computer for children that remains unbuilt in purpose fifty years later—and whose lifetime argument that computing should develop understanding rather than substitute for it is the most urgent diagnostic instrument the AI age possesses.
Alan Kay is the conscience the computing industry cannot ignore and consistently fails to hear. For more than fifty years he has made the same argument: the computer is not a tool but a medium—the first meta-medium in history, capable of simulating any other medium—and the industry has built it as an expensive typewriter, a sophisticated shopping mall, and now the most powerful instrument of passive consumption ever designed. His 1972 vision of the
Dynabook—a portable personal computer for children that would develop their thinking rather than perform tasks for them—remains unrealized not because the hardware does not exist but because the purpose it embodied has never been embraced: computing as a medium that transforms the user's capacity to think, not merely augments the user's capacity to produce. At the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, Kay and his colleagues built the Alto computer (the first with