I was among 15-20 western Washington school district technology leaders milling around the large meeting room of Apple Computer’s Bellevue office . There were coffee and pastries on the back table under ad posters for the Mac LC—a lackluster computer aimed at the school market—and the Newton MessagePad—a SO-not-ready-for-prime time precursor of the iPad that languished for four years before being put out of its (and Apple’s) misery in 1997.
These were lean and dispiriting times for Apple. Since Steve Jobs had been banished in 1985 by the Apple Board of Directors, a series of three business world CEOs had brought corporate discipline to the company, but little vision. Still, those of us in the room were getting the best Apple had to give. Schools were still Apple’s best and most dependable customers. These “Briefings” were held quarterly and led by their K-12 Account Executives and their Education Tech Specialists.
I always looked forward to these sessions. Unlike our corporate hosts, we were all having the time of our working lives. Technology in education was still in its infancy and we were part of the vanguard. We were all working incredibly hard and this was a chance to pause and compare notes. We looked on Apple as our partner and I got the feeling these meetings could be even more uplifting for them than for us.
On this day in 1995, they had prepared something a little different. The lights dimmed and the bulky ceiling-mounted video projector lit up. The familiar Apple Garamond white font on black background faded in with the title Knowledge Navigator, then faded out to black. Lively Baroque music accompanied the camera’s pan of a rich mahogany desk with numerous vaguely futuristic items and stopped at a decidedly futuristic hinged tablet.
When the lights came back up less than 6 minutes later, there were several seconds of open-mouthed silence while we looked around at each other as if seeking confirmation we’d just seen what we just saw. At this point, I invite you to see what we saw. Go ahead. Enjoy. I’ll wait.
You may have noticed that the video’s copyright is 1988. It was made in 1987 for an Apple keynote presentation at Educom, nearly a decade before our viewing in 1995. Apple never released it to the general public, fearing that it could inspire unrealistic expectations, disappointment in current technology, and result in dampened sales. Instead, Knowledge Navigator was reserved for select small groups and held up as a kind of north star for technology professionals on the road toward artificial intelligence.
“When I trace the origins of the most exciting and outrageous ideas behind the personal computer revolution, most paths lead directly to Alan.”
—John Sculley, Apple CEO
Sculley is referring to Alan Kay, computer scientist and visionary, Apple Fellow, and part of the Apple Advanced Technology Group. While at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Park), Kay had conceived the Dynabook concept, a precursor of laptop and tablet computers and the e-book. He is also the architect of the modern overlapping windowing graphical user interface. Kay is widely credited with many of the concepts modeled in Knowledge Navigator.
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
—Alan Kay
This clever aphorism brings to mind another pithy saying: “Easier said than done.” Many of the greatest minds of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been hard at work inventing the future predicted in Knowledge Navigator. Yet while some things have clearly been accomplished, why does this video still seem like science fiction?
The professor in the video used a single cognitive system—one device, one agent, and one interface— that could manage knowledge, memory, scheduling, communication, and documents. The system (the Navigator) provided the intelligence to orchestrate all of those.
What has happened instead is that computing evolved application-first—e-mail, calendar, files, notes, search, messaging—and all of these functions have become product silos. This is partly due to the incremental nature of their development and partly to the competitive marketplace. We have smart devices, smart models, and smart apps. What we don’t have is coherence.
If and when we do solve the issue of coherence in that technical sense, it will be left to another future time to solve the problem of our political, social, and cultural coherence. Will AI be a tool used most successfully to bring us together or to tear us further apart?