• by Danny Hillis (originally titled "The Power of Conviction", but I thought this was a better title), from "Points of View, a Tribute to Alan Kay"

Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate at MIT, I attended a talk by a visiting distinguished lecturer named Alan Kay. He spoke about his vision of a personal portable computer, the Dynabook, and he seemed to be actually trying to build it. Unlike other distinguished lecturers I had seen before, he wore sneakers and a t-shirt and he was not a university professor. I immediately knew that I wanted to do what he did, but it took me decades to understand what that was.

I now understand that Alan Kay is an architect, by which I mean someone who deliberately designs the world in which we will live. In Alan’s own words, he is someone who “invents the future.” To do this successfully, an architect must perceive the possibilities of reality and guide them into the service of practicable human goals. This is not easy. I have learned from Alan that it requires tapping into three sources of power, which I will call Knowledge, Imagination, and Conviction. The successful architect must possess the knowledge to know what is possible, the imagination to see what is desirable, and the conviction to build a connection between them. Any two of these traits can be useless, or even dangerous, without the third. The greatest architects possess all three.

I will not dwell on knowledge, except to point out that a successful architect requires a lot of it. Great architects have a voracious appetite for all kinds of knowledge and their libraries are filled with thousands of volumes ranging from Astronomy to Zoology, Anthropology to Zoroastrianism. They are interested in the details, especially about the more practical subjects like agriculture and engineering. They are also interested in understanding things from first principles. Since mathematics is the language of science, a serious architect will be mathematically fluent. (Studying science without mathematics would be like studying French poetry without learning French.) Yet, the architect’s appetite for knowledge is not limited to science. It includes art, music, literature, and most especially, history. Great architects continue to learn for their entire lives, which may account for their serious interest in education.

True knowledge guides conviction and inspires imagination. Ignorant people often claim that knowledge is a constraint on imagination, but the truth is just the opposite. Just as the rules of the chess pieces create the possibilities of the game, so too the rules of reality create the possibilities for imagination. The world is full of surprising examples of how these rules play out, providing an inexhaustible source of inspiration. A great architect is steeped in metaphors, matching every problem against a great reservoir of known patterns. (The computer is a musical instrument. The screen is a desktop.) These are the ingredients of imagination.

The final point that I would like to make about imagination is that, to an architect, imagination is mostly about the future. To invent the future, one must live in it, which means living (at least partly) in a world that does not yet exist. Just as a driver whizzing along a highway pays more attention to the front window than the rear, the architect steers by looking ahead. This can sometimes make them seem aloof or absent-minded, as if they are someplace else. In fact, they are. For them, the past is a lesson, the present is fleeting; but the future is real. It is infinite and malleable, brimming with possibility.

This brings us to Conviction. Conviction without knowledge or imagination is just pig-headedness, but informed, imaginative conviction is the force that creates our future. Faced with the infinite possibilities, an architect must make judgments about where to focus their energy and attention. They must decide what is important and commit to a point of view. Conviction gives purpose to knowledge and clarity to imagination. I think this is what Alan is talking about when he says that, “A point of view is worth 80 IQ points.” A point of view guides you to what is salient. Without it, knowledge and imagination would be directionless.

Few philosophers have the practical skills to be architects, but every great architectmust be a philosopher. Like Thomas Jefferson, they must hold certain truths to be self-evident, and they must have the determination to act upon those truths. Conviction is required because the world will resist change. The world has a lot of inertia and it is only moved by people who are willing to keep pushing in the same direction for a long period of time.

When I heard Alan’s talk at MIT a quarter century ago, he said a few things that I still remember. He said that the good is the enemy of the great. He said that systems can only scale if they are constructed according to carefully designed principles of modularity. He advised picking a metaphor that you like and running with it. He said to be sure that you are having fun. He was absolutely certain that computers would one day be so intuitive and natural, so personal, that they would feel like an extension of our minds. Even then, I understood that Alan had the knowledge and imagination to build his Dynabook. That part was obvious, but it took me many years to appreciate the depth and wisdom of his conviction. I now appreciate its importance. While I have met many people with knowledge and imagination, I have met very few who, like Alan, have the deep conviction required to change the world.