An Interview with Computing Pioneer Alan Kay | TIME.com

Excerpt from an extensive Alan Kay interview

"What do you think about the trend that these devices are becoming purely communication and social tools? What do you see as good or bad about that? Is current technology improving or harming the social skills of children and especially teens? How about adults?
Social thinking requires very exacting thresholds to be powerful. For example, we’ve had social thinking for 200,000 years and hardly anything happened that could be considered progress over most of that time. This is because what is most pervasive about social thinking is “how to get along and mutually cope.” Modern science was only invented 400 years ago, and it is a good example of what social thinking can do with a high threshold. Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories — much of the debugging has to be done by others. But the whole system has to rise above our genetic approaches to being social to much more principled methods in order to make social thinking work.
By contrast, it is not a huge exaggeration to point out that electronic media over the last 100+ years have actually removed some of day to day needs for reading and writing, and have allowed much of the civilized world to lapse back into oral societal forms (and this is not a good thing at all for systems that require most of the citizenry to think in modern forms).
For most people, what is going on is quite harmful."

An Interview with Computing Pioneer Alan Kay | TIME.com