Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

When you were envisioning today's computers in the 70s you seemed to have been focused mostly on the educational benefits but it turns out that these devices are even better for entertainment to the point were they are dangerously addictive and steal time away from education. Do you have any thoughts on interfaces that guide the brain away from its worst impulses and towards more productive uses?

We were mostly thinking of "human advancement" or as Engelbart's group termed it "Human Augmentation" -- this includes education along with lots of other things. I remember noting that if Moore's Law were to go a decade beyond 1995 (Moore's original extrapolation) that things like television and other "legal drugs" would be possible. We already had a very good sense of this before TV things were possible from noting how attractive early video games -- like SpaceWar -- were. This is a part of an industrial civilization being able to produce surpluses (the "industrial" part) with the "civilization" part being how well children can be helped to learn not to give into the cravings of genetics in a world of over-plenty. This is a huge problem in a culture like the US in which making money is rather separated from worrying about how the money is made.

Then what do you think about the concept of "gamification?" Do you think high densities of reward and variable schedules of reward can be exploited to productively focus human attention and intelligence on problems? Music itself could be thought of as an analogy here. Since music is sound structured in a way that makes it palatable (i.e. it has a high density of reward) much human attention has been focused on the physics of sound and the biomechanics of people using objects to produce sound. Games (especially ones like Minecraft) seem to suggest that there are frameworks where energy and attention can be focused on abstracted rule systems in much the same way.

The way you describe music here sounds a lot like how Steve Pinker has described music: as a mental equivalent of cheesecake; something that just happens to trigger all the right reward systems (the ones based on our love of patterns and structure, and exploiting the same biological systems we use for language) but isn't necessarily nutritious itself.

However, all evidence points to him being wrong about this, making the mistake of starting with language as the centrepiece and explaining everything around it. Human music likely predates human speech by hundreds of thousands of years, and is strongly tied to social bonding, emotions and motor systems in ways that have nothing to do with the symbolic aspects of language.