Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

Beside objects one true revolutionary idea in Smalltalk is the uniformity of meta facilities - an object knowing about itself and being able to tell you.

I see so many dev resources burnt just because people build boring UIs or persistence bindings by wiring MANUALLY in traditional languages. All this is a no-brainer when enough meta infos (objects and relations) are available and a program is reflected as data as in Smalltalk (not dead text). You can not only transform data but also your code. Pharo now makes some more additonal steps to enhance reflection (metalinks, slots, etc).

What do you see as next steps in using metadata/-infos for (meta)programming ...

I think one of the biggest blindnesses of our field is scaling (and I'm not sure quite why). This leads to an enormous amount of effort at roughly the same scales of some good ideas decades ago. (I think my background in molecular biology -- which continues to a very small extent -- helped this a lot. At some point one has to grapple with what is more or less going on and why it more or less works so amazingly well.)

What would a programming language be like if we actually took the many dimensions of scaling seriously ... ?

Would you consider the actor programming paradigm to be a good scalable model? It largely matches what I observe in both nature and where we seem to be headed with software engineering (containers in the cloud, near-trivial redundancy, stability, and scalability when properly designed). When I consider society I see a complex network of distributed actors, and when I consider my mind/brain I see the same. At this point in my philosophical development I am definitely resonating with the actor model, but I'm sure you are more familiar with this paradigm than I am - if not actors, where would you recommend searching?

I have every reason to like Actors! But think about scaling for a while, ...

Great advice, I am currently lacking there. Thank you!

Edit: A follow up if you don't mind - have you investigated multi-agent autonomous systems or agent based modeling?