Ted Nelson at Open Tech
Somehow I've ended up helping out with this years Open Tech conference here in London. So far it's going very well - all of the talks I've been to have been interesting, but the highlight so far has been Ted Nelson talking about what he calls a "Countercomputer Universe"
His talk was a quick run-through of his work, and his role as a dissenter in the area of computer science. He claims that everybody is in the same paradigm, but we just don't know it.
For example, the idea of a hierarchy of files is used in every modern operating system - this is just one paradigm we could be using, and nobody is really questioning whether it makes the most sense.
The idea that all computer documents should be based on representing something that can appear on paper seems particularly embedded. Even a concept as simple as WYSIWYG has a built in assumption that what "What you get" will be a piece of paper.
So his question is how a computer can improve on paper rather than just imitating it. How can computers help us simplify the world and help us transcribe, describe and share our ideas, thoughts and concepts, even if they don't fit into a page or simple relational data model.
He then gave some demos of some concepts he's been working on around this, which he described as so simple that most people don't understand them. But, for me at least, just the idea that we could be doing so much more with computers was much more compelling than any particular demo.
Food for thought.