Conversation — is there an app for that?

Smartphone usage is changing our face-to-face conversations–[even when the phones are hidden](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/opinion/sunday/stop-googling-lets-talk.html):

> [Her impatience] is characteristic of what the psychologists Howard Gardner and Katie Davis called the “app generation,” which grew up with phones in hand and apps at the ready. It tends toward impatience, expecting the world to respond like an app, quickly and efficiently. The app way of thinking starts with the idea that actions in the world will work like algorithms: Certain actions will lead to predictable results.

I’ve always thought that it was the act of _programming_ computers that made tech geeks (like myself) talk like robots. Turns out the cause may simply be _using_ them.

Theses of Technology

Some surprisingly good [theses of technology](http://iasc-culture.org/THR/channels/Infernal_Machine/2015/03/79-theses-on-technology-for-disputation/) by [Alan Jacobs](http://ayjay.org/). He’s really not a fan of [Kevin Kelly](http://kk.org/). A few of my favorites:

* To “pay” attention is not a metaphor: Attending to something is an economic exercise, an exchange with uncertain returns.
* Mindfulness reduces mental health to a single, simple technique that delivers its user from the obligation to ask any awkward questions about what his or her mind is and is not attending to.
* The only mindfulness worth cultivating will be teleological through and through.
* Digital textuality offers us the chance to restore commentary to its pre-modern place as the central scholarly genre.
* [Kevin] Kelly tells us “What Technology Wants,” but it doesn’t: We want, with technology as our instrument.
* The contemporary version of the pathetic fallacy is to attribute agency not to nature but to algorithms—as though humans don’t write algorithms. But they do.
* What does it say about our understanding of human intelligence that we think it is something that can be assessed by a one-off “test” [the Turing Test]—and one that is no test at all, but an impression of the moment?
* The chief purpose of technology under capitalism is to make commonplace actions one had long done painlessly seem intolerable.
* Embrace the now intolerable.
* Everyone should sometimes write by hand, to recall what it’s like to have second thoughts before the first ones are completely recorded.
* To shift from typing to (hand)writing to speaking is to be instructed in the relations among minds, bodies, and technologies.
* The always-connected forget the pleasures of disconnection, then become impervious to them.
*

Logic and the brain

Buzzfeed asked 12 scientists “[What is the one fact humanity needs to know](http://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/how-come-no-one-mentioned-evolution-by-natural-selection)” if civilization was destroyed. Lots of good answers, but my favorite was from [psychologist Dean Burnett](http://medicine.cf.ac.uk/person/dr-dean-burnett/):

> People aren’t logical or rational by default, and it’s vitally important to remember this when trying to impart knowledge and guidance. Having some useful knowledge like atomic theory or the nature of gravity isn’t going to be much use if enough people don’t want to believe it.

I had an MRI done recently (purely for entertainment, through [Klarismo](https://klarismo.com/)), and it’s humbling to see that for all its capabilities and seemingly logical behavior, the brain is mostly wrinkled fat and water with electricity pumping through it. It’s a miracle that we can make sense of anything at all.

Burnett’s quote is a good reminder that if we want to make real advancements in society, improved technology ([which has its own agenda](http://bob.ryskamp.org/brain/?p=4557)) is not enough–we’ll need to deal with our [monkey minds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_monkey) first.

Fossil fuels, our starter engine

> The fossil fuel deposits of our Spaceship Earth correspond to our automobile’s storage battery which must be conserved to turn over our main engine’s self-starter. Thereafter, our “main engine,” the life regenerating processes, must operate exclusively on our vast daily energy income from the powers of wind, tide, water, and the direct Sun radiation energy. – [Buckminster Fuller](http://mxplx.com/meme/2900/)

I reference this idea often but had forgotten the source. [Buckminster Fuller](http://www.bfi.org/about-fuller), of course.

Five years ago this would be in a science fiction movie

The FAA has made a PSA about drones at the Super Bowl.

Social change and technology change

> When we think about long-term change with the benefit of hindsight, the things we think are unfathomable are usually the technology – planes, cars, computers. But it is at least as likely that the things that time travellers would most struggle with are the shifts in social values, which are almost invisible to us because we swim in them constantly and adapt ourselves to them as they change.

– [Andrew Curry, The 1910 time traveller](http://thenextwavefutures.wordpress.com/2010/09/04/the-1910-time-traveller/)

The pen is mightier than the keyboard

> What I was noticing was that I’ve become such a fast typist that I could slam out great big blocks of text quite rapidly — anything that came into my head, it would just dribble out of my fingers onto the screen. That includes bad stuff as well as good stuff. Once it’s out there on the screen, of course, you can edit it and you can fix the bad stuff, but it’s far better not to ever write down the bad stuff at all.

> With the fountain pen, which is a slower output device, the material stays in the buffer of your head for a longer period. So during that amount of time, you can fix it, you can make it better, you can even decide not to write it down at all — you can think better of writing it.

– [Neal Stephenson](http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/neal-stephenson-anathem/)

Science fiction + science fact

Michael Abrash, head of Valve Software’s augmented reality efforts, [talks about why he’s joining Oculus](http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/introducing-michael-abrash-oculus-chief-scientist). It’s interesting how he focuses on the imagined experience from the books as much as the technology, which meanwhile proceeds along its own path. Blending the two is a powerful combination.

> Sometime in 1993 or 1994, I read Snow Crash, and for the first time thought something like the Metaverse might be possible in my lifetime. Around the same time, I saw the first leaked alpha version of Doom…

> Fast-forward fourteen years…

> Then two things happen at about the same time. On one path, Palmer develops his first VR prototype, John and Palmer Luckey connect, Oculus forms and its Kickstarter is wildly successful, DK1 ships, and John becomes Oculus CTO. Meanwhile, I read Ready Player One, strongly recommend it to several members of the AR group, and we come to the conclusion that VR is potentially more interesting than we thought, and far more tractable than AR.

The Winston Primer

I’ve been rereading [The Diamond Age](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age) and understanding a lot more about the “Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” which plays a major role. So it was awesome to see that [some Pixar veterans have started to create something very similar for the iPad](http://www.fastcompany.com/3015973/innovation-agents/pixar-vets-unveil-a-genre-busting-ipad-talk-show-that-talks-back)…right down to the [ractors](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age#Failure_of_artificial_intelligence):

> Speech engineers interpret the data daily, and alert writers to fresh answers. In one Fireside Chat Winston asks, “What is your favorite ball?” The staff came up with all the ball types they could think of, but in testing the app several kids replied “gumball.” Since that was not in the lineup, the writers concocted a quip to respond to “gumball” and added it to the database…

> So far, more than 3,000 lines have been recorded. The ToyTalk team expects to add fresh material to the app every week. And there’s also a full-time voice actor on staff to record the dialogue.

Why isn’t software beautiful?

It feels to me that software design, despite its intense cultural focus, huge business opportunity, and worldwide effort, isn’t as beautiful, elegant, or compelling as other forms of art and design. Held up against films, music, fashion, physical products and even video games, almost all software feels flat, utilitarian, and uninspired. Why is that? I have a few hypotheses:

* Not enough people are designing software – This is changing fast, but software design has been a very small and elite field for most of its history. When a larger and more diverse set of a population gets involved in something, the results quickly get better. Think about how most top runners are Kenyan; many top baseball players Puerto Rican–in each case, that is the dominant sport and goal for the youth of the country. We need more people to design software.
* We don’t yet have the right tools – We admire the very first cave painters, movie makers, and book publishers because the act of creating anything was hard for them. But we’d hardly call that artwork “beautiful” by today’s standards. The tools to create paintings, films, and prints today are so advanced that almost anyone can learn and practice those art forms. Software, however, is still impossible to create without significant technical training.
* Beauty isn’t useful – My friend Chris often invokes “the Pepsi Challenge”–namely, the difference between liking something for a minute and living with it for weeks. The same design that looks great up on a foamcore board, or in a science fiction movie, starts to grate on you when its ornamentations get in your way for the hundredth time. That’s the reason we had, and abandoned, long cool Flash intros on websites.
* Utility isn’t sexy – Similarly, a design that quickly and efficiently takes care of things and gets out of your way doesn’t even give you a chance to admire it. You might feel satisfaction with the results, but that’s a long way from awe and lust at its form.
* We don’t have the right support and organizational structures – Painters and writers generally work alone; filmmakers and video games have a producer/director split. But most software is designed by a triad of project managers, software engineers, and interface designers.
* We don’t really try – This is a tough one to swallow, but I think it’s fair to say that right now most software designers don’t really pursue beauty as a central goal. Many designers care deeply about elegance, simplicity, and craft, but I’ve rarely met one who speaks about the emotional journey of the viewer, or who thinks about the storyline of their interactions.

Overall, it does seem that software design is quickly improving. Perhaps it will just take more time to get to the place that these other mediums have reached.