Comment by Causification | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Causification | Hacker News Reader

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Touchscreens bring people closer to technology, but they also separate people from understanding technology. It's great that we have a whole generation of people with iphones, but we also have a whole generation of people who think that if it isn't in the app store, it can't be done, who crack the glass on their iphone and throw the whole thing into the garbage.

A touchscreen may give you a more organic connection to technology, but someone with a mouse is an order of magnitude faster at doing almost anything, and someone with a CLI is an order of magnitude faster still at complex tasks. Anyone who used PDAs for years before their first smartphone can tell you about the jarring sense of debilitation that comes when you go from using a stylus to using a finger.

As for voice recognition, its incompetence makes it too dangerous for me to use, and probably will for a long time. My phone calling/texting the wrong person at the wrong time is more than capable of ruining someone's life. I'm sure the same goes for many other people. It's like telling a five year old to retrieve a handgun. Behaving properly 98% of the time is not good enough by a long shot.

And programming computers is yet harder yet gives the user even more power. I think the dichotomy between power and usability is a false one. Technology should help people with their tasks. If this can be accomplished with a touch or speech UI I see nothing wrong with that.

Ultimately, it is completing the task that matters. If I think about it, most tasks that require CLI interfaces are not necessary on an smartphone to begin with. And that might be a good thing.

We, the technocratic elite, will shape that world. We will be its masters, magicians amongst men. We will derive more power out of technology than regular users. But the price will be that in order to gain this deep knowledge we have to devote an awful lot of time to learn the arcane spells and invocations that are all but useless for most real world tasks.

We choose to master technology. Others choose to master science or stock markets or carpenting. To them, technology is a tool. In very much the same way we will be ignorant of the intricacies of their world.

The lower the understanding of the average user, the less variety there is in a given product category. Desktops came in all shapes and sizes, until everybody bought one and suddenly they were all beige boxes. If you've strolled through a brick n' mortar lately, you probably noticed that most laptops look virtually identical nowadays. Tablets came in all shapes and sizes, from the ten inch slate ala Stylistic, to the convertible laptop, to the hybrid in the form of the TC1000 series, to the five inch chunkers like the OQO and the Sony UX series. Now they're all minimalistic squares of shiny, fingerprint-ridden black plastic. PDAs had a whole ecosystem of designs, so many you could find one that exactly suited your needs. Folding, sliding, with keyboard and without, slates, anything. The smartphone revolution destroyed that. Now you can pick from a shiny square of black plastic with one button or a shiny square of black plastic with four almost-buttons.

Everyone being able to use it means designers try to please everyone by appealing to the lowest common denominator. Ease of use is why you have to remove a panel and the battery just to change SD cards, assuming you even have the option of a microsd card or removable battery.

You're still assuming that variety in a product category, or technology being all-powerful, is the end goal.

But to 95% of the world, or even 99%, this is not the case. Technology is there to make their lives easier and help them accomplish certain tasks.

I don't complain when my car cannot transform into a speedboat on cue - because that's not what I bought it to do. Likewise, I really don't care that my pen is unable to change brush shape or stroke size while I'm using it, where an artist might find that to be the bee's knees.

Technology is a means to an end - I for one am sick of the technocratic elite denying everyone the benefits of technology in the boneheaded pursuit of some kind of technological purity.

The end goal is for the user to have something that best suits their needs. For most people that might be an iphone. Many others are restricted to paying for things they don't want in order to have the things they absolutely require, while being denied the things they need. I hate to say it, but the things I could buy seven years ago suited my needs then much better than the things I can buy now suit my current needs. Computing began by requiring the user to know exactly how the computer worked. Later it merely encouraged and rewarded the user for knowing, like the person who can save a jpeg without pasting it into a Word file. Now it doesn't encourage the user at all and is making an effort at removing any difference between the person who knows and the person who doesn't. A computer can be easy to use without stifling the user; that's one reason Windows is so successful.

"I for one am sick of the technocratic elite denying everyone the benefits of technology in the boneheaded pursuit of some kind of technological purity."

In what way? No one is trying to stop a company from selling whatever they want. We're just saying we don't like the trend computing is taking toward a world where as far as everybody is concerned, the devices they entrust their lives and fortunes to might as well work by magic.

Lets compare this to airplanes. Air travel used to be limited to those who were able and crazy enough to actually fly planes themselves. Now everyone can use planes for transportation in a very mediated and controlled environment. A pilot flying in an airliner is very much like a programmer using an iPhone: Other engineers did all the hard work and the net result is something somewhat boring and limiting (a commercial airliner will only fly to certain destinations). On the other hand it is also very safe and comparatively cheap. Now flying an aircraft on your own is amazingly fun and an exhilarating experience. But it is also very expensive, quite complicated and somewhat dangerous.

Now the point is, I am both a programmer and a pilot myself. So I can definitely see the appeal of both. But, I happily use an iPhone and commercial air travel. Other people have put in a lot of work to made these very safe and reliable for common purposes and they really work well for crossing the atlantic while listening to a podcast.

The iPhone is not denying anyone access to laptops any more than an Airbus is denying you access to a Cessna. They are not dumbing the population down. They get the job done with as little disturbance as possible. For the crazy ones though, There are real computers and real airplanes!

You know how a car works? How a plane works? How a nuclear generator, water purification plant, and skyscraper construction works? I can't speak for anyone else, but I can only know so much. For the rest of mankind's knowledge, I rely on the rest of mankind. It's worked out pretty well so far.

I don't think it's a bad thing that people no longer need to understand technology to reap its benefits. If I would have to understand all things I interact with daily at the same level as I understand how computers work, I wouldn't have time to learn anything that actually interests me.

That's like saying people who don't understand how rsync works are losing out on the full experience of Dropbox. For the 99% of people who aren't programmers, first time ease of use is orders of magnitude more important than learning how to be a power user.

This seems to be a trend, at least in my perception: the more universal technology (the internet, mobile devices, ...) gets and the younger people become immersed in technology, the less they seem interested in how it works. The shortage in engineers and programmers seems grow while less and less people want to study these technical professions. At least where I live.

Why is this happening? Doesn't make sense to me.

I'm not so sure that's true. You also need to account for the fact that as technology get's more universal, more people use it. So the same amount of "core geeks" could be using technology, but the ratio of "core geeks" to ordinary users is decreasing.

Sure, but I think that's accounted for when you see the absolute number of engineering/cs graduates drop.

Also, I would expect that being immersed in technology would at least stimulate curiosity in how it works, but that doesn't seem to be the case at all.

Admiring nature and animals doesn't lead to my becoming a biologist, nor drinking beer lead to my founding a brewery. You can appreciate something without having to really understand what is going on beneath the surface. We are just predisposed to an interest in technology, is all.

We can't peek under the hood or tinker with things like decades past.

You can't peek the lid of a PC like you could with an Apple ][. There's no pre-installed BASIC to play with. No schematics. Even most cars are now "no user servicable parts inside" when you lift the hood.

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