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Comment by nathan_compton | Hacker News Reader

I have to say I'm viscerally turned off by the language here. Perhaps even the idea, although there is obviously nothing objectionable about helping people reach their own goals, per se.

The problem here is that this whole angle on human life seems to have forgotten that efficiency, productivity, etc are all there to help us find more time to live in a world where those things don't matter. To have leisure. To think unstructured, non-goal directed thoughts. You don't need "programming" to be human.

The other thing here is that this stuff is just what humans in all societies and organizations have been working on forever. We have collective and personal goals and we have all sorts of systems to reach them. We do research on how effective they are already. We do A/B testing. Not sure what calling this collective activity "human programming" accomplishes.

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> The problem here is that this whole angle on human life seems to have forgotten that efficiency, productivity, etc are all there to help us find more time to live in a world where those things don't matter.

In reality, it’s there to help capital owners not care about these things anymore.

I’ve had this argument a lot with people. The goal of technology should be to adapt to humans and free up time. I feel like instead we keep asking people to further adapt to the needs of the system/machine. Keyboards are a great example. We should just write as people have done for thousands of years. Machines would then read what we write and understand it and then use that digitized info.

The problem is that it’s quite difficult, and machines decades ago simply couldn’t do that, so now we all type on keyboards all day (digital or physical). It’s reached the point where my children no longer have to learn cursive handwriting in school, because what is the point since everything goes into the computer via a keyboard? This strikes me as incredibly short sighted and backwards. I think it’s hurting us long term.

I have mixed feelings about the various arguments I see raised in the comments. It seems crazy to me to insist that efficiency and productivity gains via technology have, as their proper goal, a world in which none of that matters. Freeing up time in this way benefits us as individuals as well. Just staying alive and entertaining ourselves requires goal-directed behavior. I like not having to spend hours cooking food daily on an open fire.

Your argument about keyboards struck me in just this way - it's a mistake to assume that we should stick with the status quo and have machines adapt to us. After all, writing on paper (or with a digital stylus) is just another iteration of improving the technology. Nobody wants to pound symbols into stone with a chisel, for example.

I can type much faster than I can write cursively and it would be incredibly painful to revert to such writing. Natural language speech input can improve a lot of things vs typing, but I think writing code - for as long as it lasts - would be tricky to implement well using our voices.

> Keyboards are a great example. We should just write as people have done for thousands of years

Nope, nope, nope. Keyboards are a great thing that save a lot of effort and muscle strain. I did my fair share of handwriting, and I experienced the strain and tiredness firsthand (ha). This is to say nothing of the speed.

Ergonomic keyboards make things even easier.

So no, we don't always want faster horses, and the heritage of thousands of years often happens to be a yoke.

I don’t know, I’m pretty dubious that the problems of the future are grossly aided by faster input. I feel like I think better when I write than when I type, I find that really hard to ignore.

Writing by hand is just slower, so it gives more time to think.

Jotting and doodling, on the other hand, is important to improve thinking, from my experience. It's just mostly not about text.

I think and write much better on a modern computer than when writing by hand. And much better than I would on a typewriter.

Don't underestimate the ability to revise multiple times.

At the same time, I design better with a pencil than with Sketchup or LucidCharts or something, for similar "draft then modify" reasons. But that pencil could be "real" on a paper or it could be on a tablet.

you're shortsighted—handwriting also is a technological compromise.

natural language interaction is perhaps the main focus of modern machine learning research.

Physical keyboards are at a near optimum for symbolic input, for the same reason that many musical instruments are operated by keys, and the standard interface for entering notes is a (musical) keyboard. Due to how our fingers work and having ten of them, this is the most efficient and precise way for humans to enter symbolic information.

The goal of productivity, efficiency, etc, to provide survival is a much older one than the goal of it to provide leisure.

What to do when everyone can have survival and their material needs met is, I think, actually not something people agree on at all.

(And personally I don't think we are at that point yet, in terms of health and medical understanding.)

I think that’s based purely on your assumptions. Elephants chill and play and splash in the water when they reach the water on the west coast of Africa after migrating across the continent.

They’re not the only animals doing this kind of thing. Animals not in captivity generally seem to enjoy their lives. Deprive an animal of dopamine and it will surely start to wither away.

If you’re talking about humans, i find it very difficult to believe governments predate chilling with your friends with some palm wine or something.

Pleasure was an integral part of life until the accidental AI that is capitalism started manipulating human behavior for its own survival.

I would say leisure was "for free" for humans too but was often traded for productivity for survival, which was more precarious.

I found the book Metropolis to be a good history of that in the form of "what did cities look like over the years" - cities were dirty, crowded, less healthy, etc, than a lot of alternative lifestyles but they also supplied the material essentials in predictable and more reliable ways.

If physical survival was easy to do leisurely then there wouldn't have been the motivation for more complex forms of society (many of which had very-unfun roles for many participants long before capitalism).

"then there wouldn't have been the motivation for more complex forms of society" <-- not sure I agree with this one. I think the problem is less that physical survival is difficult to do leisurely and more that some people will keep trying to make it easier on themselves, even if that means making it harder on you. In a way that's the same things as what you're saying, but just a slightly different shade. It's not inherently difficult, but just inevitably becomes difficult.

Anyway, your mention of the motivation for more complex forms of society reminds me of this book which it seems like you might like. If you're vaguely interested but probably not going to read it I can summarize, but I don't want to spoil it if you think you'd read it: https://www.google.co.id/books/edition/The_Collapse_of_Compl...

Advertising is a type of human programming, and I want to stay away from it.

You may find Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash cyberpunk novel an interesting read. It could be considered a cautionary tale exploring the concept of human programming.

This is patently untrue. People in rich countries work the same or more than people in poor countries. Most people working full time could live perfectly well on a tenth their wage. Its a human condition that people want more.

People in rich countries work at much more fulfilling and enjoyable jobs. Most of my white collar friends, both in it and outside are passionate about what they do.

> Most people working full time could live perfectly well on a tenth their wage.

Now that is patently untrue. For most people 10% wouldn't come close to paying the rent alone.

I didn't say they would be able to live in the same space, they'd have to share with family, and/or cram into one room and/or live in a poorly built house, like people in poorer countries do, and we did 150 years ago.

I take you point, but even then it wouldn't be enough.

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