Computers are Brain Amplifiers

> A computer allows you to amplify the power of your brain considerably by trading understanding for extreme speed of execution. This allows a person that is not well versed in math for instance to arrive at the correct answers for math problems either by trying a bunch of solutions in a row (called ‘brute forcing’) or by using the computer to figure out a rough approximation to the answer which then leads to the crucial insight required to get an exact answer.

Yes exactly. Which is why I consistently disagree with people who don't think that programming is a new kind of literacy...either they have an incredible faith that computers will continue to be better beholden to their computationally-ignorant users, or they just don't understand that programming (or "coding") does not mean, "Teach everyone how to deploy a Rails bootstrap app on Heroku".

Is traditional literacy -- reading and writing -- any more than an amplifier? It's possible to be able to communicate without reading or writing, but the ability to transcribe your thoughts in a durable format (even in this age of unlimited digital video) and to interpret the transcribings of others...that ability greatly amplifies your ability to communicate and interact with society.

Computers obviously are another such amplifier...so why shouldn't programming be seen as a worthwhile kind of literacy?

"I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer.

And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good.

But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.

And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”

~ Steve Jobs

Reminds me of a time I was tasked to do operate lights on an amdram performance. I had a 6-channel programmable mixer to control a bunch of lights, and created something like 12-20 different light scenes for various parts of the performance. I wrote myself a table of light values in all scenes.

I quickly realized though, that manually changing power of lights will take a few seconds, and it's easy to make an error. The mixer itself was programmable however, which meant that I could assign a particular preset of all lights to a single channel, which would then serve to interpolate this preset from no power to full power. So I coded myself a Lisp program that took all my 12-20 scenes and reduced them to 6 channels at different power settings. So instead of changing 6 different lights between scenes, all I had to do to kill one channel and move another to a power level my program computed. For each scene now I just had a note like "Channel 2 - 50%", or "Channel 5 - 66%", etc.

It was somewhat brutish and inelegant approach, but solved my particular problem.

I think I've heard this before...

"I believe the computer is the most significant tool invented, as it is unique in mechanizing part of the process of learning and understanding, or at least giving us that potential. All other tools have been extensions of muscles and limbs, whereas the computer is an extension of the brain, and it is that which we make of it." -- Erik Naggum, 1996-02-06 (http://naggum.no/erik/knowledge.html)

Famously, Apple coined the term "Bicycle for the Mind".

   I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is 
   that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of 
   locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least 
   energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive 
   showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a 
   showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then 
   somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of 
   locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a 
   bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.

   - Steve Jobs

That's one of the reasons I've always loved Hypercard. [1] It made ordinary computer users programmers -- heck, it was even used to create the hit game Myst. In the video linked below, check out the used car salesman who creates a tool for matching cars with his customers. In the nineteen eighties no less!

As computers have become more consumer oriented, the ordinary user doesn't _need_ to know how to program. There are plenty of apps for individual purposes. But I often wonder how different things would be if our operating system were more like Hypercard. Need a calculator app? Build one. Okay, perhaps a waste of time you'd say. But let's say the ordinary user could build a calculator app -- those skills could be extended to piece together ever more sophisticated tools.

A lot of people argue that ordinary folks don't want to program. Or don't have the time... Recently I saw a tweet that turned the Bicycle for the Mind phrase into a dystopian one: A Treadmill for the Mind. Perhaps we have more time than we think, but we burn it on computers doing pointless things.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3624149

"The lever, the transistor, the vacuum tube and the computer all have something in common. They’re amplifiers, they allow a relatively small change or capability in a domain to have a much larger effect."

The article's premise unfortunately relies on a conflating of two or more distinct meanings for "amplify". A vacuum tube or transistor increases a pre-existing voltage or current level, but the thing being increased stays the same -- it's a change of scale. A computer amplifies a multidimensional capability like the ability to model reality using mathematics -- it's a change of scope.

A computer isn't just a faster or stronger version of biological processing, although that happens to be true. Consistency, precision and scope come into the equation also. But "amplification" really doesn't describe what the computer does, any more than it describes what we do.

Might as well go to the source of Intelligence Amplification:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_amplification

For a simple machine, I like the inclined plane, because it occurs naturally at the human scale [humans don't just walk up cliffs -- or walk down them for that matter] and thus the tradeoffs are also obvious at a human scale.

Computers are great, but there are tradeoffs related to the supporting infrastructure [e.g. a military industrial complex]; the costs in learning to use them; and their potential to distract us from more important matters. TANSAAFL.

For several years I have described mine as extensions of my mind.

They're where I do the math that would be too slow to calculate with my brain. They're where I edit and store the words that I want to share with others. They're where I visualize things that are beyond the capability of my imagination.

I think I like "Mind Amplifier". I may stick with that.

Shameless plug for a (much longer and broader) thing I wrote on sort of the same subject:

http://convexfunction.com/blog/2015/01/11/cognitive-behavior...

I got stuck on what the 7 is supposed to be??