Title: Make me think! The design of complexity
Context: By hiding complexity from people are we unintentionally making them dumberer?
Synopsis: Plato (putting words into the mouth of Socrates) famously warned that the invention of writing would ruin humanity by making us increasingly mindless since this emerging technology would no longer force us to rely on our memory in order to store and communicate information. As a species we have managed to take this “slippery slope” of stupidity to staggering extremes as we continue to invent even more complex technologies, all while driving relentlessly towards masking it behind ever sleeker veneers of simplicity. Does this hurt us? The fact that technological progress seems to be accelerating appears to belie Plato’s dark prediction, but all of us — save the engineers themselves — are ever more separated from the underlying mechanics of the very technologies we profess to understand simply because we can make them do what we want via an interface optimized for non-technical comprehensibility. Unfortunately, I do not know the solution to this challenging problem. But I wonder if I Googled it could I find the answer?
Best Bit: “Maybe being able to speak a foreign language is more fun than using a translation software.”
via prototypr.io
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