Magazine - Is Google Making Us Stupid? Illustration by Guy Billout "Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain.
I can feel it, too. I think I know what’s going on. For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. I’m not the only one. Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. Also see: Where does it end? Magazine - Get Smarter. Pandemics. Global warming. Food shortages. No more fossil fuels. What are humans to do? The same thing the species has done before: evolve to meet the challenge.
But this time we don’t have to rely on natural evolution to make us smart enough to survive. Image: Anastasia Vasilakis Seventy-four thousand years ago, humanity nearly went extinct. The Mount Toba incident, although unprecedented in magnitude, was part of a broad pattern. How did we cope? Our present century may not be quite as perilous for the human race as an ice age in the aftermath of a super-volcano eruption, but the next few decades will pose enormous hurdles that go beyond the climate crisis.
But here’s an optimistic scenario for you: if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. Most people don’t realize that this process is already under way. In any case, there’s no going back. Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books. Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips. Serials Solutions 360LINK. Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction. In real life, you would never use a ladder that only let you go up.
Likewise, when creating abstractions, stepping down is as important as stepping up. Here, we take the abstraction from the previous section, and overlay a concrete representation on top of it. That is, we draw the trajectory that represents all time, but we also draw the car at some particular time. How do we select which particular time to show? This is a general and powerful technique. Try cranking up the turning rate to 8° or so, and then inspecting the car's behavior as it makes its first two turns. In this case, it's fairly easy to look at the trajectory and imagine the car moving along. Explorable Explanations. Bret Victor / March 10, 2011 What does it mean to be an active reader?
An active reader asks questions, considers alternatives, questions assumptions, and even questions the trustworthiness of the author. An active reader tries to generalize specific examples, and devise specific examples for generalities. An active reader doesn't passively sponge up information, but uses the author's argument as a springboard for critical thought and deep understanding. Do our reading environments encourage active reading? Explorable Explanations is my umbrella project for ideas that enable and encourage truly active reading. This essay presents examples of few initial ideas: A reactive document allows the reader to play with the author's assumptions and analyses, and see the consquences. An explorable example makes the abstract concrete, and allows the reader to develop an intuition for how a system works. 1.
Ten Brighter Ideas was my early prototype of a reactive document. Drag The way it is now: Analysis: Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface. This draft was released March 15, 2006. Please email comments to bret worrydream.com. You can also download the PDF. Information Software and the Graphical Interface by Bret Victor Abstract #The ubiquity of frustrating, unhelpful software interfaces has motivated decades of research into “Human-Computer Interaction.”
#Information software design can be seen as the design of context-sensitive information graphics. #Although this paper presents a number of concrete design and engineering ideas, the larger intent is to introduce a “unified theory” of information software design, and provide inspiration and direction for progressive designers who suspect that the world of software isn’t as flat as they’ve been told.
Scope and terminology #“Software,” as used here, refers to user-facing personal desktop software, whether on a native or web platform. Of software and sorcery #A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer’s idea of a spirit. #This is a software crisis, and it isn’t news. A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design. So, here's a Vision Of The Future that's popular right now. It's a lot of this sort of thing.
As it happens, designing Future Interfaces For The Future used to be my line of work. I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I'm a little skeptical of, given that I've actually tried them and the animators presumably haven't. But that's not my problem with the video. My problem is the opposite, really — this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary.
It's a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is terrible. This matters, because visions matter. This little rant isn't going to lay out any grand vision or anything. Before we think about how we should interact with our Tools Of The Future, let's consider what a tool is in the first place. That is, a tool converts what we can do into what we want to do. That's right!