‘Kill Think’ with Drop Downs, Search Strings & Radio Buttons

I never really believed that interactions with computing devices could actually dumb us down. In fact even now, I am quite surprised by what I have realized recently and I am still trying to some to terms with it. I am surprised because I always looked at computers and computing devices as great assets for example:

* Computers as a gateway to potential new vistas through the Internet
* As tools to reach out to still smarter beings
* As great store houses of information that usually do not forget things
* Almost as an auxiliary to self, for if I want to share something in real time – I can turn on my computer and take them through it. This is almost like going to a hyperlink in my mind, which traces its path into my computer’s hard drive

However, if we were to step back and look at the entire spectrum of the kinds of human computer interface, we might be able to identify some early warning signs of how we might be doing disservice to our thinking ability by relying on ‘computer assisted way of working’.
To me these signs indicate that one needs to be careful so as not to take the Human Computer Interface protocols as second nature. However the reality is that we easily develop in the subconscious, behaviours that are tuned to work in computer situations. We then even extend this behaviour into ‘non computer situations’.
To me an example of this would be not typing the whole word for the computer would anyway prompt, or not caring too much about the spelling or limiting thinking within the number options given in a multiple choice situation. The corresponding non computer situation might be writing on a piece of paper and being totally unreadable or incomprehensible or becoming uncomfortable in open ended real life situations – where we might not have the luxury of being able to point out a right or wrong answer.
I usually refer to these situations as early examples of demise of thinking & imagination, at the hands of the drop down menu, the radio button and most critically the search bar.


As Jaron Zepel Lanier is quoted in Radical Evolution “In the computer-human loop, human intelligence is the more flexible of the two. Whenever we change a piece of technology, the chances are that at the end we might be changing humans more than the technology itself.” For example when we interact with an airline reservation bot, we get frustrated for the first few times for the bot cannot go beyond a predetermined set of responses but then after some time, we become ‘used to it’. In other words, we have aligned our way of thinking to suit the bot (and not the other way round).

Google’s benign questions viz. “did you mean bureau of Indian standards” (instead of ‘buro of Indian stndrds’, which is what people generally type) might offer a glimpse of our future spelling capabilities, triggered by the fact that that Lanier pointed out viz. “in the computer-human loop, (currently) humans we are more flexible and we adjust ourselves to the ‘level’ of computing.”
While the computer can remember a lot and process a lot (GBs and MHz’s) it still a long way from being called a reasoning device. The irony is that while we are trying to make the computers smarter, we actually might be dumbing ourselves down. We are ending syncing down instead of syncing up with machines!



May be I am being too critical of some of these everyday interface technologies, however to me it seems that because many of these customer service technologies, do not have good AI (Artificial Intelligence,) we end up going down to their level and the real fear is that the more we do that the more we would be able to do only that.


One can argue that these interface elements (viz. drop down, radio buttons etc) are used while engaging in activities that are low brow and that we do not want to invest our cerebral energies in these viz. searching for something, or filling a form or asking a question, booking a airline ticket or checking the account balance status over the phone etc. May be it is true – these really might be low brow jobs after all. However I am curious to know that while we are investing time and cerebral energies more efficiently by not allowing ourselves to think too much about these ‘low brow’ jobs, how exactly are we investing it elsewhere and how sure do we think we are about becoming smarter in this process?