zlacker

I'm reminded of a recent article about how technology and automation should be Iron Man, not Ultron. Assist and empower the user, don't take over for them completely. This allows for human oversight, keeps skills relevant (for when the automation fails), and still allows for significant progress.

Seems to have a lot of overlap with these principles.

>>falcol+(OP)
I’ve been thinking about this more for apps in the self-help category, such as meditation, yoga and fitness.

The popular ones are geared for you to rely on them indefinitely; many have "forever" memberships in addition to monthly and annual subscriptions. They perfectly fit the view of Iron Man vs Ultron apps, with the irony that, IMHO, apps in this category should strive to empower users with enough training and motivation for them to carry on their practice after a few months, not compel them to use them “forever”.

Do you have a link to the article? Google Gods did not favour me today.

>>falcol+(OP)
After hardly driving for a good portion of a decade, then regularly driving again, the highway seemed pretty weird. As in, how are these people spending so much mental energy? Then after a week or two staying exactly where I wanted to be in the lane, and basics like knowing where empty spots in traffic were around me in case I needed to move to avoid something became second nature again, not requiring much conscious effort.

Driving still seems like a waste of time, so self-driving cars make a lot of sense, but I agree that there really must be risk of people's skills during the routine practice of things eroding, such that they might be increasingly worthless or dangerous in emergency situations.

>>eswat+wh
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2841313

>>falcol+(OP)
This is a very old argument that goes way back to the beginning of the entire field with Douglas Engelbart and his augmented computing project. At the time he was an outsider who thought the future of computing was enabling humans to do more as opposed to creating a general AI that would do it for us.

Some interesting reading: https://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Per...

>>falcol+(OP)
This leads off in interesting directions, though. For example, people complain that students shouldn't just use calculators, but in the developed world, the chances of not having access to a working calculator on a phone or computer are very small (that said, it's good to know what the machine is doing for you, even if you don't want to do it yourself). Compare that to phone numbers - even a generation ago, it was common to have memorized half-dozen 10 digit phone numbers for friends and family members. Are we diminished somehow now for having offloaded that to machines? Or was it work we shouldn't have ever had to take on?

>>blacks+8a1
Specifically regarding calculators, the idea is that knowing how to calculate aids in understanding later math that depends on calculation.

Phone numbers don't lead to other interesting ideas, that I can think of. Didn't dialing originally work by just picking up the handset and telling the operator who you wanted to talk to?