Ray Sidney-SmithJul 142 min read
I have to wonder as more things become “assistant driven” are we growing to a point of inability to…
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Art Gelwicks
I’m not sure I’ll answer any of your questions by my comment, but my thoughts are as follows:
- These assistant-driven apps are, to me, one by-product of not teaching a primarily knowledge-worker society how to actually operate in a new productivity paradigm. Assembly-line, building-widgets paradigm no longer works for knowledge workers.
- Digital technology has increased our pipeline of data coming at us daily. Humans consume on average (which means that people reading this probably consume slightly or dramatically above that average) of 34 GB per day. (Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/the-american-diet-34-gigabytes-a-day/?_r=0.) That being the case, our brains are prime machines for processing but not storing and retrieving that data in the way modern society requires it. To wit, an assistant-driven app or combination of those apps allows us to continue to utilize our best selves (processing machines) over our lesser selves (remembering/retrieval machines), which computing devices are best at. I think it’s a match made in proverbial paradise.
- Finally, and this is likely a bit off-topic, but this idea of skeuomorphism as it relates to making productivity tools that are mimetic human personas. This is like Amazon Echo, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and so on. I think it becomes much more natural and easy to contend with the world when our brains are met with familiar I/O’s so that our cognitive load is reduced. This means taking a familiar in-real-life aspect of our worlds and using sophisticated algorithms and hardware processing to help us make the best decisions. Counterpoint to that is, we all need to remember we’re humans and our needs are limited to joy/pleasure and avoidance of fear/pain, not much else. We sometimes contend with overcomplicating matters for the sake of it. We’d all be happier if our assistant-driven apps told us, “Just say, ‘no,’ Ray. Just say ‘No.’” Alas, I digress. (A good design article to read on the topic: http://gizmodo.com/skeuomorphism-will-never-go-away-and-thats-a-good-thin-1642089313.)
