All Paths to Dumbness?

One of my favorite bloggers is Kathy Sierra, who has been interested in the brain and artificial intelligence since her days as a game developer (Virgin, Amblin’, MGM). Her blog is Creating Passionate Users, where the discussion centers around the fascination of brains, minds and what science can tell us about the practice of making users passionate about their lives and tools. She is the co-creator of the bestselling Head First series, and she is the founder of one of the largest community web sites in the world, javaranch.com.

One of her recent posts caused me to stop and reflect as we are bombarded by more and more tech tools to “make our lives easier”.   Each day, we hear about new tools to make our lives easier. My favorite is all the computer chip stuff in our cars. Mechanics tell us “Can’t really mess with your car anymore — it needs to be hooked up to a computer for a summary analysis”(at $94), then the computer tells the mechanic what needs to be done….Are we dumbing ourselves down and creating a society of simpletons? I can totally relate to the kids and calculators part, and I really push our kids to learn and do the long-hand math…….

Here’s how she opens her blog entry:

“It’s lunchtime at the cafe and you give the cashier a $20 bill for an $8 purchase. She gives you $32.78 in change. You mention the mistake. She says, “But that’s what the cash register says I owe you.” She can’t cope with the cognitive dissonance between reality and What The Machine Said. Later that day you get a frantic call from a co-worker–a recent addition to the programming team. “I keep getting this error message that it can’t find the classes I’m using!” You ask, “By ‘it’ do you mean the compiler?” He answers “I don’t know. I’m using an IDE.” That night, you’re helping your 12-year old son with his math homework when you realize–in horror–that while he’s quite good with the calculator, he couldn’t multiply two three-digit numbers using only paper and pencil if his Wii depended on it. These tools were designed to make us more efficient, so that we can focus on something more important than the tedious task of, say, giving change, organizing source code, and doing calculations. But are they helpful timesavers, or are we dumbing ourselves–and our users–down?”

Read the excellent blog entry here.