[ExI] Thanksgiving

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 28/11/2020 15:33, bill w wrote:
> For the future - near if possible:  far better usability for tech 
> stuff.  My recent frustration with the Samsung phone is a great 
> example:  tons of functions that I can use.  When I got it, if you 
> will recall, it did not even tell me how to turn it off.  What is a 
> person with even less tech savvy than me going to do with it?  I am 
> getting an Apple watch and am very interested to see the difference 
> between it and the Samsung.  Now, many tech gadgets are unusable by 
> nontech people.  So the faults in the tech system lie between the 
> designers of the hardware and the users:  i.e. software.  How to use 
> the damned things we buy.   bill w

I second that, bigtime. What happened to human-computer ergonomics? It 
used to be a field of study. The whole concept of figuring out how to 
make computer systems easy to use seems to have been forgotten about, 
and now we have a multitude of pesky icons, scattered all over the 
place, no clue what any of them mean, no menus (why?!! For Evolutions' 
sake, why ditch menus?! They are far and away the best interface 
system), and precious little help. Many interfaces now don't even have a 
context menu or mouse-over text. You have to experiment (sometimes with 
a steep cost) to find out what all the icons do. It does my head in.

I notice nobody has mentioned Virtual (and Augmented) Reality as a 
near-term tech to be anticipated. I'm keenly anticipating that, but 
expect it will have to be substantially hacked, or be open-source (thus 
easily hackable), to be useable. The commercial versions will be 
dreadful, no doubt.

After that, I'd hope for life-extension tech, including replacement 
bio-synthetic body parts, leading to full cyborgisation.

Uploading and AGI will be much longer-term, I think. (decades, I mean, 
not centuries. On the centuries-and-longer scale, I don't think it makes 
sense to predict anything at all, we almost certainly aren't capable of 
even conceiving of anything remotely accurate), and for me, they are 
'horizon' technologies, as ultimate as I can see so far.

-- 
Ben Zaiboc