The case against conversational interfaces

There’s an interesting… paradox? Observation? That up until 20-30 years ago, humans were not computerized beings. I remember a thought leader at a company I worked at said that the future was wearable computing, a computer that disappears from your knowing and just integrates with your life. And that sounds great and human and has a very thought leadery sense of being forward thinking.

But I think it’s wrong? Ever since the invention of the television, we’ve been absolutely addicted to screens. Screens and remotes, and I think there’s something sort of anti-humanly human about it. Maybe we don’t want to be human? But people I think would generally much rather tap their thumb on the remote than talk to their tv, and a visual interface you hold in the palm of your hand is not going away any time soon.

Computers are tools, not people. They should be made easier to use as tools, not tried to be made people. I actually hate people, tools are much better.

I went through Waldorf education and although Rudolf Steiner is quite eccentric, one thing I think he was spot on about was regarding WHEN you introduce technology. He believed that introducing technology or mechanized thinking too early in childhood would hinder imaginative, emotional, and spiritual development. He emphasized that children should engage primarily with natural materials, imaginative play, storytelling, artistic activities, and movement, as opposed to being exposed prematurely to mechanical devices or highly structured thinking, I seem to recall he recommended this till the age of 6.

My parents did this with me, no screens till 6 (wasn't so hard as I grew up in the early 90s, but still, no TV). I notice too how much people love screens, that non-judgmental glow of mental stimulation, it's wonderful, however I do think it's easier to "switch off" when you spent the first period of your life fully tuned in to the natural world. I hope folks are able to do this for their kids, it seems it would be quite difficult with all the noise in the world. Given it was hard for mine during the era of CRT and 4 channels, I have empathy for parents of today.

> Screens and remotes, and I think there’s something sort of anti-humanly human about it.

Actually, it's the reverse. The orienting response is wired in quite deeply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orienting_response

When I was teaching, I used to force students using laptops to sit near the back of the room for exactly this reason. It's almost impossible for humans to ignore a flickering screen.

I will counter this by saying that my time spent with screens before 6 was unimaginably critical for me.

If I hadn't had it, I would have been trapped by the racist, religously zealous, backwoods mentality that gripped the rest of my family and the majority of the people I grew up with. I discovered video games at age 3 and it changed EVERYTHING. It completely opened my mind to abstract thought and, among other things, influenced me to teach myself to read at age 3. I was reading at a collegiate level by age five and discovered another passion, books. Again, propelled me out of an extremely anti-intellectual upbringing.

I simply could not imagine where I would be without video games, visual arts or books. Screens are not the problem. Absent parenting is the problem. Not teaching children the power of these screens is the problem.

A flickering screen is modern man's flickering campfire.

I’ve been theory crafting around video games for children on the opposing premise. I think fundamentally the divide is on the quality of content — most games have some value to extract, but many are designed to be played inefficiently, and require far more time investment than value extracted.

Eg Minecraft, Roblox, CoD, Fortnite, Dota/LoL, the various mobile games clearly have some kind of value (mechanical skill, hand-eye coordination, creative modes, 3D space navigation / translation / rotation, numeric optimization, social interaction, etc), but they’re also designed as massive timesinks mostly through creative mode or multiplayer.

Games like paper Mario, pikmin, star control 2, katamari damacy, lego titles, however are all children-playable but far more time efficient and importantly time-bounded for play. Even within timesink games there are higher quality options — you definitely get more, and faster, out of satisfactory / factorio than modded Minecraft. If you can push kids towards the higher quality, lower timesink games, I think it’s worth. Fail to do so and it’s definitely not.

The same applies to TV, movies, books, etc. Any medium of entertainment have horrendous timesinks to avoid, and if you can do so, avoiding the medium altogether is definitely a missed opportunity. Screens are only notable in that the degenerate cases are far more degenerate than anything that came before it

I don't see a contradiction. Watching passively in an expectation of a dopamine hit = bad. Playing actively with things that respond in various interesting ways = good, no matter if the things are material or virtual.

Oh, his theory wasn't about video games though, they didn't exist in 1910, it was about the full breadth of human sensorial systems being used in the context of our neurology for a prolonged period of time during high neuroplasticity (0 to 6 was his theory). I haven't really played video games, so I don't know much about them personally.

Sensitivity to stimuli behind orienting impulse varies by individual and I wish I was less sensitive on daily basis.

These days screen brightness goes pretty high and it is unbelievable how many people seem to never use their screen (phone or laptop) on anything less than 100% brightness in any situation and are seemingly not bothered by flickering bright light or noise sources.

I am nostalgic about old laptops’ dim LCD screens that I saw a few times as a kid, they did not flicker much and had a narrow angle of view. I suspect they would even be fine in a darkened classroom.

Wasn't Waldorf a cult?

No I get that; video games are just my medium of choice. The problem I was trying to get at is these arguments and perceptions usually stem from the degenerate cases, which only get worse the further in time you go, but I don’t think it’s really due to the technology itself. You have the same braindead systems appear in any medium of entertainment — there are definitely systems of total waste in sports, physical play (I’ve yet to encounter anything so degenerate as balltapping — and that shit spreads rapidly once it starts), literature, etc.

It can hardly be said that a studio ghibli flick stunted the imagination of children worldwide but I would definitely believe it if you suggested cocomelon rotted the brains directly out of their skulls

I think it’s also worth noting that kids have a shitload of time. They can engage in both technologies and physical play and other activities simultaneously; the problem occurs when singular or few activities overwhelmingly consume that time — which is why I claim the unbounded timesinks can be catastrophic — and what I think most people are worried about when they blanket-ban whole systems/mediums

It is, packed of pseudosciences, which we still suffer today.

In Switzerland, we get often measle outbreaks thanks to his cult.

Playing computer games since an early age made me who I am. It required learning English a decade earlier than my peers. It pulled me into programming around start of primary school. I wouldn’t be a staff engineer in a western country without these two.

Well, how folks view the philosophy can be multifaceted, so I'll leave the pseudoscience and cult part aside. On the measles, Steiner was certainly skeptical of vaccination, but I think in Switzerland you have a cultural issue with vaccination. The Waldorf school I went to in Canada, everyone had a measles vaccine, but I do recall a Swiss student coming to our distinctively not Waldorf high school and there being a huge song and dance about their vaccination status, I think as a society generally...you've got some problems there?

When societies get advanced enough that all the basic needs are covered, a new generation arises where people think we can go back to a simpler past and ditch all that ugly gray industrial scientific technocratic globalistic etc etc ( add more scary qualifiers ) things that are perceived to be the the reason why things are bad and never ever concede that these things play an important role in enabling the safe environment where those very thoughts can be entertained.

The hedonic treadmill is driving the world

I second this motion. Technology is just a tool. It can be wisely used or not. Just forbidding it, is not wise in my opinion. You have to be careful to use it properly, or course.

Also let me drop the thought here, that Rudolf Steiner, like Montesori and the like, shoot "this is good" "this is bad" based on "feeling" or intuition, or such. There were no extensive scientific studies behind it.

It is pseudoscience, as they speak as if it was science (made categorical affirmations of what is better and worst for the education), but there is not science behind it. The cult is more controversial. But as long as people believe something that is not scientifically backed, for me at least, that is what I call religion.

I owe my entire career and livelihood to a childhood spent with the unbounded timesinks that were the games available to me on Amiga and my PC.

I might be a touch different in that it was obvious where I was going, and the correct decision was made to embrace my interest in the glowing screen and yes, the video games. It was video games more than anything else from which all other interests spawned.

More often than not it probably ends badly though I suppose. Despite a lifetime spent in front of screens all my social abilities work, I have a wide friends circle, a partner, my job requires me to work well with a wide variety of individuals and demographics etc which I couldn’t do otherwise. I have noticed this is not the case with all who shared a similar background.

The last few times I've bought a new monitor, I've gone through the process of adjusting brightness based on comparing a document on screen to a paper sheet. This invariably results into going from defaults of 50-70% to very low figures like 5-15%, and it's not that I work in dark places, my offices have reasonable light from outside. I would be extremely uncomfortable using default settings, for me they are absurdly bright.

The story is kind of wild. Behind the Bastards has a couple of episodes on Rudolf Steiner, the founder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_2HkBugFBw

The funny thing is that I remember the exact moment I fell in love with computers at 4. My grandmother cleaned houses and was often very late to pick me up from Headstart. So I would spend hours waiting, unsupervised, in a room with computer that had a giant note attached to the screen saying DO NOT TOUCH.

>:)

By 5, all I wanted was a computer. To me they represented and unending well of knowledge.