Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!bcm!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: hibbert@xanadu.com (Chris Hibbert) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: Nanotech Economy Message-ID: Date: 5 Dec 90 03:55:48 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Xanadu Operating Company, Palo Alto, CA Lines: 56 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu In reply to JoSH's commentary on Daniel Mocsny's article: >[This is quite an insightful analysis. I do think it is more applicable > to a point of view spanning a few centuries than a few decades; in the > short term one can imagine a host of what we might call "single-button > black boxes" that could revolutionize society without going beyond the > abilities of almost anyone to use: a box that accepts garbage and > produces food; one that turns lawn clippings into clothing; self-driving > cars; self-repairing houses; trees with a gasoline spigot. > Intelligence augmentation has been with us since the invention of > writing; it will continue to accelerate--but we have never been able > to know where we were going in that sense anyway. > --JoSH] You're missing the point, JoSH; In order for a black box that converts garbage to food or clippings to clothing to be useful, the user has to be able to program it. In the case of clothing, the sale clerk might be able to help the user enter his or her various measurements, but consumers still won't buy it unless they get to say what color, style, cut, and material they'll get today in exchange for their offering of grass clippings. In the case of food, it's even more obvious that the user has to be able to handle a task that can't be made simpler than programming the VCR, which I'm told is beyond many of the consumers you'd need to sell to in order to make a reasonable size market. Chris [Alright, here's an interface for a clothing machine: it has an input hopper, an output slot, two dials, a toggle switch, and a button. Both dials are like an old-fashioned TV channel knob, with click-stops and a fine tuning ring. The left dial is for styles, with the stops for major variations like pants, shirts, underwear, etc, and the fine tuning for cuts, colors, and so forth. As you turn the dial an illustration of the item you are selecting appears on a screen. [A typical Land's End catalog seems to have 50 pages with an average of 2 major items per page, for 100 major stops, and 5 to 10 color/cut choices per item, which could be expanded to 100 fine-tuning settings without being hard to handle.] The toggle switch is labelled "male/female" and its setting is also reflected in the illustration on the screen. The right-hand dial is for size and its setting is reflected by a number that appears on the screen. Press the button and the item on the screen comes out the delivery slot. If it's too small, throw it back in the hopper, turn up the size a bit, and press again... I have a 5-year-old nephew who could learn to operate such a machine in 10 seconds flat. Frankly I find it hard to see how anyone could imagine that you *couldn't* design a clothes-making machine that everyone can use--it is a sad commentary that such comments seem to come from people in the software industry. I can well imagine what the current makers of VCR's and shrink-wrapped software would do to the concept of a clothing machine: It would look like the cockpit of a B-52. There's no need for that. The fact that people find modern gadgets hard to use is not evidence that people are stupid; it's evidence that the gadgets were designed incompetently. --JoSH] Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com