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Essays

Serve the Servants

Sean Moore

Teaching the new dog old tricks.

Do you find it odd when computer programs go out of your way to teach you how to use them? Sometimes it’s a walkthrough, showing the expected interactions and how to produce the effect you want. Other times it will be a tutorial, where you complete a simple example to get acquainted with features and controls.

The most euphemistic of them all, of course, is the “training” that some complex apps will ask for. Ostensibly, it’s so the computer can learn what to expect from you, but more accurately, the one being trained is you, to act in the way the program can understand you.

Of course, on the other end of the spectrum is the blank screen with nothing more than a blinking cursor. The only way to learn how to do anything is to start typing and hope you don’t enter a command that makes the world self destruct. Or for that matter, digitize you into an artificial world where your father has been imprisoned.


Computing has always been constrained by the interface and inputs available to the people that use them. And the massive leaps that happen within computing are defined by drastic changes to the input. Punch cards came first, which gave way to text input, which gave way to a graphical paradigm, which has recently given away to touch interface. But the fundamental problem still exists: interaction with a computer is based on metaphors, not true manipulation. We conform our output to the expectations of the systems we use. We are on the cusp of new modalities, too: speech, gestures, augmented reality. While they open up new modes of interaction, they are still a metaphorical interaction.

But is this the only we we must interact with computers? That question certainly warrants future discussion.