DRMacIver's Notebook
Heavy up front learning requirements
Heavy up front learning requirements
So, Dave and I went to Cambridge recently to visit Dani Clode at the neuroplasticity lab. She developed a device called the third thumb, which is pretty much what it sounds like - it’s an extra thumb you can attach to your hand on the opposite side of your normal thumb.
It’s designed specifically as an augmentation, not a prosthesis, which I thought was an interesting choice. The difference is essentially that it’s not designed to exactly mimic a biological thumb, but instead has a couple of adjustments that are there to help you use it in ways that you wouldn’t normally use a thumb. e.g. they’ve got an example of essentially wrapping the thumb around a bottle while you twist the cap on and off with your hand.
One of the things that was interesting about it was that it was just very hard to use.For me. Dave found it very natural I was starting to get the hang of it by the end, but I was just constantly dropping things or holding them in weird ways that didn’t make much sense and often didn’t even actually use the third thumb. Some of that is just that it’s foot controlled,You get two degrees of freedom. One with your left foot to move the thumb up and down, and one with your right foot which you use to grip. vnd I don’t have very good foot control, but I think a lot of it’s just that it is genuinely quite unintuitive. Dani told us that they’ve got a week-long training course that they run with these to show people how to use them, and people usually have the hang of it by the end of the week.
And I thought that was pretty interesting in its own right, because it’s fairly rare that I encounter a new sort of device that requires this much training to use. Implicitly, you do have that much training in how to use a keyboard or how to use a mouse but particularly with the keyboard example, there’s an easy onboarding route, you can always hunt and peck, right? It’s not that you need a huge amount of training in order to be able to use the keyboard at all. It’s that there is a fluency that you acquire through time and practice, but the baseline level of disfluency is still pretty effective.
The third thumb wasn’t like that at all. I was making a complete mess of things, as early on there is no equivalent to hunt and peck, and my ability to do things was made strictly worse by using the third thumb. You have to just have to figure out how to use it before it’s anything other than in the way. Now, we were not encountering it in the proper training setting, so this is very much not me saying that the third thumb is not a usable object, I’m saying that there is an effort required to onboard to using it it, and this is just an interesting contrast with most of the devices that we encounter.
Dave and Lisa are currently learning to drive, which seems in some ways like a good analogy to that, in that there isn’t an easy onboard to learning to drive. But honestly this is partly because there is a high safety requirement, and partly because you need to not just know how to use the car you need to know how to use it in a way that is predictable to others. You could learn to drive by just messing around in a car and seeing how that works. There’s nothing that in theory stops you from doing this, and presumably many early car users did learn to drive this way - formal licensing of drivers is a much more modern form than the car itself - but regardless of how artificial the gap is there’s still this sort of onboarding requirement.
In contrast, the most transformative technology I can think of that’s happened to me in recent years is still the smartphone.I know that’s not that recent anymore but I can’t think of anything as big since. AI isn’t there yet. Certainly this is probably the biggest example of augmentation in our day-to-day lives. But the smartphone is very much not like a third thumb or a car. It is designed with continuity to the mobile phone from before, which is designed for continuity with previous devices, and it’s designed to be easy for kids to pick up,Too easy if anything. and is generally a fairly gentle onboarding process. Although your use of it will improve with practice, you don’t really have to spend a whole bunch of time sitting down with your smartphone and trying to figure out how to use it before it’s useful, instead it starts useful and becomes more useful over time.
And it seems to me like there’s this split of how much effort you have to invest in before you know how to use a particular type of technology. It’s not exactly shallow vs steep learning curves, so much as it’s about time to first usefulness. There can be a lot of depth to learning a new technology, but if it’s rewarding from early on then it will be a very different experience from something with a high up front cost, and I feel like we’ve gotten very used to the idea that everything should be more like the smartphone than the third thumb.
This does on some level make sense of course. In some sense it’s clearly better to have this than not, right? It’s much more rewarding to immediately be able to use a thing and work from there to improve it than it is to have to invest a whole bunch of effort into something that isn’t useful until you spend that effort.In that it turns learning it into an anytime project, but it seems like there’s limitations to that approach where not all things can work like that, and that up front investment feels extremely daunting and unwelcome.
Part of why I care about this is that one of the things I like about the third thumb is that I do have a pervasive sense that the world should be weirder than it is. I think this is partly just my “where’s my flying car” instinct. I do have a sort of very science fiction type attachment to the idea that you can expand human capabilities, and feel like it’s a shame that we’ve largely not gone down that route and instead just embraced phones as a shitty ad-supported version of our cyborg future.
I don’t know how you would ever make physical augmentation useful from day one, because it’s such a fundamental change to your way of being in the world. In sensory augmentation, maybe, something like the North Paw is a good example. Because it’s just providing you feedback. You can consciously interpret that feedback and gradually you internalize it over time. But something like the third thumb or prehensile tail, I don’t know how well you can possibly make that an incremental approach, and as a result this attachment to easy learning experiences feels like a limitation on human progress.
I’ve often thought that there just is a lot of sort of missing space in the range of UIs that we try out. And some of that is many of the alternatives we tried out just aren’t very good. You can sort of see this with VR where it turns into, like, turned out to be like a quite limited paradigm that we still haven’t figured out how to use well. But I was really interested in the idea of using the Kinect or Leap Motion as styles of interaction with a computer and doesn’t seem to have turned out that way, and I don’t think that was just the limitations of the technology, I think it was the degree to which it required both the users and the developers to actually learn something new.
And I think these sorts of cliffs where you have to do active training are part of that. I think people have gotten as used to the idea that UI should be seamless and intuitive as they are used to the idea that websites should be free and that seems like a shame.
Another problem with this is that even things where you don’t have to invest this sort of trained skill practice into, I bet we would actually benefit from deliberate practice. I bet actually, if I spent a week studying how to better use my smartphone and better fit it into my life, I probably would figure out important and interesting things about how to use it.
I think something I notice is that there is a general lack of deliberate practice for our everyday tools and habits built into life, and it seems like we are missing something as a result.