the tech industry’s flawed model of your brain
a case study in how clever people can be so very stupid
Two news stories today hit a consistent theme of mine: the tech industry has a serious problem - profound, deep, worrisome.
BL, UF: they have precisely no idea how humans brains process information; they don’t care, and it keeps blowing up in their faces.
And then they chase the next shiney thing while not fixing the obvious things in their products.
Story one: ‘Microsoft wants you to talk to your PC and let AI control it’
This is so derangedly stupid that words almost fail me.
MQ (but read the whole thing):
Microsoft is launching a set of capabilities in Windows today that will start to weave AI features into regular Windows 11 PCs, instead of consumers having to buy a special Copilot Plus PC. The biggest change is that Microsoft thinks people will want to talk to their computers and have Copilot take actions on their behalf.
“You should be able to talk to your PC, have it understand you, and then be able to have magic happen from that,” says Mehdi. “With your permission, we want people to be able to share with their AI on Windows what they’re doing and what they’re seeing. The PC should be able to act on your behalf.”
Here you are in your shared workspace, saying out loud to an idiot powerpoint:
Move that line just a small bit to the left on the slide. No the other one. Now group those objects into a single object.
No, not those ones. The other ones. Stop. Try it again. It’d be faster if I did it myself…
They see billions of talk minutes on Teams and think “Aha! People love talking to computers!”
No. This is confirmation bias writ large. The mistake is simple:
People love talking to each other - for very good reasons: it’s our cognitive interface with others.
And they will tolerate talking through computers to in order to talk to other people...
Story two: ‘AI-powered textbooks fail to make the grade in South Korea’
