
We Are What We Do Not Automate - brm
http://powazek.com/posts/1813
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ojbyrne
It's an interesting article, but reminds me of the divide between techies and
the great unwashed. When I buy a car I want a 5-speed, and stuff that, when it
breaks, I can fix. I want a spare tire, even if there are run-flat tires - I
like long road trips.

I do recognize that my tastes are not mainstream, but I value companies that
also recognize that.

EDIT: Ok, maybe not fix myself, but I appreciate stuff that's cheap to get
fixed, and maybe a little old-school. There's not too much that I can actually
fix, but there's a larger constellation of stuff that I understand the cost
of.

~~~
kirse
Driving a manual is just more fun, more engaging, and makes you focus more on
driving. It's just better. =)

I had to put up with a slushbox rental recently and finally understood how
exactly people can fall asleep at the wheel.

~~~
pistoriusp
I agree with you, but I wouldn't mind having an automatic right now. I've been
spending ~2 hours in traffic for the last month.

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jamesbritt
Brian Eno said that culture is those things we don't have to do.

We have to eat, but we don't have to eat with forks; we may have to cover our
bodies for some protection against weather, but we don't have to have drape
ourselves with some tribal logo.

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sh1mmer
This is a great article.

In summary, as technology progresses to the point where most (if not all)
common tasks can be automated the uniqueness of the UI will be what is left to
the user to control.

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derefr
I figured, by the headline, that this was going to be an article on
evolutionary psychology: "conscious thought", in a way the user-interface to
our own bodies, is all just stuff that we've just started learning how to do,
and hasn't had time to work its way into our instinctual (automated)
processes.

The scary thought behind that is that, eventually, we might evolve _past_
consciousness, without our external behaviour changing at all (self-driving
cars? Self-driving people.) All our acts of culture and art and science will
be so ingrained into our genetic structure that we'll start doing them without
having to meditate on the _how_ of it (akin, oddly, to spiritual Enlightenment
or Nirvana, through "mindfulness." For a more down-to-earth view, a permanent
"flow" state.) We'll all, technically, become
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie> s, until something shakes
up our culture enough that we need to think about what we're doing again.
Hopefully, though, we can keep introducing those shake-ups from within.

