https://numinous.productions/ttft/
The original file:
Part of the origin myth of modern computing is the story of a golden age in the 1960s and 1970s. In this story, visionary pioneers pursued a dream in which computers enabled powerful tools for thought, that is, tools to augment human intelligence. One of those pioneers, Alan Kay, summed up the optimism of this dream when he wrote of the potential of the personal computer: “the very use of it would actually change the thought patterns of an entire civilization”.
It’s an inspiring dream, which helped lead to modern interactive graphics, windowing interfaces, word processors, and much else. But retrospectively it’s difficult not to be disappointed, to feel that computers have not yet been nearly as transformative as far older tools for thought, such as language and writing. Today, it’s common in technology circles to pay lip service to the pioneering dreams of the past. But nostalgia aside there is little determined effort to pursue the vision of transformative new tools for thought.
We believe now is a good time to work hard on this vision again. In this essay we sketch out a set of ideas we believe can be used to help develop transformative new tools for thought. In the first part of the essay we describe an experimental prototype system that we’ve built, a kind of mnemonic medium intended to augment human memory. This is a snapshot of an ongoing project, detailing both encouraging progress as well as many challenges and opportunities. In the second part of the essay, we broaden the focus. We sketch several other prototype systems. And we address the question: why is it that the technology industry has made comparatively little effort developing this vision of transformative tools for thought?
In the opening we mentioned some visionaries of the past. To those could be added many others – Ivan Sutherland, Seymour Papert, Vannevar Bush, and more. Online there is much well-deserved veneration for these people. But such veneration can veer into an unhealthy reverence for the good old days, a belief that giants once roamed the earth, and today’s work is lesser. Yes, those pioneers did amazing things, and arguably had ways of working that modern technologists, in both industry and academia, are poorly equipped to carry on. But they also made mistakes, and were ignorant of powerful ideas that are available today. And so a theme through both parts of the essay is to identify powerful ideas that weren’t formerly known or weren’t acted upon. Out of this understanding arises a conviction that a remarkable set of opportunities is open today.
A word on nomenclature: the term “tools for thought” rolls off neither the tongue nor the keyboard. What’s more, the term “tool” implies a certain narrowness. Alan Kay has argued that a more powerful aim is to develop a new medium for thought. A medium such as, say, Adobe Illustrator is essentially different from any of the individual tools Illustrator contains. Such a medium creates a powerful immersive context, a context in which the user can have new kinds of thought, thoughts that were formerly impossible for them. Speaking loosely, the range of expressive thoughts possible in such a medium is an emergent property of the elementary objects and actions in that medium. If those are well chosen, the medium expands the possible range of human thought.
With that said, the term “tools for thought” has been widely used since Iverson’s 1950s and 1960s work An account may be found in Iverson’s Turing Award lecture, Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979). Incidentally, even Iverson is really describing a medium for thought, the APL programming language, not a narrow tool. introducing the term. And so we shall use “tools for thought” as our catch all phrase, while giving ourselves license to explore a broader range, and also occasionally preferring the term “medium” when it is apt.
Let’s come back to that phrase from the opening, about changing “the thought patterns of an entire civilization”. It sounds ludicrous, a kind of tech soothsaying. Except, of course, such changes have happened multiple times during human history: the development of language, of writing, and our other most powerful tools for thought. And, for better and worse, computers really have affected the thought patterns of our civilization over the past 60 years, and those changes seem like just the beginning. This essay is a small contribution to understanding how such changes happen, and what is still possible.
The musician and comedian Martin Mull has observed that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. In a similar way, there’s an inherent inadequacy in writing about tools for thought. To the extent that such a tool succeeds, it expands your thinking beyond what can be achieved using existing tools, including writing. The more transformative the tool, the larger the gap that is opened. Conversely, the larger the gap, the more difficult the new tool is to evoke in writing. But what writing can do, and the reason we wrote this essay, is act as a bootstrap. It’s a way of identifying points of leverage that may help develop new tools for thought. So let’s get on with it.
Few subjects are more widely regarded as difficult than quantum computing and quantum mechanics. Indeed, popular media accounts often regale (and intimidate) readers with quotes from famous physicists in the vein of: “anyone who thinks they’ve understood quantum mechanics has not understood quantum mechanics”.
What makes these subjects difficult? In fact, individually many of the underlying ideas are not too complicated for people with a technical background. But the ideas come in an overwhelming number, a tsunami of unfamiliar concepts and notation. People must learn in rapid succession of qubits, the bra-ket notation, Hadamard gates, controlled-not gates, and many, many other abstract, unfamiliar notions. They’re imbibing an entire new language. Even if they can follow at first, understanding later ideas requires fluency with all the earlier ideas. It’s overwhelming and eventually disheartening.
As an experiment, we have developed a website, Quantum Country, which explores a new approach to explaining quantum computing and quantum mechanics. Ostensibly, Quantum Country appears to be a conventional essay introduction to these subjects. There is text, explanations, and equations, much as in any other technical essay. Here’s an excerpt:
But it’s not a conventional essay. Rather, Quantum Country is a prototype for a new type of mnemonic medium. Aspirationally, the mnemonic medium makes it almost effortless for users to remember what they read. That may sound like an impossible aspiration. What makes it plausible is that cognitive scientists know a considerable amount about how human beings store long-term memories. Indeed, what they know can almost be distilled to an actionable recipe: follow these steps, and you can remember whatever you choose.
Unfortunately, those steps are poorly supported by existing media. Is it possible to design a new medium which much more actively supports memorization? That is, the medium would build in (and, ideally, make almost effortless) the key steps involved in memory. If we could do this, then instead of memory being a haphazard event, subject to chance, the mnemonic medium would make memory into a choice. Of course, on its own this wouldn’t make it trivial to learn subjects such as quantum mechanics and quantum computing – learning those subjects is about much more than memory. But it would help in addressing one core difficulty: the overwhelming number of new concepts and notation.