In his reading, Bret Victor discussed the Vision of the Future, sharing his observation about the central role of hands in interactions with future technology, or as he defined them, tools. Hands in the physical world serve various activities and possess numerous senses. Through just a touch or lifting objects, we can tell so much about them, making hands our primary means of understanding the world. However, in technological contexts, especially when we envision the future, hands primarily slide across glass screens. We can only sense the glass screen and manipulate the displayed content. His main point emphasizes the need to consider other interactions beyond hands— we also have our bodies! We should start considering other forms of interaction.
As he further discussed the two main functions of our hands—feeling and manipulation—I began to wonder: If we excessively use interactions solely via the glass screen, limiting our interaction with the real world and physical objects, would we lose some of our capabilities? He defined a tool as addressing human needs by amplifying human capabilities. If this were to happen, technology would become less of a tool.
Later, his response to some of the readers’ comments, and one indeed answered my questions. Victor citing a neuroscientist’s quote about the development of “finger-blindness” caused by underutilizing hands in childhood. And it is even worse than a simple blindness that a blind person cannot locate things, but a finger blind person cannot understand the meaning and value of things. What if, just what if in the far far future maybe, we start to use only the interaction of the sliding or tapping on the screen and start to develop this kind of “finger-blindness”? Though it might seem far in the future, we’re already experiencing some changes. For instance, some people have become so accustomed to typing that they feel less comfortable writing with pen and paper. What if we no longer remember how it feels like to turn a page of a book.
What he suggests is that as we choose the future, we also choose to shape our future through our actions. For that, he suggests thinking of different types of interactions beyond just using our hands, aiming for a “dynamic medium that we can see, feel, and manipulate.” And I do think such interactions might be somewhat expensive, considering that every kind of technology has its strengths and weaknesses. Take VR, for example—indeed, we can see things in 3D, but it remains a visionary illusion where we cannot physically touch and feel things around us. What I am suggesting now aligns with what he pointed out: we need to start thinking about diverse types of interactivity to balance the excessive use of one.