I really enjoyed reading this article and the Q&A based on it. Watching the video from Microsoft, reminded me of watching the Iron Man movie when I was a kid. The moments of Tony Stark working on armor using super advanced 3D technologies always impressed me, and I imagined how, perhaps, I could do the same when I grew up. It is quite common to see widely published fiction movies, books, articles, etc. as an inspiration for future technologies. The other day I was watching the video of how some things depicted by authors or artists in the previous centuries were actually implemented in real life. Moreover, many of them are used every single day – take a plane, for example. At the same time, other products of our predecessors’ imagination have not yet been feasible. Time machines, teleports, and other stuff that we often consider out of our current range of scientific skills. I made this long introductory statement to come to the idea that not all the things that we foresee and, in many cases, ‘make up’ based on our perception of what could happen in the future, actually become true.
Going back to the video from Microsoft and the article by Bret Victor on it, I, personally, mostly agree with the main statements made by the author. First, while I would be highly impressed if one showed me this video when I was 10 years old, watching from the current perspective of the experienced technology user, I can surely say I would not like to live in such a world. I feel that it is incredibly over-interactive. Excess of a technology can often hurt the technology, and this is exactly the case. As Bret Victor mentioned, we already spend too much time using electronic devices (btw his article was published in 2011, and now we use gadgets much much more). If we create the whole world around us based on augmented reality, it will mess up our initial perception of life, as how I see it. I am currently kind of skeptical about augmented reality as a whole, but who knows, maybe in 20 years I will change my mind. Anyway, I resonate with the author on the part that the future described in the video is pretty far from ideal. We should not abandon our core activities and ‘natural’ interactions. Otherwise, it will not only distort our lifestyle but also, as scientifically proven, will make our brains less developed.
The only remark I would make is that as of now, I feel like neither voice control nor, as I have mentioned above, augmented reality can be perceived as an adequate substitute for the fingers and mouse control. Yes, thinking about the future of interactive technologies being solely dependent on our finger clicking and primitive hand movements is quite sad, but I guess we got so used to them that any quick transition would be extremely difficult and inconvenient. At the same time, innovations are happening extremely fast, and who knows, maybe a couple of decades from now we will adopt another method and will be using it every 5-10 minutes of our lives as we do with our phones.