Dumbing Down

A woman and her SL500 Mercedes landed in deep water after her satellite navigation system guided her into a river.
She was driving to a christening when the sat-nav sent her down a winding track, which was signposted as unsuitable for motor vehicles.

Witnesses saw her drive into the River Sense, in Sheepy Magna, bouncing from one bank to the other before she was hauled to safety by a villager.

It's lunchtime at the cafe and you give the cashier a £20 note for an £8 purchase. She gives you £32.78 in change. You mention the mistake. She says, "But that's what the cash register says I owe you. She can't cope with the cognitive dissonance between reality and what the machine said.

You are out at sea in your boat, out of sight of land sailing along following the directions given by the sat nav when it suddenly goes off. Power gone or perhaps the US military has cut off the civilian feed, what ever. So where are you how do you get to your destination? To navigate to safety one needs to know from where one is starting. The ease of use has made one complacent, chart work has been neglected and the log hasn’t been updated. Perhaps you are in difficulties and need assistance, without the sat-nav do you know your position?

These tools were designed to make us more efficient, so that we can focus on something more important than the tedious task of, say, giving change, navigating, and doing calculations. But, are we at risk of dumbing ourselves down?

Obviously, this depends greatly on the tool, the operator, and the task itself. If we all had to understand what every tool was doing/hiding for us, we'd waste brain bandwidth that could be used for something more important; like what we're using the tool for. But in my examples above, think about how fragile the user's ability is, if they don't understand what the cash register, sat-nav or calculator is really doing. Without that understanding, what happens if the tool stops working?

Tools can reduce errors, handle the tedious work, and potentially let us spend more time in flow. Still, when I see those cashiers and navigators, I think we need to keep a few things in mind:

Tool developers when making a tool that's hiding things the user should understand, maybe could provide a tutorial or even an understanding mode where the user can ask the tool exactly what it's doing and how it made the decisions it made. However, there's another issue for tool developers, and that's where passion comes in. What if you could use your sat-nav as a way of learning more about the art of navigation?

Perhaps tool developers should consider forcing users to do some things the old-fashioned way before letting them get their hands on the tool that'll automate much of the drudgery.

Perhaps a complementary copy of Jack Lagan’s book, The Barefoot Navigator: Navigating with the Skills of the Ancients, should be provided with every Sat-nav sold.