I Want to Break the Possibility Ceiling for Knowledge Work
Without a doubt, computers have greatly accelerated the pace of knowledge work. I hesitate to make a real guess at the number, but on average, an individual can get several times as much work done per unit of time. They've created a new floor for the work an individual is expected to be capable of, raising the lower bound on productivity. What is less obvious perhaps is that, AI era aside, computers also form a sort of upper bound on productivity as well. Computers are not directly to blame for the upper bound; it's more so the interface that we use to interact with computers. Through the interface, we take in information, process that information with our miraculous brains, then output it back to the interface to save the result.
For output to computers, we were bound by how fast we could type or click. Now, dictation has become more and more popular for accelerating the rate of input. When personal computers were just getting into the hands of individual users, many aspects of the interface were designed to mirror objects in the physical world. I'd wager that for at least a couple of centuries more, humans will find the natural world to be the most intuitive interface. I've long believed that spatial computing would help to close the gap in friction between interacting with the physical world and computer interfaces. Our screen is such a finite window into our work, and to move around it, we must keep in our heads where everything is in terms of windows and tabs. I feel, in some sense, that this goes against our brains' wiring, and so there will always be some friction there until the surface of the computing interface feels like one with the physical world.
For input from computers, we're bounded by how fast we can read or watch. Of course, there's also the necessary processing of this information from the medium to its semantic representation in our minds, which I would argue is bounded more tightly by the medium than by our brains. We see this with the emergence of speed reading apps, which rapidly flash sequences of words in place faster than the human brain can scan them on a page. These apps work because they remove the real slow part, which is looking for each next word to process — the words move to where your eyes are looking instead. Understanding images is even faster and more information-dense, as the old saying goes.
Between the input and output of the work is the medium itself, which places arbitrary rules on how ideas can be expressed. The constraints of the medium place an inherent burden on users to translate ideas into forms the computer accepts, then reconstruct the meaning from those forms on the other end. Of course, this used to be necessary, but now I'm not so sure.
As people naturally do when they become aware of a possibility ceiling, I've started to wonder what it would take to eliminate the ceiling, or at least raise it high enough that we can ignore it for a couple more centuries. We've raised this particular ceiling before. Hypermedia is an improvement on plain old text, but what does an improvement on hypermedia look like? I thought that it would be pointless to dream up such an idea because such a medium would be beyond my means to implement any time soon as a broke college new grad. However, in the last month or so, I've realized that AI has lowered the necessary IQ and background to work on such a problem to a level that might be within my reach. So, in my daily browsing of Hacker News, I've been on the lookout for inspiration, or the first hint at the making of the next age of productivity.
Today, I found it in a blog post by James Somers. I read it like so many fragments plucked from my own brain and laid out so crystal clear that I was inspired to recognize it in a post. Moreover, I was overjoyed to find that I wasn't the only one who wanted to build this foundation for the future of knowledge work. I don't have many ideas on the topic to share at this point, but my goal with this post is simply to note the carcinization of this idea, which suggests its inevitability, and my motivation for thinking/writing about this in the future. I see this as the beginning of a big step change in the way knowledge work gets done, and so I intend to keep following it and one day make a contribution of my own.