I have to say I'm viscerally turned off by the language here. Perhaps even the idea, although there is obviously nothing objectionable about helping people reach their own goals, per se.<p>The problem here is that this whole angle on human life seems to have forgotten that efficiency, productivity, etc are all there to help us find more time to live in a world where those things don't matter. To have leisure. To think unstructured, non-goal directed thoughts. You don't need "programming" to be human.<p>The other thing here is that this stuff is just what humans in all societies and organizations have been working on forever. We have collective and personal goals and we have all sorts of systems to reach them. We do research on how effective they are already. We do A/B testing. Not sure what calling this collective activity "human programming" accomplishes.
The problem is essential complexity. Or at least that would be if we were computers. "The thing you want to do is hard" might be a better description.<p>When was the last time an automated flowchart script help line actually helped you?<p>If something is hard it's probably because one or more steps are hard by themselves, or because actually doing it requires multiple simultaneous actions in real time without gaps to look things up, or because there's an insane number of steps. People have learned from books for centuries, if you can't learn it from existing media,it's probably just a really hard task.<p>Like, guitar is hard because it's all about repeatable physical motions, you don't have time to carefully inspect your fingers to see whether it will sound acceptable when you strum.<p>Drawing is hard because it seems to involve a mental image that is so clear and stable one can use it as a reference, plus the ability to translate points in (Real or imagined 3D) space to points on a page.<p>Troubleshooting tech is hard because of the number of things to go wrong, almost always not covered in the manual, because if the designers knew they couhave prevented it, leading to Google being the best tool, and full teardown, deep understanding, and reverse engineering often being needed if that fails.
While I appreciate the subject matter, I think ignoring the prior art of checklist design and human factors engineering is a big oversight. I don’t know enough about either field to know what tools they are using in the process of designing instruction manuals, time critical check lists, or diagnostic and troubleshooting guides, but I imagine that would be a very good place to start. I will say though that bringing analog checklists into a multimedia world is an intriguing direction, since being able to access an expanded checklist that enables you to see details, infographics, etc when you want to dive into a specific step while also allowing you to track your current place in a process would be pretty cool.
How about design the coffee maker so I don't need a program to use it?<p>We have a water dispenser at work which can dispense regular, chilled, carbonated and cooking water. It has a printed out laminated instruction sheet next to it, because it all works with a combination of twisting a ring left or right, pushing it up or down, and I believe there is a handle too. That's bad design.<p>This is the reverse of "automate anything that can be automated", this is bringing the humans back in a step by step process.
Every time I am cooking sometig from the recipe I first need to translate it from the long text to a chart where one axis is time and second is what to do.
Human programming is easy until you reach the async, concurrent and parallel parts. Then you have to catch lots of exceptions and log the call stack. :)
I think human programming is not untapped at all. This is describing every line of business application in existence. A great example of both the power and limitations of this is phone trees for customer support.<p>A product team and dev team encode business knowledge and flows into code and leverage a human to make judgement calls when necessary. The outcome is a program that can either be used by skilled workers to multiply their output or allow unskilled workers to perform tasks that would have formerly required a skilled worker to accomplish.<p>There are already (arguably) optimized flows and design patterns for application UX. Companies have already spent years trying to build and optimize this "human programming". Dev teams have developed many DSLs to make it easier to encode business logic into their applications more quickly.<p>I am not saying line of business applications are good or near some optimal final form, but to call "human programming" untapped is taking a very narrow view of the definition.
Regarding the introduction to this essay..<p>Isn't some of the magic of being an agent in this world taken away when you are following a set of instructions to a T?<p>Unable to make decisions for yourself without consulting your "virtual assistant" about something as trivial as if you can use y milk in place of x milk seems like a sad reality to me
<p><pre><code> Educators, generals, dieticians,
psychologists, and parents program. Armies,
students, and some societies are programmed.</code></pre>
by Alan J Perlis, the first Turing Award recipient.
untapped? ahahahhaah<p>it's not untapped. it's just slightly more effective if I don't tell you I'm trying to program you.<p>in any case, in terms of "ultimate principles" all meaningful information is in the end an expression of some form of control;<p>more precisely, we can only observe (as a 3rd "objective" party) the results of meaningful exchanges between interacting entities by noticing (measuring) changing behaviors whenever "meaning" gets transferred from one to another entity; i.e. I'm pointing out that (similarly to electricity/magnetism) we can never observe "meaning" directly, but can measure its effects on beings interacting with the "fields of meaning" ahahhaha.