You know, I read about an old experiment that showed the human was the most efficient of all animals for distance traveled to calories expended. IF, that is, the human was on a bicycle. Steve Jobs heard about this at the time he was working on the first Macintosh, and declared he wanted to make “bicycles for the mind.”
Did it really work out like this? Most computers are more like cars for the mind, or, worse, like those motor-powered two wheel inline scooters for the mind. They’re not that powerful, crash easily, and don’t give you an actual workout.
For me, real intellectual work involves a lot of silently staring into space, pacing the room, and walking around the block. But no computer involved. Even when I’m writing, say, a recursive tree descent algorithms (ahh, beloved CS 163) or an RPN expression parser, I do better work in a coffee shop than in a computer lab.
The only thing about computers that really helps me is the Search function. If I’m writing a paper on Frankenstein, I can download the book from Project Gutenberg and Find the section that I want to quote, but can’t quite remember.
It just speeds up the normal process of thumbing through the book by hand. Which is quite nice — it rules, actually — but doesn’t put you on a higher level of brain-power or anything.
The problem is that the people who really could make a “bicycle for the mind” are computer programmers. Their main problem is the computer, and the tools they make are for dealing with the computer. What we need is something like tab-completion for fiction writers. I want it to autocomplete my ideas! “On overcast days in Portland, gray light comes from all directions. Nothing casts a shadow. I first met Myra on a shadowless day, and <TAB>Microsoft walrus in competitive crankshaft gear lever~~@~SEGMENTATION CORE”
OK, OK, so maybe it wouldn’t work so well for creative writing. But for legal or philosophical writing, it would be great if you could hit TAB and have it parse out your sentence or paragraph, consult a database of relevant essay, and return a list of one-line summaries of each essay.
Or what about collaborative writing? You hit TAB and it pings someone on your ICQ list and tells them to complete your sentence for you… heh… just imagine…