Why Useless Research Builds the Future of Computing
Against Usefulness
I invest in useful companies, yet I believe the next breakthroughs come from stubbornly useless research. Visiting the Folk Computer lab, I saw programming return to a human, physical scale, defying the screen-centric monoculture of the Bay Area. This lineage, from Xerox PARC to Dynamicland, proves that paradigms shift when independent thinkers work against immediate utility, funded by patrons who value long-term vision over market trends.
Usefulness, they had learned, is a trap: the moment a prototype becomes useful, its makers start answering to present users and stop pointing at the future.
- underlipton
That intro makes me want to cry, because she's describing what the hope was for augmented reality before Zuck and Tim and every web developer looking for the next step on their career ladder stuck their grubby hands into its chest and squeezed its aorta shut. AR wasn't floating screens. It wasn't hackneyed VR. It was digital bits and bobs integrated into your physical space, onto your physical objects. You know, augmenting them. Like this, but with glasses or a headset instead of a projector. And (particularly at the beginning) not so much hyper-optimized for enterprise productivity, as for doing something small and interesting and maybe a bit useful.
We came so damn close, and it's been ~10 years. Maybe this gets people's imaginations going again. Get us ready to take that, er, magic leap forward.
- jagged-chisel
> ...two researchers who worked at Dynamicland, Bret Victor’s lab in Oakland.
> Everyone is building the same thing, funded by the same people, using the same words. Where are the independent thinkers?
> [JP] said a name: Folk Computer. In New York.
Who are ... building the same thing as Bret. So where are these independent thinkers?
- gammalost
I do not get the "against usefulness" portion. The article still discusses the projects she deems "useless" in relation to their future potential usefulness.
- nnevatie
> “I don’t need the monitor anymore.”
Yeah, you just need a complicated setup of machinery that observes the room and multiple conventions on content tagging, etc.
- luco17
See something here re mission ops planning.
There’s a tactile element to understanding your assets, supply lines, air/sea/land bridges, time to rendezvous, enemy dispositions, etc that could benefit from a richer visual canvas.
How to take that physical state, encode it so it can be replayed/evolved/disseminated into taskings.
At the moment it’s all spreadsheets, white boards and staff officers.
Thinking cap on - thanks for the post!