This is absolutely hilarious, and spot on in its commentary. It really makes it clear that computers are genuinely more complex than books. The problems he’s having are funny in part because it’s just so ludicrous that his spatial skills would be so poor, since a child or a chimp would easily master the problems that are causing him to lock up. I suspect, for example, that you could set a picture book down in front of nearly every human that’s ever lived, and they would be able to figure out the basic idea fairly quickly. They might be amazed or annoyed by the photos or art or whatever, but the mechanics of the book itself would become fairly clear fairly quickly. Hand them a laptop opened to something like a web browser, however, and I suspect they’d be fairly mystified. And even if they managed to figure out how to click around, it would probably seem totally miraculous, and their mental model for what’s going on would almost certainly be severely broken.
Would it be possible to build a computer that’s as intuitive as a book? Probably not a general purpose computer, although it seems possible that one might be able to construct a computing appliance that’s pretty close in its limited domain.
Big ups to KK for passing along a link to this pointer.
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