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Possibly nothing like anything we would recognise except at the most basic level I think. It’s possible to imagine their equivalent to a GUI is entirely unlike

Possibly nothing like anything we would recognise except at the most basic level I think. It’s possible to imagine their equivalent to a GUI is entirely unlike ours, flat screens work for us because of our visual cortex and narrow field of view/depth perception framework essentially been tricked. A UI for a something intelligent with a compound eye or ten eyes or whatnot could be very different. Not to mention if we give said aliens hundreds of years of computers, they would likely arrive at something akin to a neural interface, I mean a computer as a direct expansion of your cognitive ability has to be the end point in user interfaces, you don’t even have to think about how to translate what’s in your head into something the computer can understand parse, you manipulate it as easily as thinking of a pink elephant in a tutu, it is just there. It would also likely be heavily influenced by their psychology. What would be fun is trying to create a router between our systems and theirs down the line. We’ve had electric computers for a blink in time compared to the wheel, lot of places to go between a Ryzen 3950X and computronium.

pfarrell 6y ago
> I mean a computer as a direct expansion of your cognitive ability has to be the end point in user interfaces, William Gibson hints at something similar to this in the graduate work of a character in the short story “Dogfight”[0] from the excellent collection “Burning Chrome”. I think before that, the act of programming will be supplemented by AI and will become more descriptive than procedural. I think about SQL, where you typically describe the shape of the data and relationships you want, rather than how to get it. The database then creates a query plan... effectively a “program”, compiles it, then executes it. I think programming will become more like that, on its way to what you describe. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogfight_(short_story) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogfight_(short_story)
- noir_lord 6y ago
  I'm familiar with Burning Chrome, I read it when it came out (after 9yo me figured out how to get to the library on my own and ask the nice lady behind the counter how to order books in - my mum disliked the former part but was impressed with the latter - she was even handed, I got grounded for a week but since I spent most of my time in my room reading I realise now that was superb parenting).

pfarrell 6y ago

> I mean a computer as a direct expansion of your cognitive ability has to be the end point in user interfaces, William Gibson hints at something similar to this in the graduate work of a character in the short story “Dogfight”[0] from the excellent collection “Burning Chrome”. I think before that, the act of programming will be supplemented by AI and will become more descriptive than procedural. I think about SQL, where you typically describe the shape of the data and relationships you want, rather than how to get it. The database then creates a query plan... effectively a “program”, compiles it, then executes it. I think programming will become more like that, on its way to what you describe. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogfight_(short_story) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogfight_(short_story)

noir_lord 6y ago
I'm familiar with Burning Chrome, I read it when it came out (after 9yo me figured out how to get to the library on my own and ask the nice lady behind the counter how to order books in - my mum disliked the former part but was impressed with the latter - she was even handed, I got grounded for a week but since I spent most of my time in my room reading I realise now that was superb parenting).