3 ms·
Clippy was the beginning of today's dark era, not a relic of some past golden age. With Clippy, users were conditioned to accept computers attempting to anticip
by bitwize 11mo ago
Clippy was the beginning of today's dark era, not a relic of some past golden age. With Clippy, users were conditioned to accept computers attempting to anticipate, guide, and shape the user's actions rather than responding to user commands.
For close to 3 decades we've been locked in a philosophical war with Microsoft (vendors in general) over what these stupid machines should really be doing for us, that parallels the exchange between Dr. Gibbs and Ed Dillinger in Tron (1982):
Us: User requests are what computers are for.
Microsoft: Doing our [specifically Microsoft's] business is what computers are for!
If I had a YouTube pfp, I'd change it to Tron—not Clippy.
- Anamon 11mo agoIt still left the choice of whether we wanted that guidance up to us users, though. It was auto-enabled to make users aware of the feature (and because it mainly targetted the more tech-illiterate). But if we didn't want it, we could turn it off, and if we did, we could ask for those suggestions. To me, that's a qualitative difference to the M.O. of big tech today. Google doesn't care whether I want an AI summary or not. In fact, they work hard to remove any option for me to express that I don't want it.