Hate is a complex emotion. It can destroy the hater while leaving its subject (thief, tyrant, rapist, sadist) completely unperturbed. Hate includes a component of dread not seen outside of illness, famine, or torture.
In the real world, evil usually wins.
Often, hate is the only appropriate emotion.
This article is about solving software. Computers remain so unusable, unreliable and outright defective that many users would sentence the programmers to death if they could.
This is by design. These people are actually evil. To me computer programmers are the world's top devils.
* The problem is controlling the program, persuading it do any specific task.
Programmers are 'bottom-up' experts who care less about 'top-down' interface design. They deliberately make their users dependent by forcing them to learn proprietary interface methods, while making them pay to upgrade often. Agony breeds loyalty.
Windows 8 & 10 programmers deserve to be shot after a fair trial. They think of their software as a community or a lifestyle instead of a tool. They are tools.
* The first interface barrier is the keyboard. This pain is also known as 'touch typing'. Keyboards were invented before touch typing but adapted for this dark art, making them impractical for hunt and peck typers. A billion unskilled typists keep hitting the wrong keys, which might not happen if they were bigger or further apart, or had barriers between them, or were angled differently, or any other innovation. Touchscreens are worse than anything though.
Learning touch-typing can be harder (often impossible) than human skills like quantum interpretations or Basque palindromes.
* Online user interfaces are completely arbitrary.
Like the world, the Net remains shockingly primitive (see PayPal or Bitcoin), defined by what a user can't do. Tracking visitors, web layouts, recording what's onscreen (the DMCA doesn't like that at all), and data backups are deliberately made agonizing for non-experts. Each tool is a trial by fire.
* The greatest censorship innovation is the network rule that bandwidth must be paid for by the content provider instead of the downloader. Around 2004 came the Web 2.0 of irritating 'rich' media and 'streaming' content to better control information. User options have been stealthily reduced to make users more dependent. Mobile devices are beyond crap if you want to control your own data. Individual websites of the 1990s are an ancient memory. The Net now exists for the benefit of social and corporate media collecting user data.
* In many ways, the future will suck. Inefficiencies will only increase as society becomes more complex. Users won't even notice as barriers become mandatory standards, like how dictionaries don't include brand names. For some reason, almost no one complains about ever more bloated Javascript and adspam encrusted websites.
* To become less malevolent, software should become dumber, but with more lists. Dumb is easy: a simple but predictable personality like 'Rain Man'.
The future will be chaotic. Now is the time to consider standards based on things humans still have in common.
Ideally, there should be only one program environment, a format to connect all data, simplifying interactions like a nervous system.
The web could be divided into "data atoms" that could be reassembled as needed (each element text-readable). All files could be described through a universal comment layer. Every link could have independent descriptions. Self-updating, text-based link lists, and so on . . .
* Simple solutions are better. Software designers shouldn't even talk to each other, but communicate by text to simplify their thoughts. Linear communication makes it harder to squeeze in hidden assumptions.
Instead of repetitive clicks or swipes, software should work faster with face scanners, muscle interfaces, and eventually brain interfaces.
* Everyone could evolve their own interface, instead of a standard OS packaged by a secretive corporation.
Applications should simplify themselves in response to each user, by backing up and sorting old content, arranging bookmarks and file hierarchies, and identifying common tasks and describing them in flowcharts, with the goal of fully automating them.
* This is a long way off. At the moment, society is splintering faster than software is improving.
The solution for humans to cooperate may be to lie better - i.e. diplomacy. Manners took most of history to evolve, but can be forgotten much faster.
Social taboos and delayed gratification are necessary to share space with people even with similar goals and outlooks. Unfortunately, that won't work anymore when diversity increases faster than rules can be learned.
* This can already be seen online. The Net is fracturing like the real world.
Japanese and Chinese web services are only available to users with Japanese emails. What's happening over there? Social networks invent their own codes. If we're lucky, the first virtual nation may start as some exclusive online environment. The first virtual war will begin soon after.
* The penultimate goal of computer science (before human-level AI) should be life management software. It would help people cooperate by identifying traits, norms, and cultural aptitudes held in common by different users.
It would set the user's schedule, track every activity, test their personality, and try to improve it. Every user would be constantly analyzed and compared to standard personality profiles, based on their interests and habits.
* Ideally, everything would become functionally transparent and user serviceable. This applies to their physical environment as well.
Simplifying to the extreme, future geeks may inhabit live-in boxes with exposed utility pipes and stilt-mounted foundations: a simple paradise compared to the unpredictable lives people have endured throughout history. Instead, they would enjoy some sort of information-existence in cyberspace, still a very remote dream.
* One problem with integrated life control software is that it could be used by the powers-that-be to monitor and enslave their subjects.
The only way to prevent these records from being successfully subpoenaed would be to encrypt them. This could be done by auto-compilation: making the life-management software totally dependent on each user's unique personality and habits. The files and settings would make no sense to anyone else.
* Eventually, privacy concerns will of course become irrelevant. If history is a guide, most people will want to join the Borg Collective.
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