Stuart Johnson

In discussions about AI capabilities, there's a human aspect of how people access those capabilities which I think is important regardless of whether or not you're an AI doomer. Interface design can seem banal, but I think it's fundamental to how people interact with the singularity. I. When Apple invented the mouse, consumers didn't automatically know how to use it. Apple's hunch was that the quality ceiling of mouse-based interactions would be much higher than terminal or keyboard-based navigation because of the intuitiveness. They were right. They won again with the touchscreen; both interfaces are now ubiquitous. But this was the first Apple mouse. In both cases, although a new kind of input had been created, it took much longer for optimal ergonomics to develop. 40 years on, I think it's unlikely a mouse will ever release that is a substantial advance on ergonomics invented in the early 2010s - the Logitech G502 comes to mind. I think if you held an early mouse from any manufacturer, you'd feel that this is not the final form immediately. Importantly, the barrier to making better mice wasn't the technology - mice are conceptually pretty simple, the interfaces needed already existed, and there's nothing special about the hardware. What took time was the development of software patterns that could take advantage of this new method of input. It took 12 years from the release of the first mouse for the standard two-buttons-and-a-wheel design to catch on. > Back in 1993, as I was watching many Excel users do their work, I noticed the difficulty they had moving around large spreadsheets. Finding and jumping to different sections was often difficult. I had the idea that perhaps a richer input device would help. > > My original idea was the zoom lever. This was simply a lever, presumably for your non-mouse hand (i.e. on the left side of your keyboard if you're right-handed). When you push it away from you the spreadsheet zooms out. When you pull it towards you