Timothy Wu writes really thoughtful posts about technology for the New Yorker’s “Elements” blog that I enjoy reading even though I usually disagree with them philosophically. Case in point: His latest piece questions whether the ease of technology will weaken us. I agree that certain abilities disappear without focus and repetition, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Some tools are intended to teach and others just to provide utility. (And I think both kinds will exist as long as we exist.) I don’t think our minds aren’t meant to naturally handle a fixed set of immutable tasks but to continually evolve past them into more significant challenges. I remember hearing senior citizens complain about digital watches when I was a child. “Kids today don’t even know how to tell time,” they’d say. Most of those children grew up to be much more sophisticated thinkers than their elders. Perhaps pocket watches or wind-up wrist models looked classier and provided more aesthetic satisfaction, but it’s good we had the option to move past them. Evolution will always lead us to new tools and our challenges will change, but I think finding challenges is hardwired into us. The opening of Wu’s piece:

“In the history of marketing, there’s a classic tale that centers on the humble cake mix. During the nineteen-fifties, there were differences of opinion over how ‘instant’ powdered cake mixes should be, and, in particular, over whether adding an egg ought to be part of the process. The first cake mixes, invented in the nineteen-thirties, merely required water, and some people argued that this approach, the easiest, was best. But others thought bakers would want to do more. Urged on by marketing psychologists, Betty Crocker herself began to instruct housewives to ‘add water, and two of your own fresh eggs.’

The cake-mix debate may be dated, but its central question remains: Just how demanding do we want our technologies to be? It is a question faced by the designers of nearly every tool, from tablet computers to kitchen appliances. A dominant if often unexamined logic favors making everything as easy as possible. Innovators like Alan Kay and Steve Jobs are celebrated for making previously daunting technologies usable by anyone. It may be hard to argue with easy, yet, as the add-an-egg saga suggests, there’s something deeper going on here.

The choice between demanding and easy technologies may be crucial to what we have called technological evolution.”