Are our tools making us dumber?

It's lunchtime at the cafe and you give the cashier a $20 bill for an $8 purchase. She gives you $32.78 in change. You mention the mistake. She says, "But that's what the cash register says I owe you." She can't cope with the cognitive dissonance between reality and What The Machine Said. Later that day you get a frantic call from a co-worker--a recent addition to the programming team. "I keep getting this error message that it can't find the classes I'm using!" You ask, "By 'it' do you mean the compiler?" He answers "I don't know. I'm using an IDE." That night, you're helping your 12-year old son with his math homework when you realize--in horror--that while he's quite good with the calculator, he couldn't multiply two three-digit numbers using only paper and pencil if his Wii depended on it. These tools were designed to make us more efficient, so that we can focus on something more important than the tedious task of, say, giving change, organizing source code, and doing calculations. But are they helpful timesavers, or are we dumbing ourselves--and our users--down?

Obviously this depends greatly on the tool, the operator, and the task itself. If we all had to understand what every tool was doing/hiding for us, we'd waste brain bandwidth that could be used for something more important--like what we're using the tool for. But in my examples above, think about how fragile the user's ability is if they don't understand what the cash register, IDE, or calculator is really doing. Without that understanding, what happens if the tool stops working? (In college I worked in a small surfboard shop in SLO, California, and the owner said, "I don't care what happens to the cash register, always take the customer's money!" Power outage? Use a damn cardboard box for the cash drawer until it comes back up...)

But should a web designer need to be an HTML coder? Or can he just use a WYSIWYG tool? The debates still rage in the web development world, although the issue should be resolved soon enough. In desktop publishing, for example, you will never hear, "Oh, you can't just use Quark or Adobe InDesign... you really need to tweak the Postscript by hand to do it right."

Some people think even automatic transmissions are dumbing people down. (I've offered to let friends borrow my car and I'm always shocked when I hear, "No, I can't drive a stick.") A flight instructor friend said there are some planes they don't want you to learn on, because those planes do too much for you. Some people think convenience foods like TV dinners are keeping generations from learning to cook. My sister's boyfriend could fix his own VW bus, but that was before cars became computers, before master mechanics were often reduced to part-orderers.

Tools can reduce errors, handle the tedious work, and potentially let us spend more time in flow. Still, when I see those cashiers and programmers, I think we need to keep a few things in mind:

Tool developers
If you make a tool that's hiding things the user should understand, maybe you could provide a tutorial or even an understanding mode where the user can ask the tool exactly what it's doing and how it made the decisions it made. But there's another issue for tool developers, and that's where passion comes in. Consider a point-and-shoot digital camera with presets for things like Portrait, Sunny Day, etc. The camera hides the complexity of making adjustments for exposure, white balance, etc. For most people, that's the whole point of these cameras--they don't WANT to mess with the settings of an SLR. But it's staying in point-and-shoot mode that keeps most people from developing a passion for photography (and ultimately, buying more expensive cameras and lenses).

But what if you could use your point-and-shoot as a way to learn more about photography? It would be so helpful if you could put the camera into a kind of "teach me" mode, where it explained what it adjusted and why it did it. That would make a great bridge to help you feel more confident moving into a (more expensive) digital SLR and avoiding what most first-time SLR owners do--keep it in program/automatic mode.

Tool teachers
Consider forcing students to do some things the old-fashioned way before letting them get their hands on the tool that'll automate much of the drudgery. My first semester of college stats wouldn't let us use computer apps for anything. Just us and our HP calculators. I hated it. But by the time we started running (and writing) our own programs, we had no doubt what was happening at each step and how to troubleshoot. When I teach Java, I always teach it using nothing but a simple text editor and the command-line. I do advocate tools for development, but never, never, NEVER for someone who doesn't understand Java at a fundamental level (compiler options, packages, namespaces, access modifiers, etc.)

Tool users
90% of the time we probably don't need to know how things work under the covers. I only barely understand why 747's ever leave the ground. I've never changed my own motor oil. (I have, she says proudly, topped off my windshield wiper fluid.) But I shouldn't think about putting a bit in my horse's mouth before I understand everything from horse anatomy to the principles of leverage that bit was designed for. I don't have to know how to create a microchip to use this MacBook, but if I don't understand the basics of its UNIX OS underpinnings, I can get into trouble figuring out where things are, how to set up security, etc. And just because there's one Starbucks per every 20 square feet in the US does NOT mean you shouldn't know how to make good, strong coffee the old-fashioned way.

Just something to think about, and as always... I'd love to hear your thoughts about tools, dumbing down, and strong coffee.

[FYI: I'm travelling right now, so if you're waiting on email, I'm hoping to catch up by the end of the week.]