User Interfaces
In this podcast, we explore user interfaces. Specifically, we discuss the development, integration, progress and limitations of interfaces, and consider what could be next. ChatGPT with a brain? Neuralink? Tom Cruise's desk in Minority Report?
A few things we mentioned in this podcast:
- Smartphone typing speeds catching up with keyboards
- The rate of inner speech
- Content Agility 2013 - Minority Report UI [Congility]
For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email podcast@alephinsights.com
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare, Peter Coghill and Jordan Fermanis of Aleph, and this week we're discussing touchscreens. Nick, off you go. Well, I don't know about you, but I find them boring. I just think they're boring black squares. And the other day... When they're off, they are. Well, yes, I mean... You need to start turning them on. I was looking at a, for some reason, looking into like the design of linotype machines. My dad used to be a journalist, so I'm kind of fascinated by this idea. What's a linotype? It was basically a keyboard that produced hot metal pieces, letters. So it had molten lead up there. And when you pressed a button, it would cast the letter you needed and it would drop down and it would basically cast a bunch of letters into what was called a slug and that would then go onto a printing block to be printed. So it's a really fast way of composing, you know, print blocks for newspapers and stuff. OK. It's really good. Really, you know, lovely machines, these things, really kind of all mechanical. They've got molten metal in them. And just how... Like steampunk. Exactly. I was going to say, it sounds very steampunk. And, you know, of course, these days, all of that is digital and any interface you have is just going to be another bit of touchscreen with software on it and how boring it is. And I just wondered if, you know, is touchscreens it? Because it feels like they came out about 15 years ago, took the world over and that's it. Like, is there something else that we can look forward to that might make them interesting again? Or is it just, is everything in the future, is all interfaces just going to be a bloody touchscreen? This sounds so Petery, all this stuff. If only he was here. Wait a minute, who's that guy? There he is. OK, so how are we going to frame this? What are we going to talk about?
Speaker B: one and the iPod touch around: Speaker A:Was the technology. So I don't want to keep going.
Speaker B: of video rise of YouTube was: Speaker A:Yeah, I think it's interesting that I think if I was just asked off the top of my head, what have been the big, you know, developments in technology over the last, you know, 20, 30 years, I'd probably just say, you know, faster memory and faster computation. But actually, the interesting things about touchscreens and what Peter's touched on there is there's a load of actually kind of electromechanical inventions that had to exist for the smartphone, for all of these things to happen, you know, in the physicality of like things like small cameras and, you know, the digital camera technology and the GPS, you know, detector and the compasses. So there are different types.
Speaker B:I think most of them now are, it's a sort of grid of capacitive sensors. So it senses something kind of fleshy and wet.
Speaker A:Are they tuned to us or is it just that we happen through sheer luck to work on touchscreens? It must be tuned to us.
Speaker B:Well, touchscreens weren't discovered in some ancient tomb.
Speaker A:But you know how like it doesn't work if I just use that pen on it, it wouldn't detect it. But could you just change some settings and it would detect pens?
Speaker B:You'd probably have to tune the component to be sensitive to something that's in pens. But yeah, the principle would still apply.
Speaker A:So just a back of the envelope calculation, mind-blowing number. I took Peter's figure of, I think you said four billion, roughly, smartphones have been produced. And then I doubled it for things like iPads and other interfaces in McDonald's. I think that comes out about 8,000 football pitches of touchscreen. So if we wanted to put them all down into one big massive touchscreen, it would be the size of 8,000 football pitches. That's pretty big. Yeah, and I did a similar calculation that would stretch the moon and back about seven times. Well, it's an area, of course. So what you're describing is the length. Yeah, but I would want to do it. Fair enough. It would cover an area of 8,000 football pitches on the moon. Well, but it would also be 807 Isle of Wights is what it would be as well. So great history. Because I've got a question, but Jordan, is anything at this point?
Speaker C:Not at this point, but I guess the thing I sort of like what Nick was saying, but I think the combination of infrared sensors and, I guess, algorithms offers this prospect, I suppose, of really advanced multi-touch, which I think is an interesting... It's like a confluence of two different fields to then produce this one technology.
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely. Great. So therefore... There's actually a really useful app for board gamers out there called Chwazi, I think, which entirely relies on the multi-touch idea. But, you know, choosing who goes first or which order people are going to play in a board game, it's a bit of a pain in the arse. I mean, I've got a really nice set of dice which are designed so that everyone has an equal chance of coming first, second, the third, or whatever. But that only goes up to four. Anyways, there's an app where everyone puts their fingers on the phone, and it just sort of randomly chooses one person's finger. Really? It's really good, yeah. I like that. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly the kind of thing where you think, well, we've got this technology. Working out who goes first in a board game is not the kind of thing the designers probably had in mind. But... Send me the app, I want to see it. Yeah, we'll have a go on it later. Yeah. What you could also do is... I'll let you have this one. Or we can do it together, co-author this. But you could invent a dice that is more than four sides, perhaps. Four sides? Yeah, yeah, I know. Amazing idea. So, look, touchscreens. When we're talking interfaces, it's been nailed. It's been done. They're fantastic. We've reached perfection in terms of tech evolution. Yes?
Speaker C:There are issues with them, I think.
Speaker A:Aha, okay. This is what I want to go into. What's wrong with them? Actually, sitting all of us here, there's four of us. We've all got groovy phones. We've all got touchscreens. But as we look, I have got a laptop, which I'm not using. I'm resting a bit of pen and paper on it, right? That's my interface. Jordan's got a laptop, okay? Which I don't think it's got a touchscreen. I've got a Chromebook, actually. It has a touchscreen. Oh, it's got a touchscreen as well? Yeah, yeah. Peter, we all know what he's got. He's always got his touchscreen with some sort of fancy pens. He's probably got a stylus or something. Yeah, he does have a stylus. Nick, he's maverick. He's like me. He's old school. He's got pen and paper. I've got the Mitsubishi Pencil Company's Uniball Micro. It's the only pen I ever use. I feel really discombobulated. I haven't got one of these on me. I haven't got mine with me because you converted me to them. Well, I just did. It wasn't back of the envelope. It was front of podcast notes. Yes. That calculation would have taken me ages if I'd have had to do it through a touchscreen. Because there are plenty of times I don't like to use a touchscreen. I prefer a different... Well, we just mentioned now, right? Someone pick this up, what I'm trying to put down here. What are the alternatives and why might not we like them? And I don't know if we want to project into the future stuff. And also just random... Well, not randomly. Two words for you. Minority report. Yeah, we'll get to that. Yeah. Where do you want to go with all this?
Speaker B:I think Nick's got a list, but I'd like to talk about a couple that I'm really excited about. That aren't really... They haven't really... Future stuff. Future stuff. So one is speech. We have speech interfaces, but they're all a bit rubbish. I'm thinking Alexa's and Google Homes and things.
Speaker A:Yeah, try writing a technical report through speech. Yeah, I don't... Really hard. Oh, no, reword that. Go back five words.
Speaker B:Yeah, what's missing though? I think, yeah, writing a technical report might be difficult for a speech interface. But what they would be amazing for is things which are a bit more discursive. So you might have heard of ChatGPT. Nope. Sam Altman is very keen on the idea of pairing ChatGPT with a speech interface. So basically, give Alexa a brain, really. That, I think, would lend itself to all sorts of... Shenanigans. Tasks. So where conversation would be more natural to it. So for example, like coaching and finding out about a topic. It's very natural for us to want to have a chat about a thing that we don't know about to learn about it. So just having a sort of meandering discussion with ChatGPT. What are the barriers to that at the moment? Not... It feels doable. It feels doable. There's probably apps out there that do it now. You'd need to sort of parameterize the prompts for ChatGPT to keep it short. Because the prompts are, by default, quite long. You'd want it to be tuned to be more discursive rather than ask a question, get a big long answer. But I bet there's bound to be people working on it. And I think OpenAI are working on it. That is exciting. So I'm really excited about that. Because I can imagine a world where I just have an earpiece all the time and I'm just constantly chatting with ChatGPT. The other one I'm really excited about is direct brain-computer interfaces. So a big one is Neuralink, Elon Musk's Neuralink. And it all sounds a bit... Have pop-up ads creeping straight into your brain. Yeah, well, that's a dystopian possibility. But yeah, it does sound all a bit creepy and kind of transhuman. But I think that could unlock a whole new, another vast dimension of possibilities that we haven't considered. Like the touchscreens have done. But more so.
Speaker A:Just by chance, I was listening to a report on the radio this morning that was, I think it was to do with people who had limbs sort of removed or weren't born with them. And robotics and how it linked. I think it's the same thing that you're talking about there. It is. It's thoughts translating immediately to movements. So I think there are some fundamental limits we want to look at. But just before you do, any other ones, Peter?
Speaker B:No, just those two. Those are the ones that really, really excite me. And I can't wait to get a neural link.
Speaker C:Yeah. I think another one, I guess, is VR headsets, I suppose. I mean, Apple just brought out their Vision Pro thing. I think that's another possibility of a technology that could be on the brink of being very widespread and popularised soon.
Speaker A:No, quite. And I think, yeah, it is a good moment for Nick to come in on limits. And I guess there's also, there's, you know, it's an obvious thing to say, but I mean, there's the tech, but there's us. There's the interface-ees, as it were. Yeah, Nick? Yeah. Well, I'll present some analysis I've done, and then we can discuss that exact issue. Okay. So a keyboard, which is my favourite interface. I'm pretty good at typing. I measured my speed this morning. It was 84 words a minute, which apparently works out about 10 keystrokes a second, which I found surprisingly fast. You could make it as a secretary and then stuff. I know. I wouldn't mind doing that. And that's when you're copying text. And we'll get onto when you're actually writing text in a minute. But that means that it works out about 70 bits a second. And if you want it, so if you want to think about what that means, how many binary digits, zeros or ones, would you need to capture what I'd done in one second? And you would need about 70 bits, extraordinarily. Each keystroke carries about seven bits of info. No idea what you're talking about, but keep going. You need, how many keys are there? Roughly 100 keys, which means you need about seven binary digits to describe which key I pressed. Okay. So 10 keystrokes in one second equals about 70 binary digits to describe one second of my activity on a keyboard. That's right. Right. Smartphone. Extraordinarily, to my mind, the people can get up to typing speeds on a smartphone. I think they're about a quarter slower than on a mechanic or, sorry, on a… Surely this is young folk, but keep going. Well, yes. And apparently it really comes down to, are you a single finger person or a two thumbs person? And to my daughter's horror, she discovered that I was a single finger person. I didn't even know there was a two thumbs method. And my kids, of course, are two thumbs people and they are really fast. Apparently, the fastest person measured in this study I read did 85 words a minute. So that person was typing faster on their smartphone than I can as a quite fast typist on a keyboard. Mouse. Now, I mean, we're going to talk about gesture control probably, but a mouse is gesture control, really. It's with a sort of limited palette of gestures. Clicks are obviously one bit. Is it if I clicked or not? Right. And apparently people do something when people are playing computer games and, like, firing their guns and stuff. I think they typically do about 100 clicks a minute or something. But, of course, the mouse also tells you about direction because you can move it around or position it in a particular point on the screen. And doing some back of the enveloping, I thought, well, you can probably… What's my resolution to communicate something to you? I reckon whether or not the mouse is capable of distinguishing, of course, it is. I can probably tell you to go in one of eight directions, broadly, and I think if I had to communicate how fast you should go, I could do potentially three speeds. What I'm saying is that I'm limiting here. I just simply don't have the physical resolution to tell you it's 276 degrees. So I work that out about five bits. And if I could change that, if I could wiggle it around to communicate 10 of those per second, lo and behold, it comes actually up to similar. We're back to somewhere between 50 and 100 bits a second. Speaking, another interface that we use when we're talking to other humans or, in Peter's case, robots, I think is a bit low. It comes out about 25 bits a second. But I think there is redundancy in speech. So in other words, we speak slower than we can type and read. But they do say phrases. Just sorry, I'm helping to summarise and frame this on my mind. But you can't summarise, you can't finish. No, wait, wait, wait, wait. You're addressing this from a point of view of information capacity, it feels like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How much can we pump through an interface? That's what this is all about. Apparently, in a speech, I've got no idea how they, someone has claimed that in a speech, it can be up to 4,000 words a minute. So you think at 4,000 words a minute. I'm not sure that's how it works. But if true, that suggests that it's about 10 times faster.
Speaker B:That sounds a bit back of the envelope. Oh, well, a picture paints a thousand words. How many pictures can you generate?
Speaker A:Well, there's that, but this is your thought process. But I know certainly reading for me is way faster than speaking. I would believe it's 10 times faster than speaking. How much can we process then? Right, so this depends. Apparently, we are actually taking in and effectively processing something like 11 billion bits of info a second. And that's through sound and sight and touch and all of the same. You add it all up. So the amount of info we're consuming is about 11 billion.
Speaker B:I think that's the amount that's presented right at the sensor, but it immediately gets filtered.
Speaker A:So then what are we consciously processing? They think about 40 to 50 bits per second. So the amount... So where am I going with this? Aha, here's the big reveal. I think we have a persistent idea that if only we could get the interface right, we could somehow magically improve our ability to communicate through computers as though the interface is a barrier. But the interface is an enabler. The interfaces can go a lot faster than we can. And so even if the sort of speed of thought is 4,000 words per minute, the speed of composed output, the speed of the thing that I want to express, I think we're at the limit already, right? So really, we're just arguing about user experience. We're not going to... I don't think there is out there an interface which is going to magically be able to double the speed at which I can do stuff. We're back to our old friend, you know, the sort of processing problem, right? Which, yeah. Yeah, that's the limit. It was us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice. Okay. So where does this leave that? Jordan?
Speaker C:What about like interfaces like exoskeletons or like prosthetic limbs for people that don't... Like if you have a disability and it gives you... I think there are things that could...
Speaker A:Yeah, well, hold on. Sorry, can I just sort of just frame us where we are, right? So we're talking about interfaces. Oh, sorry. We're specifically talking about touchscreens. Hey, aren't they great? We're using that as a platform to sort of... We've looked at the history of that, but also exploring other interfaces, right? We've looked a little bit at potential future interfaces. We've talked about limitations. And I think that was nicely done, Nick, in terms of, you know, explaining what a key limitation is. And so, yeah, where are we... What do we want to move this onto now?
Speaker B:Just about the challenge, Nick's assertion that there are limits that can't be broken.
Speaker A:Okay, so do we want... Because I was actually rather swayed by Nick on that. So has he got it, you know... Do we want to push back on that?
Speaker C:Well, I just think there are some interfaces that can... Like an exoskeleton, for example, allows you to lift a heavier load than you can physically do so without it. So I think that would be like an upgrade in terms of your physical capabilities. A body-integrated interface, it's like a bionic limb. So a prosthetic limb for amputees, for example, allows them to function at a level that is more sophisticated than they could otherwise.
Speaker A:So you're quite right, because the way Nick has sort of framed that particular bit was in terms of information capacity, right? But interface is not always just about... I'm sure Nick would say it's not just about that, right?
Speaker B:And even the information capacity, there's an implicit assumption there that everything has to pass through your conscious mind in order to be useful. So I could imagine a Neuralink-like interface that bypasses your conscious brain to directly inject information into memories that you can then later access. So you could basically say, oh, download the information about this topic for me from the internet. It forms memories for you that you can then recall.
Speaker A:Can I get the memories of a trip to Mars as a secret agent? I want to have an adventure and get in trouble, but be safe eventually.
Speaker B:So I don't think it necessarily needs to pass through your conscious mind for it to become part of your knowledge, right? You could have knowledge just patched in.
Speaker A:Well, I think, Ben, I think Peter's got the nub of what the future might hold here. Basically, we're talking about doing something different with interfaces than anything we've done before. So what is that? Peter's sketched out some use cases. I think it might be worth delving into that. But there's just a couple of things I want to cover off about sort of gesture. I think Jordan's touched on this thing about, yes, of course, you can connect an interface to a prosthetic limb. I can use a smartphone to detonate a bomb if I want to. But the interface is still only getting a certain amount of information from me. And I think it's effectively connecting it directly to my nerves is kind of gesture control in a way, in the sense that you're sending physical signals through your body to do things. But I want to ask what Tom Cruise is doing in Minority Report, right? Because everyone sort of thinks that's the holy grail is this kind of, you know, we don't have to do all that messy typing again. He's got his gloves on. I'll tell you what he's doing. He's sliding things around. He's just rearranging his desktop. I don't get it. I don't get what he's supposed to be doing that it makes all of this necessary. It looks slower. He's just, well, it looks to me like he's rifling through a filing cabinet or something. I mean, is he able to consume information faster mysteriously because of this? I don't see how that enables him to consume information faster. Peter's idea might work, but just getting information on a screen, I don't think we, again, it's not like, yeah, magically flashing loads of things up makes me able to process that information faster. Unless, and I don't know if this is something we want to move into, which is our experience physically and psychologically. And to me, I look at that and it looks like, well, there's no feedback loop. I don't see any sort of, you know, am I, I need some resistance, but maybe he's getting some feedback. There we go. That's what I'm looking for. And maybe that's what he's getting. We just don't see it. It looks a bit unsatisfactory, just waving your arms around in the air. Sorry, the other thing I want to talk, just briefly mentioned voice control. Peter likes talking to robots because they're much better. They're much more interesting than humans.
Speaker B:They fail in much more predictable ways. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker A:I feel like a total penis when I have to talk to a computer. And I've managed to work out why. When I was a little kid and I used to go to kind of, you know, local fairs and things, there would be some guy dressed up as a cartoon character and he would want to come and interact with people, right? I used to hate that. I found it so cringey. And the reason was that I didn't want them to think that I thought that they were real. I didn't want them to think that I was stupid enough to think that they really were Deputy Dawg or whatever, right? I know that that's a guy in there. And that is exactly how talking to a computer makes me feel now. I feel like the computer thinks that I think it's a real person. And I don't. I'd rather just press buttons to get it to do things. I don't hate interacting with computers through talking to them. It makes me feel like a moron. It's like when you're sat there and it says, oh, for say, if you want banking services, say two and you go two. It's infantilising. I don't know.
Speaker B:Yeah, I think that's very much an early generation problem with voice interfaces. I think when a voice interface is fairly indistinguishable from having a chat with someone who knows something about a topic that you want to find out about, you will change your mind because it will feel it will pass. So, you know, once it's past the uncanny valley and the earlier parts, which is where it's just crap and it's got to be human like then.
Speaker C:But to get there, we're going to have to endure like sort of with chat JPT, like all the prompts are so polite. And it's not someone you actually want to have a conversation with. It'd be a really annoying person to talk to. So I feel like the first few generations of this voice. It's important to remember that it's going to be frustrating until we break through that and we can actually talk to someone that resembles what an interesting person sounds like.
Speaker A:Yeah, the tone of chat JPT reminds me of like Vox explainers and things. It's like, you know, it's all like, well, although alfalfa sprouts have got three types of vitamins in and here's why. That's a good thing. You know, it's all like that. But yeah, where do we want to go with this? Where do we want to go? Give me one second. I think I'm sorry, but I just want to say, how are you going to have a voice interface in an office or on the tube or even at home when there's three of you, you know, in different rooms and you're all shouting your heads off trying to get a computer to do something? I think it could get really I just don't see it ever taking off for that reason. It's that kind of thing. It's like the VR, the idea that we could somehow operate systematically in VR. And then you say, what happens if I want to drink my tea? Do I have to kind of lift that up? And how do I? Yeah. Well, look, it's a context thing, isn't it? Because sometimes with the. We lose, I think we lose sight of the like, just the pure convenience of touching a thing that's. No, of course. But it feels like that, you know, sometimes I prefer touch screen. Sometimes I prefer voice. Sometimes I prefer pen and paper. And, you know, we don't we're not shackled to just one method of interface, and it might be the case, you know, that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's that's it really. Right.
Speaker C:I think I think that is it. I think maybe like a customizable dashboard of interfaces that you you can you can select which ones you want to use for your given task. Like, maybe it's a feedback system. Maybe you want to do a voice recognition. And you just you just get to select the one that suits your task the most.
Speaker A:Yeah, look, so what are we going to go on to? Because I want to I think Peter's put forward, I think it's something which is a step forward rather rather than just I think all of this is rearranging deck chairs when we're talking about different interfaces for the reasons I think we've discussed. It's like, OK, it's the same business. I mean, bloody touch screen. How do you interact with it? Mainly because it pretends to be a keyboard, you know, it's like these things are not doing something revolutionary. But if right, what do we want? I want to know from Peter how you would what would be the desired behaviour from a direct neural link into your brain? You've mentioned like getting getting memories inserted without without bothering going through your conscious mind. Do you? Are you sure?
Speaker B:Yeah, I think that would be as long as there was some way of I want the memories to be tagged to it. So I always knew that it was a false memory. But if I could access that noise directly, that would be truly incredible. The other another mode that I've thought about is a sort of virtual reality like mode where it can provide me a basically a screen that I can then interact with inside your brain.
Speaker A:Yeah, you've got that. It's called your eyes.
Speaker B:Yeah, well, yeah, but it projects onto my visual system. A sort of full screen. But which eyes do you use to look around it? Let's let's use a sort of that you train in sort of inner eye to sort of scan around it.
Speaker C:Is that rather than an implant? So there's no like, you're not actually getting?
Speaker B:No, it would be implanted, but it'd be integrated with my visual cortex to provide me with a sort of screen in front of me. Peter, have you heard of the homuncular fallacy?
Speaker A:Well, it's it's a kind of idea in philosophy where we see ourselves as basically a little person inside our brain receiving information as though we're looking at a screen. And then, of course, the reason it's a fallacy is you then go, but how is that little guy looking? What's he using to look at the screen? Has he got some other eyes? In which case, what's watching what's coming through those eyes? That's I think I think actually, it sounds like you could look a bit like the Terminator, you know, when he's going around and there's like words appearing and it says this person is a threat. I cannot understand. I can't imagine how it's supposed to work. Say more about how it's supposed to work, like give me a use case and how you would actually interact with it.
Speaker B:Well, so projecting is like augmented reality information as like an overlay on my view of the world. So a simple example might be just when you are following directions by Google Maps, having some sort of indicator of where I need to turn and direct next.
Speaker A:Yeah. All the names of people, names of people, names of people. That'd be handy.
Speaker B:Like I might go, so, oh, that looks interesting. Tell me about that. And it could give me some visual overlay on it.
Speaker A:But imagine that's actually in your eyes. Where is the information actually? Like, where does it appear?
Speaker C:What's just in your brain?
Speaker B:Well, it wouldn't. Yeah, I think my description of it being like a sort of screen, VR screen is perhaps not correct. What I'm saying is that that information is injected into my visual pathway in a way that affects how I see the world to give me more useful information beyond what my senses can provide.
Speaker A:I mean, I know that, and I'm going back to philosophy again here, but I know that my philosophy professor actually used Terminator as an example of that's not how thinking works. Like, it's not like there's a thing in front of. As far as the Terminator is concerned, as far as it is, should experience that. And I get why they did it, like, you know, so that we as the viewers can understand. But how it would be experienced is simply knowledge. It's simply knowing something. That's what I'm getting at. Yeah. So, but then the experience would be.
Speaker B:It's not projecting words onto a screen that I then read. It's projecting, like, maybe other hues and things which I can't see with my eyes to give me more information, more texture, more detail about a thing.
Speaker A:Yeah. Could you use it in conjunction with deep fakes to make someone look like someone else? Yeah, potentially. I won't delve into the use case for that one, but I can imagine it. And actually, we need to wrap up. But before we do, and also even just this thing, dare I say this, I think this stuff is quite complicated and potentially messy. Oh, a little bit, yeah. But the surgery alone. Yeah, but just thinking about this thing of, OK, I want memories, but for them to be tagged as false memories, even that is, and maybe it's a similar kind of problem, which is, well, you're making a memory of that false memory. And so is that new memory? Every time you re-access that, are you generating a new memory? I feel like human memory doesn't come with that nice, convenient labeling. It doesn't come with an audit trail of where you got that memory.
Speaker B:The point is, the Neuralink would provide that labeling, because I'm directly accessing data in the Neuralink as if it were a memory. But just remove this issue of a tagged one staying tagged. I think there's so much about how neurology works that we don't really know. But a Neuralink will really help us find shit out.
Speaker A:Well, that's true. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So just the other thing, we just raise it. I mean, it's too big to tackle. But this question of that continuum between a thought to an intention and then a decision, I think what we've sort of said is, in terms of our thoughts and our decisions, they probably come out at something like 50 bits a second or whatever. But if this is going to speed things up, it must be because it's doing things, as Peter suggested, at the pre-conscious level. It's kind of, it's taking that slightly messier set of things that are going on in my brain before I've got around to forming an intention to do something. And I don't know, e.g. anticipating. So I start thinking about, oh, what am I going to have for dinner? And before, and then some recipes have appeared, right? Without me even thinking, oh, I'm going to do... But it's one step ahead of me, and it's presented me with a bunch of recipes. Is that wonderful or terrifying or both? Well, I mean, I'm just sort of thinking that's the only way it can speed things up, is by doing things that aren't going through your conscious brain, which is, you know, how that would work or, I mean, how that would be experienced. It's quite, it would be challenging. Yeah, let's stop there. Anyone got a question? Well, what about, what would be your, what bionic appendage would you choose to have? Yes. Okay, great question. Does anyone want to jump off on this? Maybe you've already spent lots of time thinking about this. Anyone want to kick off?
Speaker C:Like a huge brain. A second head.
Speaker A:And we're talking physical, right? Was that the physical appendage? An extra appendage you could get attached to your body so that, which you could just use, just like all your other limbs and stuff. And yours was another head? Yes.
Speaker C:Yes.
Speaker A:Okay. A huge throbbing brain. But actually, all that does is just double your brain capacity, for example, let's say. Imagine that for a moment, right? It doesn't do anything beyond that. And what it means is it turns you, it just makes you a sort of... It makes him the cleverest man on earth. Yeah, but it doesn't make him any cleverer than two people sitting next to him. It could possibly make him the most conflicted man on earth, if they have different opinions. You know, is that better than one head? Is it, what about if someone comes along with four heads? And I know my, I mean, I've got a four head, but I mean, I don't know. If two heads are better than one, then four heads must be twice as good as two heads. Right, yeah. As long as it's two to the end heads, then we can go for that, I think. Let's go for a hundred heads. Yeah, 128, please. Yeah, yeah, okay. All right, nice. Anyone else? I still need to think of mine. Yeah, I want an extra arm at the back of my back that can scratch my back. Please. That's all. Back scratch. It's not much to ask. Yeah, I can get to my bum already, but there are bits of my back I just can't ever get to. Yeah, good call. Although you do have that wonderful back scratcher thing. The back scratcher, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's always losing it. Yeah, it's only, it lives in my living room, so if I'm out and about, that's no good.
Speaker B:Okay, Peter? I would like a sort of Wolverine style skeleton to make me sort of stronger. It would be powered and articulated, so it'd make me stronger and also fitter and everything else. Would it make you less fit because you would just be getting skeletons to do all the work? Well, yeah, I would be, yeah. But collectively, you and the skeleton would be incredible. Outwardly, I would be flabby, but very fast. This is just, it's just funny.
Speaker A:This just makes you think you're just going to be, you know, the wrong trousers and you're going to be Probably, yeah. Falling asleep and stealing diamonds without realising. When it blue screens, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Keeping up with this. Yeah, no, I'll be that guy, the elephant in the room. I'd like a bionic Willy, please. What? Yes, there's so many. None of us were thinking. Yeah, I mean, yeah, the possibilities, you know, and I think. Like what? I'm not going to go into it. Well, actually, no, because there are things like when you've got a cup of coffee in one hand and a sandwich in the other, opening a door, for example, a bionic Willy would be.
Speaker B:When you're like, you're trying to go for a pee with your coffee and your sandwich. Yeah, that kind of thing. And it could unzip itself.
Speaker A:Would you completely dispose of the organic one or would you keep them both? No, that'd be too scary. Right. Yeah. Just keep it in the freezer. Or maybe just augment it. It doesn't need augmentation, but I would augment it. Yeah, something like that. All right. On that note, on that dystopian note, on that exciting note, we'll stop. Thanks, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. I've been here with Nick Hare, Peter Coghill and Jordan Fermanis of Aleph. Until next time. Goodbye.
