[hbogert]

Everything is making us dumb. I remember when ATMs would give out your money before giving back your card. You would often find someone's card and maybe you could still shout to them if you saw them walking away.

Back then you'd giggle about how silly that person was, you wouldn't forget your card would you? Somewhere since then the mindset shifted and if a machine would allow for this to happen everybody would agree the designers of the machine did not do a good job on the user-experience.

This is just a silly example, but through everyday life everything has become streamlined and you can just cruise through a day on auto-pilot and machines will autocorrect you or the process how to use them makes it near impossible to get into a anomalous state. Sometimes I do have the feeling all this made us 'dumber' and I don't actively think anymore when interfacing with things because I assume it's foolproof.

However, not having to actively think about every little thing when interfacing with systems does give a lot of free mental capacity to be used for other things.

When reading these things I always get the feeling it's simply a "kids these days" piece. Go back 40 years when hardly anybody would use punch cards anymore. I'd imagine there were a lot of "real" developers who advocated that "kids" are wasting CPU cycles and memory because they've lost touch with the hardware and if they simply kept using punchcards they'd get a sense of "real" programming again.

My takeaway is, if we expect our ATMs to behave sane and keep us from doing dumb things, why wouldn't we expect at least a subset of developers wanting to get that same experience during development?