Tech is a Black Box

In this awesome article, Jean-Baptiste “JBQ” Quéru asks a seemingly simple question:

“You just went to the Google home page. Simple, isn't it? What just actually happened?”

A whole lot of technologies came together, actually! There’s the browser, which uses protocols like HTTP and HTML. Don’t know how those work? Let’s move on. Then there’s the networking stuff like DNS, TCP, IP and Wifi. Don’t know them either? Ok, how about the PC/tablet/phone on which you viewed it: do you understand how an operating system, a graphics driver or screen painter works? I didn’t think so. But we never worry about all that, because as Quéru says:

“For non-technologists, this is all a black box. That is a great success of technology: all those layers of complexity are entirely hidden and people can use them without even knowing that they exist at all.”

Of course, many do try to learn (at least parts of things). It is said that we try to understand new stuff that is complicated by using analogies of things that we already understand. And often, the analogies are close only in terms of what is done, not how things work, says Benedict Evans:

“So, the automobile is compared to the carriage, Uber is compared to taxis, digital cameras to film cameras, and smart watches to Rolexes. But sometimes there is no model.”

As the smartphone becomes the first device through which billions access the Internet, Evans’ question is very thought provoking:

“We’re making devices that are more personal and important with more at stake, and we’re also giving them more and more to people who’ve never used a computer before. Indeed, a lot of the ‘next billion’ have never owned an electronic device before, and some have never owned an electrical device at all, except perhaps a radio. How much abstraction is right in this world, and is it helpful or unhelpful to have prior mental models (‘memory cards are like film’) to apply?”

This inability to explain or understand how most technologies work is probably the root of why more and more people feel that the patent system is broken, says Quéru:

“Technology has done such an amazing job at hiding its complexity that the people regulating and running the patent system are barely even aware of the complexity of what they're regulating and running…The patent discussions about modern computing systems end up being about screen sizes and icon ordering, because in both cases those are the only aspect that the people involved in the discussion are capable of discussing, even though they are irrelevant to the actual function of the overall system being discussed.”