This presentation from the 2006 TED conference - the big tech confab in Monterey - is enthralling and maddening. On the one hand, the computer-interface technology being demonstrated - a kind of hyper-touchscreen that works as well with text as with numbers and images - is incredible, the kind of thing that you can instantly imagine fruitfully using within ten minutes of putting it on your desk. Jeff Han, the research scientist at New York University who is demonstrating the device, is obviously a superbly innovative guy. And, reminiscent of Edward Tufte's argument that the content of presentations shouldn't be determined by the bureaucracies which created them, Han makes some excellent points about how contemporary interface technologies (especially relating to visualization of data) are a brake on the best use of computers.
On the other hand (watch the video to see why this is a pun), I find ludicrous Han's constant chatter about how this device has no interface, that it's so intuitively easy to use as to require no manual. Of course a user would require some sort of instruction: like all modern IT, it's a (figurative) black box, even if it's (actually) a clear screen. Despite Han's rhetoric, none of his gestures are really as "natural" as he claims. Such claims are common with respect to technology generally and intrinsic to IT specific. Apple's current "Mac vs. PC" advertisements are part and parcel of this, with their contention that Macs are plain easier to use. I'd say they are, but at the same time you have to learn to use them effectively, and it'd be no different with a fantastic touchscreen. Overselling even the best technology shades on the technological messianism which only leads to disappointment and misuse - not a big deal when you're talking about Microsoft's new sure-to-flop MP3 player; a bigger deal when one of Han's posited markets for this device is the fabled $100 laptop that would supposedly bring the benighted Third World into the Information Age.