The Future is Not What it Used to Be: Some Thoughts on Why the Fun Stuff in Technical Human-Computer Interaction is All Ahead of Us

Abstract:

 In this talk I will consider how the future of technical Human-Computer Interaction is different than it used to be - what has changed, what has stayed the same, and mostly what should we do about it. Although it seems mundane, when we consider change in any sort of computing technology, we must consider "the elephant in the room" of Moore's law. I will present two quick thought experiments in this talk to try to convince you that you really don't understand the implications of Moore's law, that this really does matter, and that you should perhaps be thinking a little differently about your work as a result. (Spoiler alert: you are dramatically underestimating how much change in computing power is ahead of you, and probably under-utilizing it's potential for HCI advances.) Based on this, the core of my talk will consider what we might be missing in terms of how we go about our work, and talk about several exemplars of where a different view of a "new future" might lead in terms of specific research directions. With these exemplars as motivation, I will consider some more general thoughts about the methodologies we use in our work, and suggest a few ways we might consider thinking differently about how we go about our work.