Computers as a Tool for thought:

• Early computers worked with existing paradigms, mimicking existing modes of thinking. Computers wrote linear documents, just as had been written by hand and then by typewriter, albeit computers added richer editing capabilities.
  • Some trace many modern computing schemas to thinking that is still rooted in the printing press, and fault this way of thinking for the limited ways in which computers currently augment our intelligence. (Personal conversations * - need to see if this was an idea they had found/written in the lit somewhere.) - edit, this is more relevant to types of human intelligence
• But the power of computers as levers for our use is richer than being fancy printing machines. Computers are a tool that allows us to interface with symbols, with representations of ideas, in new ways.
• Picture a computer taking a complex set of paragraphs, each paragraph representing an atomic thought or idea, that might be explicitly linked to some other related paragraphs. Some of those paragraphs are related hierarchically to other paragraphs, with those higher up more abstract and those farther down, more nuanced. For a computer to allow those paragraphs to be shown in multiple places, where an edit in one place propagates across all instances; to further place those paragraphs onto a two or three dimensional spatial plane that allows for rearranging and playing around; to allow the saving of multiple instances of those spatial planes; to offer visual libraries of drawings or icons to give representational anchors to ideas such that the human sees the icon and recalls the idea without reading; to seamlessly switch back and forth between spatial and more purely textual representations of ideas; to, in short, allow a human to play with and rearrange ideas in looking to compare, contrast, and find patterns across a large repository of thoughts - for a computer to do this is nothing. Nothing, in that it requires little effort on the part of the computer, but nothing too, in that it means nothing to the computer. No additional insight can be obtained by a computer by changing the abstraction, the representation of an idea. But a human that is given the power of such a computer sees a tool that allows for the generation of new ideas, insights that come from multiple representations of thought and the ready recall of information at unprecedented scale. This is the computer functioning as a tool for thought, as a tool that allows for more innovative and insightful human thought. Computers and humans each have powerful and unique sets of capabilities, and the computer as a tool for thought allows for a complementary synergy.
• A computer can easily take a complex set of information or ideas and display it from multiple perspectives, including or excluding specific sources or types of data, and shift back and forth between any of these perspectives on demand. This is something that is difficult to replicate with analogue tools- and computers can do this at a scale that the pre-computer world could not dream of. Insights drawn from these representations are generated by the human rather than a computer; the computer here serves as a tool rather than as an Artificial Intelligence (to the extent that the computer generates insight, it displays a higher level of the Artificial Intelligence dimension).
• Computers allow us to manipulate information in ways we could not otherwise do easily, or at all. Computers can present the same information in multiple perspectives, such that the human can examine ideas and data from multiple views, and ask the computer to include or exclude sources of date or ideas. Computers in this way allow for a dynamic manipulation of data and ideas, crafting a medium that could not be represented using analogue methods. New representations of thought allow us to tap into latent capabilities that we already have, where humans rather than computers are the ones generating insight (as opposed to when technology functions as Artificial Intelligence), but it is the representation of ideas or data, through the capabilities of the computer as a tool, that makes this insight possible.
  • Many great ideas in history have been realizations that data could be represented in different ways: maps of the world, algebraic notation, data visualization.