There is one aspect of this that bothers me, though.  Early on in the dialog, Shirky says that if we, “… start thinking of [our free time] as a social asset that can be harnessed, it all looks very different. The buildup of this free time among the world’s educated population—maybe a trillion hours per year—is a new resource.”  Of course he’s right.  It’s a wonderful new resource that is already being harnessed.  As they mention, this “cognitive surplus” is being used to create serious open source projects like Linux and Apache, great resources like the Wikipedia, and even all the dumb Youtube movies and LOLcats you could ever want to see.

Still, I’m wary of thinking of our free time as a “resource” for achieving new levels of productivity.  Shirky says of free time:

People have had lots of free time for as long as there’s been the industrialized world.  But that free time has mainly been something to be used up rather than used, especially in postwar America, with the rise of suburbanization and long commutes. Suddenly we no longer lived in tight-knit communities and therefore we spent less time interacting face-to-face. As a result, we ended up spending the bulk of our free time watching television.

This observation wouldn’t bother me at all if Shirky were bemoaning the loss of tight-knit communities and face-to-face interaction, but instead he seems to be advocating converting all of that television-watching time Wikipedia-editing time.  There’s something disturbing in this.

Does this mean that, when we’re done with a full day’s work, we’re supposed to come home and ignore our communities while working for several more hours, this time for free?  Is it too much to expect a few hours of rest and socializing?

In fairness, I haven’t yet read either of their books, so I don’t know if they address this problem better.  Still, I think this is connected to the niggling question I was trying to put together in my last post: Shirky seems eager to exploit the resource of free-time, but doesn’t seem to ask the question, what does this mean for our work-time?

Our society tends to take for granted that we must all suffer the sometimes absurd effects of economic inequality, and we accept this because using money as a motivator is the only way to create a productive society.  Shirky and Pink argue that money is often a terrible motivator and can actually have adverse effects on productivity, and then they continue on as though they haven’t noticed that they may have knocked out our society’s underpinnings.

Here’s my parting thought: Clay Shirky presents Ushahidi.com as a triumph of “cognitive surplus” because it was made by developers in their spare time.  Might it instead be a shortcoming of our economic system that these developers were forced to do such important work in their spare time?

(Sorry if this is muddled, but this is a product of my cognitive surplus, and not of my work life– i.e. I’m tired.)

Edit: I suppose I’m not arguing with anything Pink/Shirky are explicitly saying.  I’m worried that people might be looking at these discoveries about human motivation and thinking, “This is great!  You mean, not only can we get people to work their normal crappy 9-to-5 job, but we can use new motivational tricks to get them to go home and keep working for free.  Now, if we could only keep people from sleeping, people could work 24 hours a day!”

To me, the story shouldn’t be “people will work for free” but instead “coercing people to work under threat of homelessness and starvation might not be necessary.”

Admittedly, that doesn’t immediately sound like a bad thing.  People are doing important work for free, out of love for the work or out of concern for the consequences of that work, and we all benefit.  However, I always thought that the purpose of our economic system was to support and reward useful contributions to society.  There are certainly people out there who will claim that, for any useful endeavor, there must be a business model capable of supporting that endeavor.  You’ll hear an argument like, “If there is enough demand that people are willing to pay the required price, then a business can flourish.  If there is not enough demand for a product or service, then it must not be worth providing.”  But that’s not true, is it?

With all the things the poor need, there’s plenty of demand; there just isn’t any money to meet the need.  Further, there might be projects or even whole industries that are impossible to turn into conventional businesses that must be run at a profit (or even required to break even).  Setting aside the example of open source software for a second, you have more conventional businesses like the record and movie industries, which cannot exist without government protection of copyright.  Even more concrete, you have the building and maintenance of vital infrastructure, which must be run “at a loss” even though the benefits to society often outweigh the costs.  There are, of course, many charitable organizations who solicit donations, and even software that’s funded through donation.

So if the purpose of our economic system was to support and reward useful contributions, what does it say about our economic system when so many useful contributions are not supported by it?  There have always been great contributions to society that have gone unrewarded.  That isn’t new.  There have been influential artists and writers and scientists and great thinkers who have died in poverty.  But I wonder, what if the balance shifts, and more of our contributions are collaborative and can’t be monetized?  Would we then need to change the way we think about money?

Sometimes these thoughts seem like far-fetched naive idealism, but as Shirky points out, the realities of financial penalties and rewards don’t actually work the way we expect.  His example of the day care instituting a fine is by no means the only example.  Dan Pink gave another TED talk on the topic, explaining how incentives do not necessarily improve performance.

Anyway, I don’t have a solution to propose.  These ideas puzzle me, and I’m not really even convinced that this is a new problem.  The economics of online collaboration and open source software start to make the problem more obvious, since there arises a natural conflict between open source and closed source competitors.  However, I wonder if it may be that our economic systems never worked as well as we imagined.  Can we structure our economy so that we support all of the work that needs to be done?

I’m not a fan of the narrative that we’re all vivid and passionate wild things who should hope to burn out brightly, expressing individuality and energy.

I’d prefer a narrative that included some hope of dignity; that restraint, too, can be natural; that rebellion and raucousness lose their charm; that goodness might be more important than beauty.

That all of this matters.

I’d like to keep reminding myself that these are not different lives.

Of course it’s not in the Constitution.  None of it existed yet. There was no Internet or telephones 200 years ago, nor were there trains or cars. Medicine hadn’t really even been invented yet. Yes, there were doctors, but the doctors of their time advised that people avoid bathing and use leeches. Not only were there no CAT scans or MRIs or antibiotics back then, there weren’t even stethoscopes or medical thermometers.

And let’s not forget, the Constitution also doesn’t give the government any particular power to form agencies like the FBI or CIA. It gives the government the power to have an army and navy, but doesn’t explicitly authorize them to create the Air Force.  It doesn’t give them specific powers to fund military research and keep a stockpile of nuclear weapons.  I don’t remember there being any particular clause that permits the government special powers to provide for disaster relief or combat terrorism.

The founding fathers weren’t afraid of communism. Communism also hadn’t been invented yet. It’s arguable that capitalism didn’t really exist yet either; it certainly didn’t exist in its modern form. The limits that the Constitution put on the government were to prevent the rise of a tyrant, not to prevent the government from providing medical checkups for poor children.

Now it’s not too bad.  It’s clean and simple and no-nonsense.  The icons are all far apart, I suppose to keep you from accidentally hitting the wrong thing, and maybe when I get my hands on an iPad I’ll be glad things are spaced so far apart.  But my first impression was that it was a big waste of space.  Also, there’s very little information here; the only think I know from looking at this screen is that I have some unread email, but I have no idea from who or regarding what.

What I had anticipated and hoped for when I heard rumor of the iPad would be that it would give you something a little more useful and information-dense.  I was hoping that the primary home screen would be a sort of dashboard with a whole lot of information available at a glance.  Here’s a mockup just to give an idea:

Now admittedly I’m not an interface designer or even a graphic designer, but the big idea here is to present the user with an aggregated feed of information from several sources.  You have a consolidated inbox of all email accounts, but also the most recent SMS messages, IM conversations, voicemail transcriptions, and even incoming social networking notifications.  Below that, you have news feeds to let you know what’s going on in the world.  There’s a search box that would search all the information on your device, a box that gives you time, date, and the weather, and below that a box that shows a list of contacts in your address book, including the contacts’ IM status.  At the very bottom, a series of shortcuts to the user’s favorite applications.  All in one screen, right there without needing to flip back and forth between applications.

At the risk of overstating things, I think it’s important to note that this isn’t just a different design, but I think it’s actually a different conceptual approach to the interface.  Apple has had a long history of object-oriented user interfaces.  Apple was one of the early developers to use the desktop metaphor, and Mac OS retained a spacial file manager for all the way until OSX.  Even OSX’s Finder exhibits spacial behavior if you hide the toolbar and sidebar.  Apple seems to be sticking with their conventional interface concepts, so it makes sense that the first screen you see is essentially a bunch of little objects– little buttons to press on, and those buttons do things.

Twenty years ago, interfaces pretty much needed to be object oriented and spacial in order for people to make sense of them, but I think people today are ready for interfaces that are a little more abstract.  I propose that it’s time to put the information front and center.  Although I’m generally a fan of Apple’s products, I was impressed to see Microsoft’s new OS for phones.  Instead of filling the interface with icons and fancy jelly-bean buttons, it’s all minimalist white text on a black background.  I don’t know if the UI will be intuitive and pleasant to use, but it looks pretty slick.

Just to be clear, I haven’t presented this interface mockup to propose it as an idea interface.  Interface design is pretty complicated, and I’m sure Apple could come up with something much better.  Still, I’d like to argue that information-driven interfaces could be more efficient than more classic object-oriented approaches. The mockup is just a visual aid.

Thinking about this problem lead me to consider the following question: if I had an iPad, what would I use my iPhone for? It occurs to me that the iPhone really has 2 advantages over the iPad. The first advantage is that you can make voice calls over AT&T’s network. Though I think this is a big deal, it’s only a big deal because of circumstance. Right now, cell phones support voice much better and much more widely than they support data. If you were to have a robust, ubiquitous, and fast wireless data network, you should be able to make all of your voice calls using VoIP. Of course, you don’t want to hold your iPad up to your head like a phone, but you could easily get a Bluetooth headset or even a Bluetooth handset.

The second advantage that the iPhone has over the iPad is that it’s small. Of course, the advantage the iPad has over the iPhone is that it’s big, so being small isn’t absolutely better. However, in many contexts, being small is an advantage. The chief advantage of the iPhone being small is that you can stick it in your pocket. This means it’s much easy to take it everywhere with you, and just as importantly, it’s easy to access in any situation. When you’re standing in a crowded subway car, it’s much easier to reach in your pocket to pull out an iPod than it is to dig through your bag and pull out a notebook. Relating this back to the first advantage of the iPhone, you probably don’t want to have to pull out your iPad when you’re running around in the world and you need to make a phone call.

To address both of these problems, I think it might be good if Apple were to create a small Bluetooth iPad remote. I imagine that hardware-wise, it could look quite a bit like the iPhone but smaller and thinner. It would only connect to the iPad, so you wouldn’t need WiFi or cell connectivity. You could ditch most of the internal storage as well. The handset would retain the speaker, mic, touchscreen, battery, and perhaps a headphone jack.

The controls of the handset would expose 2 main functions: making and receiving phone calls and browsing through the media library on your iPad. The handset interface would have a dialer which would control the VoIP calls placed through the iPad’s data connection, and the handset would also “ring” like a handset when the iPad’s VoIP received an incoming call. During calls, you would talk through the handset like you would with a normal cell phone. Your voice would be picked up through the mic and sent to the iPad via Bluetooth. Incoming audio from the call would be sent to the handset’s speaker via Bluetooth as well.

The other use for this remote/handset would be to allow a user to store all of his music on the iPad and listen to the music on-the-go without actually needing to pull out the iPad every time he wants to change songs or adjust the volume.  The menu system could look identical to the iPhone’s normal music playback, but instead be controlling remote playback of the iPad.

Actually, the idea of a iPhone-like remote control for the iPad isn’t too far removed from features that Apple already provides.  One of Apple’s early iPhone applications was one which allowed you to use the iPhone as a remote control for an Apple TV or even any computer running iTunes.  It wouldn’t be much of a stretch for Apple to expand this application to allow remote control of an iPad.

However, what I find most interesting are the missed opportunities for making the iPad even more useful, including improvements that could still be made post-launch.

The first big missed opportunity in my mind was that Apple didn’t make use of this patent:

For years I’ve thought that my ideal computing experience included something roughly like the iPad: a small lightweight tablet about the size of a standard sheet of 8.5×11″ paper with a highly refined touchscreen interface.  However, the problem with a device of this form factor is that working on a small touchscreen for a long time isn’t as comfortable as working with a nice big monitor, keyboard, and mouse.  So in my ideal computing experience, I would be able to dock this tablet to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse for projects that require more intensive computer use.  Ideally I would have access to all the same documents and applications whether I was using the computer in touchscreen-mode or docked-mode, but I would always be presented with an interface that was optimized for whichever mode I was in.

Of course, this concept presents a lot of complications.  Not only would the OS need to host two totally different context aware user interfaces, but application developers would need to create two interfaces for each application as well.  The tablet would also need to be powerful enough to run a full desktop operating system and full desktop applications, while being energy efficient enough to allow several hours of battery life while in tablet mode.  The technology isn’t there yet.

However, what Apple could probably do is allow the iPad to be used to host user profiles.  Technologically, this would be a very different approach, but it could achieve similar results.  The idea would be that you permanently store all of your documents and media on your iPad, and when you dock your iPad to your computer, instead of syncing, your computer automatically mounts the iPad’s filesystem and uses it for your home folder.

You computer’s iTunes wouldn’t store all your music on the hard drive and then sync your music to the iPad, but instead it would store all of your music on the iPad.  When you ran iWork on your computer, it would read the Pages document directly from your iPad and edit it on your iPad’s internal storage.  When you disconnected your iPad from your computer, you would have access to the same exact document through your iPad’s copy of Pages.  When you looked at your task list in your computer’s version of Things, it would be reading and altering the same database that your iPad’s version of Things would alter.  This would also allow you to dock your iPad to any number of computers and essentially take your whole home folder, settings and all, from computer to computer relatively seamlessly.  If Apple really wanted to, they could even get fancy by supporting automatic backups of your iPad through Time Machine.  Or they could even allow you to store a cached version of your iPad on the computer so that you could work when your iPad was disconnected, which would automatically sync when the iPad was docked or connected on a local network.  Or perhaps an even crazier idea: the iPad could automatically sync all of its contents online via MobileMe’s iDisk.

I believe all of this is possible with current technology.