Don't stop explaining

Have you ever been tempted to give up trying to explain how technology works? To accept that ‘it’s not about the technology’, that business people only care about outcomes, and to keep the technical details for the people who understand them?

If so, it is worth referring back to a piece of wisdom buried in a footnote of a book on computing from 1953: We apologise for the repetition of much of the subject matter of this chapter elsewhere in this book; it has been our experience that the layman finds it very hard to grasp and follow an account of the operation of a computer, and that he finds it helpful if the whole subject is presented to him several times, particularly if successive treatments are more and more sophisticated . . . In any event it is quite unnecessary to follow all the details of circuits and things: if the fact can be appreciated that circuits exist, and can readily be built, which will perform certain specified functions, that is all that is necessary in order to follow the rest of the book.

The book is Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines. A full online copy can be found in the Internet Archive and it is worth reading, if only to travel back to a time when the world was beginning to get excited about ‘electronic brains’, but it was still possible to survey most of the computers which existed in the world in a single volume.

It is also a reminder that, despite decades of exponential growth in computing power, some things have not changed. Even though our computers are built using silicon chips rather than valves, cathode ray tubes and mercury delay lines, the fundamental concepts that they implement are still the same: binary states are still binary states, and logic gates are still logic gates. We just have a lot more of them now, and they work a lot faster.

And it is still true that ‘the layman finds it very hard to grasp and follow an account of the operation of a computer’, especially when we consider the impact of all those decades of exponential growth. If you understood the operation of a single computer in 1953, you would have grasped a significant percentage of the total world’s computing power. To understand the equivalent today, you would have to understand whole fields of technology, many layers of architecture, the interaction of customers, suppliers and communities, the layout of billions of dollars worth of physical infrastructure, and the work of millions of people. It is, indeed, ‘very hard to grasp’.

And this difficulty in understanding remains a defining characteristic of the use of computing. Although the quote above is written in very courteous and diplomatic terms, we can sense some frustration, even from a distance of more than seventy years. We get the feeling that attempts to present ‘the whole subject . . . several times’ have been made several times, and that perhaps the motivation for writing the book is to make repetition an exercise for the reader rather than the author.

This frustration is familiar today. Everyone who works in a specialist field has an information asymmetry with everyone else. Technologists have different levels of understanding, even when the difference is as simple as that between the person who wrote a piece of code and the person who has to amend that code. When the asymmetry is particularly acute, it can be hard to find common ground, which is why it is common to see people leaving meetings shaking their heads, the technologists frustrated that the non-technical leaders didn’t ‘get it’, and the non-technical leaders frustrated that they were being asked to take decisions that they didn’t understand.

One approach to this is to simply give up: to assume that all discussion of complex topics must be translated into the simplest possible terms, that technologists should care about technology, that non-technical leaders should only care about outcomes, and that we should get comfortable with existing in two different worlds.

I think that this is a mistake, and that it ignores the wisdom from all those years ago. The quote above does not merely say that computing is ‘very hard to grasp’, it implies that it can be grasped through patient repetition, ‘particularly if successive treatments are more and more sophisticated’. Providing those successive treatments in more and more sophisticated ways is part of our job.

It is also part of our job to remind people about the significance of the second part of the quote: ‘it is quite unnecessary to follow all the details of circuits and things: if the fact can be appreciated that circuits exist, and can readily be built, which will perform certain specified functions’. Back in 1953, the existence of circuits that perform logic was a miracle, implemented in a small number of machines worldwide. Today, it remains a miracle, even though it has been implemented in billions of machines.

We have still only just begun to explore the implications of computing, and to put the vast and exponentially growing power of computers to work for us. If we fail to help our non-technical colleagues grasp the implications of this power, then the outcomes they seek will always be based on the potential of yesterday, not that of today and tomorrow. Explaining what it means to live in a world where ‘circuits exist, and can readily be built, which will perform certain specified functions’ is one of the most important things that we can do - and we should keep on doing it.

(Views in this article are my own.)