The Perfect Chalk

Chalk has been used by humans as a communication tool for thousands of years. Are some technologies too good to be replaced?

Things mentioned in this podcast:

• 2015 article expounding the virtue of Hagoromo chalk (

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Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision-making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights, and this week we're discussing the perfect chalk. Nick, tell us about what is the perfect chalk? Why? What are we talking about?

Yeah. Peter, wax lyrical. Well, I think the chalkboard and the chalk are probably an evolution of the original chalk on slate. So they've been honed over hundreds of thousands of years from probably quite an unpleasant writing experience by modern standards to something that's extremely good. But I agree. I'm with you that paper and pen or paper and pencil. There's nothing quite like it yet digitally. I think things are coming close, though. So I've got a thing called a remarkable tablet. That's actually the name. That's not just how I describe it. It's and it seeks to imitate paper as closely as possible. So it has fairly no frills. It's not like an iPad. There's no notifications. There's no distractions. It's just a paper writing experience for the digital one. And it's pretty darn close. You can rest. Can you rest your hand on it? You can rest your hand on it. Yeah. What's the friction like? Very paper like. It's a bit like a pencil on paper. It's got a nice nylon tip on a sort of slightly matted screen. So you even get that subtle feedback of, yes, the kind of, yeah, the vibration of the thing on the paper. It's let down slightly by the software at the moment, but it's kind of getting there. It feels very nice and it looks like pen. It looks like pencil. It even responds even to the angle at which you hold the pen and things. So you can shade in a similar way that you would with a pencil.

Out of interest, have you compared it to the iPad, whatever it's called, the iPad Pro?

Yeah. Have you tried that? I've never tried an iPad Pro, but I've got something similar. I've got a pen for a different thing. But anyway, the point is that I think these technologies are kind of getting there. Be able to have a digital replacement for paper. Certainly graphics designers and artists use graphics tablets in place of paper because the output, they need to have a digital output, which is much more versatile.

And in fact, I know David Hockney, who, of course, is a very respected artist in terms of his technical ability, has gone entirely digital and only paints on a tablet, which is interesting to me because you might expect an established artist to be much more defensive about traditional artistic technologies. But no, he's very accomplished in terms of production of digital art.

Yeah. I mean, although he's probably getting towards the end of his career, this might just be his iPad period. That's all. He might go on to other things. Indeed. But anyway, well, look, there's one example. So arguably, we can say chalk and cheese. No, not chalk and cheese. Chalk and blackboards. Cheese is never going to go out of fashion.

Yeah, I do have some examples. We've had pen and paper and then. So technologies that don't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. The granddaddy of them all, really. The king of the invention. Well, hold on. The good old fashioned. Wheel. Wheel. Yeah. OK. There are wheels all over the place, Fraser. I don't know if you've noticed them, but they're pretty fundamental. Cutlery. Cutlery. Yeah, cutlery. And actually, when I was making this list, I discovered quite how many things are still in use that are actually ancient inventions.

Also, sorry to interrupt, but I'm just guessing, let's say you went to chopsticks. I bet that's even more ancient and even more unchanged than Western cutlery.

I don't know if I 100% agree. OK, go for it. Well, for example, one of the things you mentioned there was fridge. OK, it seems to me that there's just an original technology that was made. And then you've just got further iterations of that and improvements and materials change and all sorts of things change around it.

It's a refinement. Yeah, it's a very original idea. Keep it like having a box that's cold to put food in. Yeah. It's very old. Right. Before the mechanical, electromechanical fridge, you had ice boxes, ice houses. Yeah. And then holes in the ground and things like that. Yeah.

But as far as I understand it, the basic that the innovation was using sort of gas decompression as a means of extracting heat.

So I guess at the heart of it, there is something, it just doesn't seem quite as pure as the original example we started with, which was chalk on a blackboard. Because surely even this Haruga company, whatever it's called, they kind of changed it that much.

As Peter was saying, I bet, I mean, they're probably really high tech, this chalk, probably the result of quite a lot of intensive process and research. You know, it's not just like they grab a lump of chalk and make it into a cylinder.

Okay. Okay. All right. So lots of examples there of unchanging stuff.

So I mean, I mean, I, I, there's, I mean, I, I slightly ill at ease with some of the things on your list. When does a behavior become a technology? I mean, there are some things there which are sort of behavioral things that we want to do. Like you could argue that writing on a piece of paper is just writing stuff, is writing, rather than the technology that you're involved in. The evolution of certainly things like the ARPANET and the internet. Internet looks nothing like what ARPANET looked like. But it's just bigger, isn't it? I mean, it's just more, there are more things plugged into it. The, well, the fun, the technology is a fun, the technical, the bits of kit, the boxes are fundamentally different. Right. Yeah.

I mean, I mean, I guess the idea is the same. Yeah. I think what we, what we unearthing here is that actually it's quite hard to say what a technology actually is and what it entails and what's fundamental to it and which bits are kind of peripheral. You know, whether or not writing is something, whether we can meaningfully say that, you know, a remarkable tablet is basically the same as pen and paper. It's basically just, you know, an evolution of pen and paper. And we shouldn't even really consider it a new technology. It's basically the same technology in a slightly different form. Or whether actually there's something, whether it represents a kind of fundamental shift. And I just, one of the things that I was thinking about in the context of this exact question of, you know, whether or not remarkable tablets and their ilk are going to end up taking over, you know, from pen and paper. Just like we, you know, still having the discussion about whether e-readers are going to take over from books and, you know, whether Google Glass is going to take over from various things and whether, you know, there is often hidden physicality in a technology which you don't notice until you try to replace it with something. So, I mean, I think that, you know, examples, I mean, so the pen and paper, for example, you know, there really is like no substitute for being able to quickly flick back and forth, transcribing an equation or something from one page to the next, just being able to flick back and forth. No technology at the moment can keep up with that in terms of my sort of working memories, having my hand on one screen effectively on one piece of paper and having my eye looking at another piece of paper. That's very, very difficult to replicate without something which is quite physical. But yeah, but I mean, also, you know, things like things like board games, like computer games have not displaced them with books, even, you know, they've shown that recall is better when people have a physical book because the physicality of the book is affecting the way that they're interpreting the information, knowing how much you've read, for example, how far through the book you are, even knowing where on the page something is. Those things have been shown to affect the way that people engage with books. So, you know, we wouldn't have expected that, I don't think. You might say, well, e-readers are just obviously better. You can have a thousand books in one thing. And yet, you know, there I am carrying three books around with me because I can't stand e-readers.

Which actually makes me think of another podcast we did, which was about why is it that all good things always come to an end? Well, actually, maybe they don't. And because books is a good example of of where they've actually shown to be resistant, as we as we say to e-readers and so on. OK, where do we want to go with this?

Well, one of the one of the one of the things we were sort of discussing before we recorded was like, how do we know what that technology is good? How do you just know that it's good and there isn't a better alternative? The example we had was mobile phones.

It also sounds we're venturing into also Betamax versus whatever the other one was. VHS, there we go.

You not remember the one that won? I know, I know.

Yeah, I'm sorry, I interrupted Peter. Not necessarily which is the best of a particular kind of technology, but given that you do something in a certain way with a thing at the moment, how do you know at what point you should abandon that for the new thing that does that plus other stuff?

Well, this sounds like a brilliant muskets versus archery kind of thing.

Yeah, because I mean, when a new bit, new technology comes along, it's very it's unusual that it's doing the same thing in a better way. It's usually doing something similar or more in a new way. It's there's a distinction there. So mobile smartphones, for example, they might, you know, as we said, they might go out of vogue one day, be replaced by something. What how like how likely is that? And what other things, you know, will chairs go out of vogue? Now, will we stop wanting to sit because we've been we've invented some exoskeleton or something that everyone wears? It means you don't need to or they will will do vase be replaced by sheets or something or infrared, you know, heat breathers. Yeah, infrared. Yeah. Hot air blowers. Yeah. How do we know that there's not like a better way of doing something and we just haven't tried it yet? Yeah. What's the answer? I don't know.

I think we intrinsically don't. Yeah, because if we did, then we'd have already done. Yeah, that's the thing.

I think you have mad people coming up with crazy ideas about new ways of doing things. And some of them, some of them turn out not to be so crazy.

Yeah, I don't. But I don't think there's any way of knowing in advance what things are, you know, going to going to be going to turn out to, you know, be replaceable by something else. And, you know, a lot of often technology can be really surprising, you know, and I think that's why technology predictions are really terrible. I mean, you look at AI, which you might think probably, you know, when we get something close to a general artificial intelligence, it's going to be maybe the most significant invention we've ever made. And some people think, well, the last invention, because from then on, AIs will be doing all the inventing, you know, predictions for when that might happen range from sort of never to, you know, five years time. No one has a clue. We just don't know, because we don't know what the form of the solution is going to look like and what the technological constraints are that we're going to discover there that we didn't know about, you know. So, so, yeah, I mean, I think it's a good question, but I don't see any way of answering it. It's like trying to predict which company is going to last. For many ways, it's the same question. You know, how are you going to know, you know, like that things, things like social networks. Which have made a lot of things obsolete, a lot of specialist things. You remember Friends Reunited, for example. And that looks like, oh, that was a huge area which everyone was going to go into as sort of, you know, reminiscences about school. And then you might think, well, why don't we have social networks about pubs and stuff? And then Facebook came up and it was like, no, we only need this one thing. And suddenly all of these things that looked like they were really super viable all just disappeared, you know.

So I've got something I want to ask about before I do anything else. Before I ask that, OK, so, so let's speculate for a moment, make some predictions about things that might go into obsolescence. What do you see coming? And actually, this reminds me once of a quite insightful Simpsons episode where I forget the context, but they had a pile of gramophone records, a pile of tapes. And they had then had a space marked reserved for CDs. Yeah. And it was all and that was like 20 years ago. And of course, they were completely right. So, yeah, what let's predict what might sort of fall out of fashion or into obsolescence. I mean, the first the big one surely is mobile phones. We've already talked about it. Will it seem I mean, you see people coming out of tube stations now and the first thing, you know, they reach their mobile phones. They need to know where they're going to go. Will we look back at that and see that on TV and laugh?

Yeah, I think you still have mobile computational devices and things on your body, but they'll probably be replaced by more convenient things that aren't a separate object that kind of you wear them as a watch or there is a you wear a contact lens or a head up display on your on your on your glasses, things like that. But you'll still have you'll probably always end up with some connection to the Internet that provides you with information.

Yeah, I mean, there is another alternative, which would be personalized sort of displays, you know, where you kind of basically don't need to carry anything. And there's no computation required because all the computation is done centrally where it's more efficient. And and you're just you're all they need to know is your position and wherever you go, you'll see a screen which says, you know, Fred's waiting in the dog and duck and you go and you go and find him.

Would it be a personal screen or?

No, I'm just I'm just since we're in the realm of speculation, I'm just I'm just thinking of another potential solution, you know, a kind of parallel universe where mobile phones didn't exist, but you had other means of getting that information, you know, that you basically, you know, the computation follows you round without having to carry it. Yeah. What else? I can think of another one, but I do have a really controversial one. Go on. It's controversial in the context of it being the number one thing Peter and I always argue about. I think Google search and Google search is going to die.

Go go. Yeah, go on.

First of all, it's shit. It is really, really bad now. I'm I'm unable to find things on Google by entering them in direct quotes and knowing that they're every, you know, swamped by by sponsored, you know, links and by hundreds of very, very similar links from kind of bloody social network BuzzFeed quizzes. You know, I was doing research for another podcast looking for things about general knowledge. I couldn't find any research about general knowledge because all I was getting was page after page of general knowledge quizzes. You know, so I and I did a little bit of research on this and I find that I'm not alone in this having this perception. And I wonder if we're going to go back to something a bit more akin to kind of digital version of index cards that actually even though Google killed Yahoo, Yahoo tried to curate the Internet and the Internet was way too big for Yahoo to curate it. And Google came along and you could just find stuff. Now, I think maybe the problem is it's too big for Google again. And perhaps we do need curators. So I think there's going to increasingly be a demand for curated search. So anyway, that's a zany prediction.

I think there's something in that. But I think it can be left up to the content creators to provide additional structure and metadata around their content. So it helps the user ultimately filter it.

So I also I understand why you think that. But my only concern is what has happened to online ratings. I don't trust any online ratings now. I just don't. It's so many studies now into how they've been gamed and how companies have tried to monetize them and how marketing has kind of basically spoiled their trustworthiness that I sort of think, well, I don't even I don't trust a crowd to do that. I don't trust a crowd of commenters to do that or creators. I actually want some trusted authority to do it for me, which is which goes against everything that the Internet was supposed to be about. But I think I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't work. We tried it and it doesn't work. Decentralized stuff just fails me on too many occasions. So anyway, I'll just put that out there. It's interesting.

Peter? So I think the traditional organization, the business as a as a as a thing will maybe not completely eliminated, but very much diminished. I think the hyper connectivity we will have and the capacity to self organize into groups to perform a certain role could reach the point where we don't need static organizations as perpetual legal entities to exist anymore. And I spot an opportunity. I don't know. I can only do half of it. I can put a shout out on the Internet and somehow find someone I can rate as being trustworthy and then team up with them instantly to to to fulfill that that contract. So a very sort of very dynamic, very sort of self organizing, very loose coupling between people and all groups or small groups of people.

I would love to see that. I like the medieval connotations as well of everyone being a sort of journeyman, you know, being able to being able to just ply your trade, whatever you are, even. And, you know, you're you know, there are people now you could get, you know, secretaries as a service and business managers, you know, as a service. And and I think that's just that would be brilliant. Yeah. You know, and because firms are so soul destroying anyway, you know, the idea of a permanent contract. I'd love it. So if if if if in 100 years time, people look back and go, why are all these comedy programs and books written about how miserable working in companies were and yet everyone was doing it? Why? You know?

Yeah. Yeah. OK, well, I think we'll wrap up there. Thank you very much, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. And until next time, goodbye.