A Whole New What?

I just started reading Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind, subtitled “Why Right-Brainers Will Rule The Future”. Pink starts off by pointing out that the ascendance of the right, creative hemisphere is often exaggerated, and the division between left and right is frequently misunderstood, but nonetheless we are on the cusp of exiting the information age dominated by left-brained analytical thinking and entering the conceptual age dominated by the right hemisphere, or perhaps integrating both hemispheres. That sounds promising, except that I am developing some kind of facial tic that activates whenever he places software engineering in the left-brain category. I hope this doesn’t develop into a full-fledged Tourette’s Syndrome where I scream obscenities at the book.

The source of this new afflication is because when I’m not blogging or DJing or writing music, I moonlight in what might be called a software engineer here in Silicon Valley, and I know quite well that real, honest-to-God, left-brained engineers refer to what I do as software “engineering” – just like that, with disparaging quotes around the word engineering. And they are right to do that, because there’s not a whole lot about the activity that’s linear or left-brained, which is why its other names (software design, software architecture) are much more accurate. I guess the reason for the misconception is because people generally know that deep down at the bottom of its electric heart, a computer is basically a linear, calculating machine, but for some reason they think that, day-to-day, this is what we deal with. In fact, modern computers have so many layers of abstraction that programmers are often a million miles away from its left-hemisphered internals. There are occasions when its necessary to observe what the computer is doing, and you have to take a left-brain perspective, but this is an excruciating process that is only used when something has gone badly wrong. Otherwise, I avoid it. One of Daniel Pink’s bizarre assertion is that the software industry is good at what it does. It is specifically because software design is a right hemisphere activity that modern computers are so frustrating to use. We don’t know how to create design at that level of complexity, but we can sure as hell make it limp along for a while before it eats your data.

Don’t get me wrong, it is possible to write software in a very left-brain way. I know this, because I have to deal with it on a daily basis, and part of my job involves telling my boss that software that we use that is written that way is flawed, ineffective, not resuable, impossible to understand, full of errors and, above all, ugly. Even though its functional. Please, please, please, I say, let me rewrite it. So yeah, you can be a left-brained programmer, if you are some kind of sadist and hate programming. OK, that’s a bit harsh. We outsource some work to Indian firms, and the code we get back works correctly – but its still not quite right. There’s a kind of aesthetic to software that goes beyond functional correctness which all good programmers understand, and this has been called the Tao of Programming. Some of what a programmer does is write instructions for the computer, but a very significant amount of time is spent turning complex sets of instructions into well-designed and functional tools for other programmers to use too.

Going back to A Whole New Mind, Pink posits that the next socio-economic stage will include the right hemisphere characteristics of design, story, empathy, play and meaning, and I think he’s quite right there. Where I think he’s wrong is that he thinks that this new Conceptual Age is somehow a post-Information Age phenonmenon. In fact, the people who have ushered in the Information Age are the same people who embody what he calls Conceptual Age traits, which is the unification of right and left hemisphere thinking. That traditionally right hemisphere people like writers are awakening to (and then misidentifying) this is a sign that its no longer a silent revolution, but that doesn’t change the fact that very creative people capable of operating in analytic and synthetic modes have been working on this for a long time. It is completely predictable that this phenomenon is invisible to one-sided people, and it is not the case, as Pink seems to assert, that the Right Hemisphere is now ascendant. The Right Hemisphere is now included, but if you are not capable of switching back and forth between Left and Right, you will be at a disadvantage.

One other minor quibble is that Pink seems to say that the reason the Right Hemisphere is ascendant is because Left Hemisphere operations can be done better and faster by computers. But he takes it on faith that computers won’t eventually be able to replicate Right Hemisphere operations too. What happens then?