A guy I worked with joked that his meal he needed to microwave had too many instructions listed. It was 5 steps. He modified it by taking the plastic off first, added all of the time into one number of minutes, averaged the power setting, and go. It came out fine, so he claimed. I like to use the line with my students, “Oh, the instructions tell me what to do.”

I admit this is a bit hypocritical as I often bypass the instructions to only use the pictures when putting something together. What I am wondering is whether writing and reading will begin to feel like extra tasks with the next generation or the one thereafter. With the announcement for the release of the latest AI program that can write anything you request, how much more challenging it will be to convince young people to write?

When it comes to instructions, there are also other options than reading and writing them. You can currently find a video for anything that you want to do. Do people say to themselves, “Hey no one has a video for putting this together, let’s take it apart, and make a video while we reassemble the whole thing”? They clearly talk like they have experience doing it, so it cannot be their first attempt. Who would make a video showing us the ways to assemble it wrong?

I was assembling an item while reading the instructions, and unfortunately, they were written by someone who may not have had English as their first language. It made me wonder if it was written in another language and a translator was used. I stated my frustration that Step 4 did not make any sense. My wife looked it up and found a video that was well done. The instructions did not describe accurately what I had to do on step 4, as verified by the person in the video.

A few questions: Will all items to assemble either come with a link to a video? Will we be able to just push a button on the box and get an audio of the instructions? How about a hologram of the assembly? You could build it right there in place of the hologram so that all of the parts match. Call it a holossembly, an assemblegram, a hassemblogram. I think the first one. It will be called a Holossembly. My term, I deserve some royalties when they use it.

May you have a Happy Friday. Remember to subscribe on the perspectives page.