Checkboxes that kill. Great post about the dan­gers in com­plex, cus­tomiz­able set­tings. Two key take­aways: reg­u­larly audit how peo­ple are using your prod­uct and con­sider whether more than 2% of your users will use a setting.

Dyson: We have cre­ated this expand­ing com­pu­ta­tional uni­verse, and it’s open to the evo­lu­tion of all kinds of things. It’s cycling faster and faster, and it’s way, way, way more than dou­bling in scale every year. Even with the help of Google and YouTube and Facebook, we can’t con­sume it all. And we aren’t really aware what this vast space is fill­ing up with. From the human per­spec­tive, com­put­ers are idle 99 per­cent of the time, just wait­ing for the next instruc­tion. While they’re wait­ing for us to come up with instruc­tions, more and more com­pu­ta­tion is hap­pen­ing with­out us, as com­put­ers write instruc­tions for each other. And as Turing showed math­e­mat­i­cally, this space can’t be super­vised. As the dig­i­tal uni­verse expands, so does this wild, undo­mes­ti­cated side.

Wired: If this is true, what’s the takeaway?

Dyson: Hire biol­o­gists! It doesn’t make sense for a high tech com­pany to have 3,000 soft­ware engi­neers but no biologists.

From a Q&A between George Dyson and Wired’s Kevin Kelly.