Skill

A lot of people at Microsoft are very smart, especially the people that I'm surround by daily working around strategy and research folks (which makes me wonder how I got the job). At a recent team meeting we had a guy come and talk to us about immersive computing (computing in the future will move away from monitors and small squares of computing space and will become more immersive = imagine your wall being a huge monitor).

But something he talked about was very interesting and paradigm-shifting. He asked the question, "What is skill?" How do you define skill? When you say that someone is skilled at something, what exactly does that mean? The opposite of skill is not unskilled. The opposite of skill is attention to each detail. To move from having to pay attention to every detail to "skill" is a process called aggregation. In this process, all of the detailed steps aggregate into a subroutine, which has minimal "load" on our attention.

Imagine driving a car. You are a skilled driver when you can perform all of the necessary individual steps without having to pay attention to them. When you are unskilled, you have to think about every action. Imagine a rock guitarist, who can play amazing riffs while discussing what he's going to do later that day with his friends. Skill = subroutines.