Just after the release of Lion, Apple’s latest desktop operating system, I was catching up with Gabe when he made an observation that’s been rattling around in my head ever since.

As we talked about how his migration to Lion had gone he noted that after decades of navigating personal computers by scrolling down to read a page, Apple was retraining their users to scroll up in order to page down. 

It’s clear why Apple did this- they’re taking to the desktop the same interaction physics we’ve been trained to navigate our iPhones and iPads with. 

But, Gabe’s take away has stuck with me.

After throwing decades of computational muscle memory out the window, going back to the “old” style of scrolling just felt wrong. In a video describing how to change the default Lion settings Chris says essentially the same thing and promptly switches back to the updated scrolling.

Two nights ago, my son picked up an old Blackberry I had tucked in a drawer and asked what it was. After looking it up and down noting the screen size, it’s bevy of buttons and scroll wheels he simply said “looks confusing”. After having used the iPhone for years I totally agree. I can’t believe I used to use that mess of a device.

This morning, while typing a reply email to one of our portfolio company CEOs, I paused mid sentence to re-read what I had written. I noticed that I could say in 33 characters what I had quickly written in 192. Years of Twitter usages is trickling down into being more aware of my level of efficiency conveying thoughts and ideas through writing.

Lonelysandwich has an insightful piece up this morning on how our interactions with Siri are driving another form of evolution:

As we learn to speak to Siri, we’ll learn more about how we formulate ideas into words, how to express those so that they may be understood with less margin of error, ultimately shortening the gap between intention and comprehension.

It’s safe to assume that as we learn to talk to Siri, Siri learns to listen to us. So we’re not simply assimilating with the robot culture, we’re fostering a new understanding between our vastly different types of intelligence.

Which is to say, Siri will teach us how to talk to Siri but maybe more importantly, how to talk to each other.

I may not be Darwin and San Francisco may not be the Galaposos, but it’s fascinating to watch humans and computers evolving together in real-time.