Technology as a separate species

From the International Herald Tribune (Nov 4, 2007) article on how GPS devices are causing problems in small English villages that can't handle the giant trucks their satnavs systems route them through:

...signs seem to be less and less effective as people increasingly rely more on GPS systems and less on maps, common sense, and their own eyes. ... 'Like if the satnav says, "drive into this muddy field," they think, "that 's weird," but they do it anyway." 

This story (and my own experiences with GPS devices) illustrates nicely the basic premise of Donald A. Norman's new book, The Design of Future Things: It's best to leery and cautious when we start letting our machines do our thinking for us. (Or as I like to say, we need to remember that the operative word in artificial intelligence is artificial.)

 

I am always delighted when Norman publishes a new book. I've been a fan since he wrote Things That Make Us Smart. His Design of Everyday Things always makes my list as one of the most influential books I've ever read.

 

In this book, Norman tackles how we should best design ways to communicate with "smart" machines - cars and houses and appliances especially. (There is little said about computer interfaces, per se.) What happens when cars "help" us drive by not letting us get too close to the car ahead of us or not pull in front of another car? Will we be able move traffic more efficiently or might we be forever be trapped in traffic roundabouts by an overly cautious driving program? Do we really want our refrigerators nagging us about our food intake or our houses selecting music according to our perceived mood? He observes:

If machines can be said to have a "voice," theirs is certainly condescending..." and

"...our products are getting smarter, more intelligent, and more demanding, or if you like, bossy."

Norman cautions that we and machines ".. are two different species," each with its own values, outlooks and objectives. If we recognize this, we have a better chance at communicating effectively. He also suggests we confine machine's task to those that are "augmentative" rather than "autonomous" - helping us make good decisions, not making the decisions for us.

He suggests these "design" rules 

Design Rules for Human Designers of "Smart" Machines

1. Provide rich, complex, and natural signals.
2. Be predictable.
3. Provide good conceptual models.
4. Make the output understandable.
5. Provide continual awareness without annoyance.
6. Exploit natural mappings.

Design Rules Developed by Machines to Improve Their Interactions with People

1. Keep things simple.
2. Give people a conceptual model. 
3. Give reasons.
4. Make people think they are in control.
5. Continually reassure.
6. Never label human behavior as "error."

The writing iis readable and thought-provoking as are all of Norman's books. A good holiday gift for the geek who reads in your house.

P.S. I was delighted that Mr. Norman himself responded to a Blue Skunk blog entry where I stated that I could not get his book in Kindle format. (His comment is about 4th from the last.)  Pretty cool that he took the time to comment. It was like hearning from the Elvis of technology! 

What's on your bookshelf?

Ethan Bodnar in his entry "Your Bookshelf, Your Identity," challenges us to photograph our bookshelves and post the photos to Flickr. (He suggests some fairly stringent rules.) I don't do Flickr, so I'm just posting mine here. I suppose had I taken a couple minutes, I could have put out some more intellectual-type titles. (It was fun seeing Carolyn's, Diane's and Tim's bookshelves as well.)

The bedside pile. Gives lie to my Lazy Person's Reading Plan, eh? One title hard to see is Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You. The Gruber book is quality fiction. And yes, I am still working through the Second Life guide.

 
The home office reads. The usual suspects about technology and education.

And the home library in a lower level hallway - 1/2 of which belongs to the LWW. When the cases get full, I start getting rid of books.

Oh, booklovers, take a look at BOOKS TOOLBOX: 50+ Sites for Book Lovers. A great list of tools for tracking and sharing one's reading and personal library (or libraries). (Via Stephen's Lighthouse)

The polemicist

Polemic: an aggressive attack on or refutation of the opinions or principles of another (M-W.com - professional)

Polemic: An aggressive debate, attack on or refutation of the opinions or principles of another (en.wiktionary.org - amateur and stolen?)

Groucho Marx once quipped, "I was so long writing my review that I never got around to reading the book." While I actually read Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture (Currency, 2007), I may have been so busy mentally writing the review as I read, I wonder if I really comprehended it.

As a self-proclaimed polemicist, Keen sets out to be deliberatively provocative and succeeds. Starting in the introduction by setting up and referring to social web content providers as Huxley's infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters (disgusting that anyone would do this), Keen argues that non-professional content providers, intellectual property thieves, and the new Internet moguls who control Google, YouTube and Facebook are destroying civilization as we know it.

Let's get some of the quibbles out of the way first:

• Despite arguing that edited content must be encouraged and preserved, Keen saves his most virulent criticism for authors appearing in traditional media - Chris Long's book The Long Tail and a Kevin Kelly article appearing in the New York Times Magazine. If the blogarati are so deluded and the professional writers are so saintly, wouldn't you think Keen would have disagreed with the monkeys instead of the blessed?
• Keen attributes all the decline in newspaper publishing, music production and film-making to free amateur content, free services (Craigslist) or stolen intellectual property reducing the profits of the established media companies. He finds no fault with the poor quality products that have been the result of the accountants in these companies making the creative decisions based on profitability. Might it be that people are not watching TV, buying music or getting newspapers because today's TV, music and newspapers have been so starved by bottom-liners that they are not much distinguishable from the amateurs.
• While the first part of the book stays pretty much with the theme of the amateur driving out the professional, Keen digresses in the final chapters into a general condemnation of the Internet itself, trotting the tired old pornography, identity theft, child safety, and lack of privacy stories out just for good measure. Damned by association, I believe this called.
  
• Much of what Keen is describing is an economic shift - power moving from the traditional media companies to those which are web-based. Is there really any reason I should care that the president of Disney or Gannett is taking home a few hundred thousand less in bonuses this year and the folks at Yahoo or YouTube are taking home more?
  

Yet I have some of the same concerns Keen shares about the fate of authors, musicians, and newspaper reporters and how they will remunerated for their intellectual creations. Music companies and mainstream publishers do provide the services of development and marketing of talent. (John Perry Barlow and Esther Dyson predicted as early as the mid-90s that digitized creative work was so easy to steal that other forms of income generation would be necessary for artists, writers and musicians.) I would hate to think of a world from which Peter Jackson's work has been replaced by home clips of fart lighting on YouTube.

It's probably in the news are where I share Keen's concerns the most. Society still needs the Third Estate and were professional journalism's power diminish to the point it no longer could be a governmental check, we'll all be in trouble. Of the LWW and my four children, only one takes a print newspaper - and these are educated young people! Professional news is lacking in credibility with lots of people right now who feel the "people" offer a more fair and balanced view. We need to think hard about this one.

My sense is that the more infatuated one is with the Web 2.0, the more important it is one read this book to get a look at the darker side of the changes being wrought. I always find I learn more from critics than I do from friends.

A few take away quotes:

• What happens, you might ask, when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule?...The monkeys take over. p 9
• Wittingly or not, we seek out the information that mirrors back out own biases and opinions and conforms with our distorted versions of reality. p 85
• History has proven that the crowd is not often very wise. After all, many unwise ideas - slavery, infanticide, George W Bush's war in Iraq, Britney Spears - have been extremely popular with the crowd. This is why the arbiters of truth should be the experts - those who speak from a place of knowledge and authority - not the winners of a popularity contest. p. 96
• These days even the clergy are turning into plagiarists. p 144
• Well, the Web 2.0 is the democratization of that Orwellian nightmare; instead of a single all-seeing, all-knowing Orwellian leader, now anyone can be Big Brother. p 177
• Can we really trust society to behave properly in the Wild West culture of the Web 2.0 revolution? p 196
• ...as a parent, I feel we need to enforce the laws [COPA, DOPA] designed to protect our kids from morally corrosive Internet content. p 201

Now back to summer and some wonderful, mindless mystery and adventure novels.