|
 BUY
THIS BOOK FROM BARNES AND NOBLE
Dertouzos, Michael (2001). The unfinished
revolution: Human centered computers and what they can
do for us. New York: Harper-Collins.
The unfinished revolution sets forth a new
direction for computers--that they should serve people rather
than the other way around.
1 WHY CHANGE
We are buried in email. Our devices
cannot talk to each other. Our search engines are like
looking for a needle in a haystack. Too often, we serve
our computers instead of the other way around.
Faults
- Overload fault
- Manual labor fault
- Human servitude fall
- Crash fault
- Feature overload fault
Forces for change
- Increased horsepower for computers and
communications
- Interconnection of appliances and physical
devices to our computers
- Mobile computers connected through wireless
communications
- A new breed of highly mobile "rented"
software
Rise of the information marketplace
The sharing of information and e-Commerce
over today's Internet is only the tip of the iceberg. "Content"--
TV, movies, radio, books, magazines, etc.-- accounts for less
than 5% of the world's economy. However, 50% of the
economy is information (office) work, which is barely happening
over the Internet today.
Integrate computers into our lives
What's all this talk about "getting on
the Internet", like it's a special place you go?
Today, we are at the beginning of the information revolution.
The last revolution was the industrial revolution. Its
greatest innovation was the motor. Did we have special
places just for motors? No--we brought the motors into
our lives, integrating them to such an extent that we no longer
mention the motors, only the tools in which they are embedded.
The same thing should happen with computers. Don't tell me
about its specifications---tell me what it can do.
Give us a gas pedal and a steering wheel
We need to raise the level of controls we
use with our computers from the current low machine level
to a higher human level. Imagine if on your car you
had to individually control spark plugs, fuel mixture, brake
tension, etc. No! In cars, we simply have a gas
pedal, brakes, and a steering wheel. We need the equivalent
for our computers.
Reach all people
Only 5% of the world's population is connected
to the Internet. How can the web be worldwide when it
only reaches such a tiny portion of humankind? If this
is allowed to continue, it will only increase the gap between
rich and poor. Instead of providing more training, why
don't we make the computers easier to use?
2 LET'S TALK
"Our computers are hard to use.
They enslave us rather than serve us."
We should throw away 90% of the features in
today's bloated software.
You were born with eyes, ears, a mouth:
the ability to see, hear, and speak. You were not
born with a keyboard or mouse socket. Human centric
computing says you should use these natural human abilities
to communicate with machines.
Elusive intelligence
There's a lot of hype about "intelligent
agents", but current ones exhibit only a sliver of intelligence.
Speech and vision: different roles
Humans use speech for two way communication.
But vision is used mostly one way-- for taking in information.
therefore, speech should be the primary means of exchange
between people and machines, while vision to be the primary
approach for getting information from the machine.
Let's talk
Speech recognition systems are difficult.
Speech understanding programs, in comparison, are easy---they
require no training and can understand anyone. We need
to shift power efforts towards speech understanding programs
(examples from LCS research).
Speech readers are getting much better; they
sound less computerized and more natural.
There needs to be growth in translation services
as commerce becomes more global.
Show me
Display from machine to the human is progressing:
bigger displays are in the works, as are three dimensional
displays. Head mounted displays, VR displays and augmented
reality displays are also progressing. However, visual
recognition from you to the machine is lagging. new
research in visual recognition, intelligent rooms, and pattern
classification may help us there.
A new metaphor
Are two main metaphors today are the desktop
and the browser (window shopping). Each is good, but
together they make no sense because they work in different
ways--- it's like requiring different dialing systems to make
local versus long distance phone calls. we need to merge
these two metaphors into a single system. One possible
metaphor is that of servant. Another is a virtual geographic
metaphor (Bob: kind of like William Gibson's "cyberspace")---
moving in space is a natural human endeavor with which we
have thousands of years of experience. Similarly, a
"historicoptor" would allow you to drill down into
the past by pressing down on a joystick or into the future
by pulling up.
Brain chips
Direct human/machine interfaces are tempting,
but we would have to deal with the problem of information
overload before brain implants are a good idea.
3 DO IT FOR ME
The author uses an "e-bulldozer"
to book his airline travel. a command given in a few
seconds produces about thirteen minutes of work by the computer
that replaces perhaps hours of work by a human, similar to
the way a slight touch on the levers of bulldozer can lift
thousands of pounds. This automation is one of the most
promising aspects of human centric computing. Properly
applied, such automation should be able to raise human productivity
by 300% during the next century. Since, as noted earlier,
office work accounts for more than half of the world's economy,
this is a big deal (you could do a year's worth of office
work in four months!).
The ascent to meaning: e-forms
Computers should be able to "understand"
what they are communicating to one another so they can act
on it. For example, computers should be able to automatically
fill in forms for us. Failing that, forms should be
speech driven, underlain by speech understanding programs.
Problem: how do we agree on systems of shared
meaning? Perhaps by either gradual adoption of standards
or through "Semantic Webs". Metadata (e.g.,
XML) shows great promise.
Bring things under control
Automation should extend to control and coordination
of physical devices around us.
Hundreds of dumb servants
A bunch of little "scripts" could
automate daily activities. Start
small---use "Quickkeys" or other macro programs
to automate common tasks.
Automation and society
Automation will result in the loss of some
jobs, but mostly jobs that are repetitive and require little
human intelligence.
4 GET ME WHAT I WANT
Individualized information access.
"Today's information retrieval systems
don't understand what we mean what we ask for something...
and they don't understand what all the information they sieve
through is about."
Organize or search?
How do people get at information without computers?
We check our desk drawers, we ask friends and family, we look
in reference books and contact experts. Our machines
should do likewise---check themselves first, then go to machines
of our friends, and roam the information marketplace.
We need a "meaning processors".
Meaning processors can be "extractors" that pull
header information from a file, or "observers" that
track the frequency with which you use each piece of information
you touch, as well as linkages among the pieces of information
you use. These media processors would work automatically,
all the time.
The semantic web conspiracy
Tim Burners-Lee, the inventor of the world
wide web, dreams that the web will gradually form a gigantic
"brain" by adding the capability that can relate
the meaning (or semantics) of the information contained in
web pages. Manufacturers can aid this process by joining
together into groups in deciding on standards for using XML
or RDF to code their web pages.
A new information model
The prevailing model of information storage
on our computers right now is that of hierarchical files and
folders. Meaning is not included in this picture (except
maybe for file names).
The web is not hierarchical. Imagine
if all of the information on your computer was linked together
using hyperlinks, like on the web. Pictures, audio files,
video files, and text files related to a given concept would
all be automatically linked to each other. Now imagine
extending that to the computers of your friends and associates,
or even all the computers on the web.
Call to action
Ask yourself the question: what information
is reliable, timely, and vital to me or my organization's
purposes? It's in your best interests to find the best
information out there, and that information is not standing
still. You can start by searching for good information
sources. Ask peers, look at competitors, and search
the web. The harder you work to find that information
sources, the easier finding information will be.
Another big question to ask: what information
within my organization is not currently on any machine but
could be dramatically more helpful if it were computerized?
Pick areas where the potential payoff is great.
5 HELP US WORK TOGETHER
The challenge
Now, via the web, we can electronically reach
any one of a few hundred million people around the world--
that a thousand times more people than we could reach with
an automobile, and a million times more people than we could
reach on foot. Our challenge is to convert this proximity
into useful person-to-person and organization-to-organization
collaboration.
E-commerce brings buyers and sellers together;
however, hardly any of these transactions involve direct negotiations
between buyer and seller, so this is not really collaboration.
Messages and packages
Currently, the most widespread collaboration
is via email (with an estimated 1.5 billion messages per day).
Future email will include more speech, diagrams, and video.
However, email can sap your time. We
are headed for an estimated ten fold increase it received
messages, so much that it is estimated that within ten years
your email will require eight hours of daily attention.
Clearly, something must be done.
What to do? "Birth control at the source,
and euthanasia at the destination".
Birth control: consider---if you send
an email message to one other people, you'll consume half
a day of their collective lives!
Use filters to remove unsolicited email and
categorize other mail. use macro programs to automate
common email tasks.
Collaboration systems
Tomorrow's collaboration systems need to provide
us with the natural feel of face-to-face encounters.
Consider the telephone. It's "low tech".
However, it's successful because it approximates the naturalness
of a spoken conversation held face-to-face.
To do this, we need three things:
1 making distant encounters realistic, as
if they were held in the same location
2 carrying forward the "meanings"
pivotal to continuity in asynchronous encounters
3 coordinating person to person encounters
with the other human centered technologies people we use with
their machines.
Currently, delays and glitches more this process.
But this will change. Likewise, video is currently small and
grainy, but it will get better as bandwidth increases.
Sharing applications is already easy, but controlling them
at a distance is still difficult.
For asynchronous communication, we need collaboration
editors that will do for the collaboration process what text
editors have done for document preparation.
Information work
Collaborative software will soon be customized
to professionals and tasks. Medicine, salespeople, real estate,
lawyers-- even video games and dating services.
Privacy
Information technologies can be used to attack
on privacy, but they can be used to protect it, too.
More social consequences
- changes in taxation
- redistribution of population away from
urban centers
- changes in types of jobs
- changes in copyright law
- possible changes in human relations
- exploitation by criminals
Distance education
Education defines future society. It
can narrow the gap between the rich and the poor.
The jury is still out regarding the efficacy of online education.
However the promise is impressive.
6 ADAPT TO ME
Customization in software will increase when
we use applications that come loaded with special speech modules,
automated procedures, individualized information access capabilities,
specialized collaboration editors, and a good deal of customized
software-- all tailored to your job and your needs.
A growing need
Our tools need to be tailored. Carpenters,
Jewelers, and dentists all use hammers---but not the same
ones! Why are we all using the same word processors?
Picture different word processors for novelists, poets,
secretaries, doctors, insurance workers, journalists, and
students.
Everywhere, whether to expand their markets
or force people to upgrade, big clunky programs keep adding
features, trying to do a lot more than they should.
The result is confusion, and we should revolt.
Pushing the OS upward
Programmers, in their applications, use "calls"
to the operating system. In half a century, the APIs
used for this process have not come much further towards the
human level. GUIs were a big improvement, but an even
more ambitious revision must take place again.
Nomadic software
"My" computer needs to follow me
around, to be available wherever I go. Imagine not having
to lug around a laptop because any computer you use instantly
becomes "your" computer.
7 APPLY THE NEW FORCES
Areas in which these principles can be applied
- health
- commerce
- disaster control
- financial services
- play
8 OXYGEN
How can we bring all this about? Build
and test a prototype. The word "oxygen" is
the name for a shared vision of human centered computing.
It is a proof of concept test bed that combines three things:
- the primary software
technologies that bring machine capabilities closer to people
- the hardware delivery
vehicles that let people use the software
- the core software that
pulls all the different pieces together
Oxygen has three key delivery vehicles
- Handy 21: a portable device consisting
of a microphone, speaker, small screen, and miniature
camera
- Enviro 21: a stationary computer in the
walls of your office, in your hall, and in your car trunk.
- The N21 network: a set of network protocols
that help the other pieces.
9 FINISHING THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION
(summary of book) |
