The Unfinished Revolution: How to Make Technology Work for Us--Instead of the Other Way Around
240
The Unfinished Revolution: How to Make Technology Work for Us--Instead of the Other Way Around
240eBook
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Overview
In a world spiralling into a state of technological excess, Michael Dertouzos shows us how to make technology—in all its infinite varieties—work for, rather than against, us in our everday business lives. Now includes a new foreword by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.
At its core, Dertouzos' manifesto is this: Simplify the use of technology to the point where it works FOR us rather than having it dictate the way we live and work. This book is about getting to the point where computer fads give way to a true Information Revolution. To get there, we must abandon our current preoccupation with machine complexities and set a goal that is as simple as it is powerful: Information technology should help people do more by doing less.
Dertouzos offers a look at the future and place of technology in everyday life: Where would a world of truly easy to use technology lead the human race? How might people change their way of life and work, their politics, their self perception and their quest for the meaning of life in such an environment?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780061755477 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Publication date: | 10/13/2009 |
| Sold by: | HARPERCOLLINS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 483 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Why Change
Weird animals surround me in my home, at work, everywhere I go. Every day I must spend hours feeding them, healing them, waiting for them. And the fighting! They hold each other hostage in asphyxiating headlocks. I scream at them, but they just grunt or stare back stupidly. When we do get along, and I'm feeling affection for them, they suddenly turn around and bite a chunk off my hide.
You are surrounded by these creatures, too — the personal computers, laptops, handheld assistants, printers, Internet-savvy phones, music storage drives, and other digital wonders. They are everywhere and multiplying fast. Yet instead of serving us, we are serving them. We wait endlessly for our computers to boot up, and for bulky Web pages to paint themselves on our screens. We stand perplexed in front of incomprehensible system messages, and wait in frustration on the phone for computerized assistance. We constantly add software upgrades, enter odd instructions, fix glitches, only to sit in maddening silence when our machines crash, forcing us to start all over again, hoping against hope that they didn't take a piece of our intellectual hide with them. We'd never live in a house, work in an office, or ride in a car where we had to put up with a menagerie of such beasts. Yet we do it every day with our computer menagerie.
We shouldn't have to.
We have already gone so far down the road of serving computers that we've come to accept our servitude as necessary. It isn't. It is time for us to rise up with a profound demand: "Make our computers simpler to use!" Make them talk with us, do things for us, get theinformation we want, help us work with other people, and adapt to our individual needs. Only then will computers make us productive and truly serve us, instead of the other way around.
Is this possible? Certainly.
Before I reveal an entirely new approach to computer systems and their uses — a new plan for human-centric computing — let me assure you that in our new century, we have every right to expect fundamental reform. For 40 years computers have been shrines to which we pay dutiful homage. When something goes wrong, the "user"you and I — feel that if we somehow had behaved better the trouble would not have arisen. But we are not at fault. The trouble lies in the current approach to computing.
If computers are to live up to the promise of serving us, they will have to change drastically and never again subject us to the frustrating experiences we have all shared.
Several colleagues from the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and I are flying to Taiwan. I have been trying for three hours to make my new laptop work with one of these "smart cards" that plug into the machine and download my personal calendar. When the card software is happy, the operating system complains, and vice versa. Irritated, I turn to Tim Berners-Lee, sitting next to me, who graciously offers to assist. After an hour the inventor of the Web admits that the task is beyond his capabilities. I turn to Ron Rivest, inventor of RSA public key cryptography, and ask him to help. He declines, exhibiting his wisdom. A young faculty member behind us speaks up: "You guys are too old. Let me do it." He gives up after an hour and a half. So Igo back to my "expert" approach of typing random entries into the various wizards and lizards that keep popping up on the screen. After two more hours, and two batteries, I make it work, by sheer accident and without remembering how.
My friends on this flight were hardly incompetent. The problem was what I call the "unintegrated systems fault." Technologists design today's hardware and software systems without worrying enough about how these different pieces will work together. If the slightest conflict arises among an operating system, a communications network, a digital camera, a printer, or any other device, the modules become deadlocked, as do their makers, who point to one another, leaving you to resolve their differences. After I published this Taiwan anecdote in an August 1999 article in Scientific American, I received scores of letters from people who said, "I know exactly what you are talking about. Please fix it." The problem is not simply a "bug" to be worked out in existing systems, but rather an endemic mind-set that has characterized computer design for decades. Only a radical change can fix it.
It's 11 P.M. and I check my e-mail. Ninety-eight new messages have arrived since yesterday. At 2 to 3 minutes per message, my average response time, I'll need 4 hours to handle them. I'd like to grant them my highest security classfication, DBR — "destroy before reading."
How do we handle this "overload fault?" We don't. Mostly, we feel guilty if we cannot respond to all the messages that come our way. Better e-mail software can relieve a lot of this burden. Better human behavior can go further. Human-centric computing means more than changing the hardware and software of computer systems. We must also improve the ways we use technology.
My son is searching the Web for information on Vespas, the Italian scooters that conquered Europe in the 1950s, which he loves to restore. The search engine has given him 2,545 hits and he is busy checking them out. His eyes squint and his brain labors to minimize the time he needs to decide whether he should keep or toss each entry. I imagine him in an ancient badlands, furiously shoveling through 2,545 mountains of dirt, looking for one nugget of hidden treasure. His shovel is diamond studded and it is stamped "high tech," so he is duly modern. Yet he is still shoveling!
Table of Contents
| Preface | xi | |
| Acknowledgments | xv | |
| 1. | Why Change | 1 |
| Charting New Terrain | 6 | |
| Rise of the Information Marketplace | 12 | |
| Integrate Computers into Our Lives | 16 | |
| Give Us a Gas Pedal and Steering Wheel | 17 | |
| Reach All People | 19 | |
| 2. | Let's Talk | 22 |
| Elusive Intelligence | 27 | |
| Speech and Vision: Different Roles | 29 | |
| Let's Talk | 30 | |
| Show Me | 38 | |
| A New Metaphor | 41 | |
| Brain Chips | 45 | |
| 3. | Do It for Me | 48 |
| The Ascent to Meaning: E-Forms | 50 | |
| Meaning on the Web: Metadata | 56 | |
| Bring Things under Control | 59 | |
| Hundreds of Dumb Servants | 63 | |
| Start the Ball Rolling | 65 | |
| Automation and Society | 68 | |
| 4. | Get Me What I Want | 71 |
| Organize or Search? | 73 | |
| Discovering What Your Information Means | 75 | |
| The Semantic Web Conspiracy | 79 | |
| A New Information Model | 86 | |
| Call to Action | 90 | |
| 5. | Help Us Work Together | 94 |
| The Challenge | 99 | |
| Messages and Packages | 101 | |
| Collaboration Systems | 104 | |
| Information Work | 110 | |
| Privacy | 113 | |
| More Social Consequences | 117 | |
| Distance Education | 120 | |
| 6. | Adapt to Me | 123 |
| A Growing Need | 125 | |
| Pushing the OS Upward | 131 | |
| Nomadic Software | 133 | |
| 7. | Applying the New Forces | 139 |
| Health | 141 | |
| Commerce | 147 | |
| Disaster Control | 154 | |
| Medicine in the Bush | 155 | |
| Total Financial Services | 156 | |
| Play | 157 | |
| Sundials | 158 | |
| Why These Five Forces? | 159 | |
| Dovetailing People with the Forces | 160 | |
| 8. | Oxygen | 165 |
| Putting It All Together | 171 | |
| The Handy 21 | 173 | |
| The Enviro 21 | 176 | |
| The N21 Network | 178 | |
| Speech | 181 | |
| Automation | 185 | |
| Individualized Information Access | 188 | |
| Collaboration | 190 | |
| Customization | 192 | |
| The Oxygen Software System | 192 | |
| Turning on a Dime | 193 | |
| 9. | Finishing the Unfinished Revolution | 195 |
| Info Royalty | 199 | |
| Global Reach | 202 | |
| Monoculture and Overload | 205 | |
| The Technology Fountain | 207 | |
| No Machines beyond This Point | 210 | |
| Greater Humanity? | 212 | |
| Beyond the Information Revolution | 214 | |
| Index | 219 |
Reading Group Guide
Overview
Michael Dertouzos begins his latest book, THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION, with an all-too-familiar scenario when he describes spending the bulk of a long transatlantic flight trying to download his personal calendar onto his laptop using a so-called "smart card." The frustration felt by the author, who has headed up the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science for over twenty-five years, is replicated thousands of times a day by people who have considerably fewer computer skills than he. After all, it is an accepted fact that computers will crash, software will be indecipherable and machines in the same home or office will be incompatible when linked together. In THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION, Dertouzos proposes a solution to these modern technical woes. Using one's computer, he argues, should be as easy as driving a car -- with one pedal for the gas, one for the brake, and no impossibly dense manuals to figure out.
The solution, as Dertouzos sees it, is to make computers "human-centered," a concept that goes beyond the idea of the "user friendly" PC or the high speed modem. Computers, Dertouzos argues, should be designed around the needs and capabilities of people rather than people trying to adapt to the machine. We have become so used to battling with inefficiency in our computers that we are unable to see the need to change them. The first step, Dertouzos argues, is in changing our mindset.
Once we have realized the need to make computers more human-centered, Dertouzos proposes five striking new technologies that will aid in the process. These technologies are possible, even feasible, right now. In order to become truly human-centered, Dertouzos says, computers willinteract with us (understand human speech and respond in ways that we can understand), automate human tasks (saving time and increasing human efficiency), individualize information access (gather information relevant to a specific person based on preset commands and preferences, again, saving valuable time), facilitate human collaboration across space and time (linking humans together through a common network to allow for increased productivity), and offer easy customization (wherein the computer adapts to our individual preferences instead of the reverse).
Dertouzos describes each of these five types of interactions and the type of technology needed with several detailed examples. Extrapolating from the fundamental technologies he proposes, Dertouzos goes on to describe how almost every aspect of our daily lives can be enhanced by a transition to human-centered computers. There is great potential in the field of health care, for example, as sophisticated tests could be administered quickly and efficiently and an individual's entire medical history could be tracked, from home, by a personal "guardian angel." Commerce is another field that would benefit greatly as businesses could link and share information for products and research. Finally, Dertouzos explains how education, so critical in today's society, could be vastly improved by pooled and efficient information available across a broad base.
Dertouzos finishes by describing how his model can be created in the near future by detailing a current experimental system used by MIT called Oxygen that combines all of the five human-centric technologies. In his description, Dertouzos demonstrates how human-centered computing has the potential to relieve us of the inevitable frustrations of today's computers and save us immeasurable hours of time, trouble and inefficiency.
Questions for Discussion:
Interviews
Author Essay
The automatic answering system greets you with its murderous "You have reached the Tough Luck Corporation. If you want Marketing, press 1. If you want Engineering, press 2...." The image this ritual forms in my head is of a human being, on whose head a price cannot be set, obediently executing instructions dispensed by a $100 computer. You are serving the inhuman machine and its inhuman owners, who got away with saving a few dollars of operator time by squandering valuable pieces of your life and that of millions of other people. What glory: The highest technology artifacts in the world have become our masters, reintroducing us to human slavery more than a century after its abolition.
This "human servitude fault" is but one of the many ways in which machines cause us to serve them, instead of the other way around. Here are some more: In the "manual labor fault" you do all the work, squinting your eyes and taxing your brain, as when you sift through thousands of search-engine results to find the one you want. In the "excessive learning fault," your handheld digital assistant demands that you go back to first grade and relearn how to write, so it can understand your scribbling on its tiny screen. Software, overloaded with features that you don't need, overwhelms you. You wait forever as web pages load up on your screen. And when two pieces of software come in conflict with each another, so do their makers, leaving you alone to sort out the mess.
The Web, which we think has reached its pinnacle, is more like a meeting ground for "exhibitionists" displaying their wares or tooting their horns and "voyeurs" browsing frantically to catch these exhibitions. And as for the Web being "worldwide," it interconnects fewer than 5 percent of the world's people.
Two factors are responsible for this situation: an overwhelming complexity of computer systems that force us to deal with them at their low, mechanistic levels and the yet-to-be realized potential of the Information Revolution to help us do more with less effort. And we should keep in mind that technology is not standing still: Millions of new wireless devices and physical appliances that we use in our everyday lives will increasingly join the interconnected information marketplace, making our systems even more complex. By all these counts, we are nowhere near where we could be. In comparison to the industrial age, the information era is at the steam-engine stage. By the time information systems reach jet-plane status, we will focus on utility over fads, triple our productivity, use our computers as naturally and easily as we now use our cars and refrigerators, and hear the voices of hundreds of millions more people -- if we abandon our self-defeating path toward unbridled and growing machine complexity.
Until we undertake this challenge, people will stay confused, and justifiably so. Does all this new and exciting technology make us "better off"? Or are we headed toward greater complexity, increased frustration, and a human burden that will grow in proportion to the gadgets and programs that surround us? We certainly can be better off with information technology. But not the way we are headed. Without a fundamentally new approach the confusion will get worse, and the Information Revolution will remain unfinished. It's high time for a radical change.
I have called the approach that will induce this change "human-centric computing," to emphasize that, from now on, computer systems should be centered around our needs and capabilities. Here is what human-centered systems should be able to do:
1. They should let us communicate with them naturally, the way we communicate with other people, using the spoken word. This way, we won't need to learn new and complex ways for telling our machines what we want them to do. Fortunately, the speech understanding technology is up to meeting this challenge.
2. They should automate routine human actions: You should be able to say to your machine, "If Joe calls or sends me email, alert me, wherever I may be." And the machine should obediently and tirelessly check every incoming caller ID and email sender, carrying out its master's instructions.
3. Human-centered systems should help us work with other people, across space and time. You should be able to sell your office work not only to local organizations but to distant ones as well, even to ones that are in faraway time zones. Hardly any office work flows over the Net today. Yet, it will be the bulk of tomorrow's economic activity over the world's network, because at 50 percent of the industrial world economy, it involves some $10 trillion a year.
4. The new systems must help people locate the information they need, the people they want to reach, and the physical appliances they desire to control, whenever and wherever they wish to do so, without having to search forever through mounting piles of info-junk.
5. Finally, human-centered systems should be able to adapt easily to the highly varying needs of different human beings and organizations. Ultimately, everyone will start with similar information systems. What will distinguish the winners from the losers will be the way they dovetail the new systems with their most precious resource -- their human capabilities.
Human-centered systems will make available these new technologies to tomorrow's computer application programs. This way, a human-centered system for doctors and hospitals would come equipped with the ability to understand spoken medical commands and queries; with built-in programs that would automate routine medical procedures, communicating, as necessary, with medical appliances; with collaboration software that would enable doctors to hold consultations with one another; and with built-in information access capabilities that would let doctors easily access patient records and the medical literature. With such increased capabilities in hand, doctors would be able to devote much more of their precious time to valuable eyeball-to-eyeball doctor-patient sessions, instead of doing all the routine office work by themselves.
The human-centric approach also calls for changes in our attitude: As we complain about the email that overloads us, we should keep in mind the fact that just because we have become interconnected, we have not earned the automatic right to reach anyone we want, nor the automatic obligation to respond to every message that reaches us. Human-centered systems will also give rise to a new breed of "nomadic" software that flows among the networks to our machines, where it is needed. If you drop your handheld unit in the lake, you should be able to pick up another one, maybe from a friend, and download your "information personality" into it from your home and office units, without missing a beat.
Human-centered systems will have a profound impact upon our personal and professional lives. Take the information work that will be made possible with the collaboration technology: Imagine now the 50 million Indians in Asia who can read and write in English and who are skilled in some kind of office work -- transcribing medical instructions to text, reviewing mortgage applications, selling products or services, and so on. These people will be able to offer their work, at a distance, to the wealthy English-speaking nations of the world, perhaps at one quarter of the cost charged by local office workers. The result will be a global redistribution of labor with the attendant pain for those who lose their work and the corresponding gain for those who replace them. At the same time, speech technology will open the door of the information marketplace to billions of people who today cannot read and write but are perfectly capable of speaking.
Most office work over the Net will flow within the industrial world, transforming the way we do business and eventually tripling our productivity. Much like the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the middle class, human-centered systems will give rise to a new info-royalty class. Kings and rich folk have always had servants. With human-centered automation, we, too, will end up surrounded by automated servants. Rich people have always had products and services customized to their wishes. So will we through customization. Rich people don't need to work, because their wealth breeds more wealth. The expected threefold increase in human productivity made possible by human-centered systems could free up two-thirds of the time we now spend working...if we elect to realize the savings in this way. Many more benefits will accrue to our health care, our education, our business and professional lives, simply because human-centered systems aim to serve our needs.
We will know that the Information Revolution is finished when human-centered systems become invisible, as they quietly serve our needs, letting us do a great deal more of what we want, with a lot less effort on our part.
--Michael Dertouzos