Binary bitch slapping
Do computers work for us or do we work for them? It seems that we spend a disproportionate amount of time complying with requests made to us by automated processes. Demon dialers call us at home and most of us blithely hold the line and answer the programming with key pressing. We call companies and are confronted with the dialer's cousin--the dreaded voice mail box system ("Press 1 if you're calling about timber wolves, Press 2 if you're calling about wolverines.)
Websites were supposed to make things easier for us, but in many ways they have not. They also try to force us into a rat maze of deterministic choices. Commercial websites do not relate to us by our problems, they force us to constantly choose from their navigation menu, which is another variant of the voice mail menu.
There must be a new paradigm for how to interact with computer systems. We should be able to just blather to a gadget and get a rational response. I'm not sure that this is completely AI in a conventional sense--the software doesn't have to know much about the world, just how to translate our problems with a company into a quality solution. I hope that they don't turn out to be the same thing.
Humans free-form their problems, mixing fact, feeling and opinion along with a little dose of anecdotes ("my car used to act the same way, except that is an ipod. God, it makes me mad when it locks up like that!") Computers need to deal with that somehow. One of the biggest problems with digital thinking is that is presumes that someone smarter than you has thought through all the permutations of what could go wrong. This is why you often go to a product help site and get a lot of "did you turn on the box?" kind of questions, but nowhere can you find a mention of what appears to you to be demonic possession of your Tivo.
Posted on December 11, 2007
