Why talk to a computer?
I recently caught the movie Her (2013), whose story of a man falling in love with an "operating system" (actually what is more commonly called an "artificial intelligence") seemed like it should provide plenty of material for commentators upon humans' relationships with technology. But apart from the prevalence of pastel shirts and bad moustaches in this imagined future, I was most forcefully struck by the constant use of voice interfaces. The main character makes his living by dictating letters to a computer that prints them out in faux handwriting, and, once his new operating system is installed, constantly chats away to it without any apparent regard to what might be overheard by the people around him. Nor do the people around him pay him any regard.
I've long suspected that talking computers are part of The Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived. Not because they don't work — though my limited personal contact with them suggests that voice recognition is still not particularly good — but because they aren't nearly as useful as many a science fiction writer has supposed them to be. Is it really so hard for an able-bodied person to push a button or touch an icon on a screen? Can't writers, well, write? And would any real writer (or anyone else needing to concentrate) want to work in an office where everyone was babbling at their computers all day?
A week after seeing Her, I happened to read a quote from one John R. Pierce in the August 2014 edition of IEEE Spectrum: "Many early computer enthusiasts thought that computers should resemble human beings and be good at exactly the tasks that human beings are good at" (p. 8). He goes on to describe the pursuit of human-like computers as "facing the future with one's back squarely towards it", that is, looking at the past and assuming that the future will be a technologised version of the same.
I take Pierce to be making a point similar to one I've already discussed a couple of times in this blog: what use would a human have for a computer that did something that he or she is already good at? Computers are so useful precisely because they're good at things at which humans are not — most fundamentally, the rapid and reliable carrying out of minute instructions.
When I was (much) younger, I think I supposed that we'd one day be able to program our computers using English instead of the difficult-to-learn formal languages that we use now. Or at least I assumed that everyone else was pining for that day, as evidenced by depictions like Her. But greater experience tells me that the reason that we don't use English to program computers isn't that they can't understand it (though they can't), it's that English isn't actually a particularly good tool for describing data or issuing instructions. That's why lawyers and philosophers spend so much time debating the precise intepretation of observations and phrases, and why scientists and others resort to mathematics when they want their meaning to be indisputable.
I'm not sure where the idea that computers should or would be like humans came from. They neither look nor act anything like humans, and I'm pretty sure that most psychologists would laugh at the idea that humans behave like neat information-processing machines. And humans have plenty of trouble talking to each other — Her illustrates this itself — so why expect talking to a computer to be any better?
