Re-inventing the wheel, I mean, human
I read David F. Dufty's Lost in Transit: The Strange Story of the Philip K Dick Android over the weekend, whose subject matter is plainly described by its sub-title. I found the book informative and entertaining in its own right, but reading about androids also reminded me of a rhetorical question I asked in the first entry in this blog: what is the purpose of creating human-like artificial intelligence when we have seven thousand million human intelligences already?
I, and most other academics, could probably produce of a long list of intellectual reasons for such a pursuit, ranging from better understanding of how humans interact with other animate objects to illuminating the concept of "intelligence". But some of the folks in Dufty's book (and elsewhere) clearly think that human-like artificial intelligences have more immediate practical uses.
David Hanson, the sculptor who championed the project and built the android's head, argues that "when we interact with things in our environment we interact more naturally, and form more natural relationships, with things that look like us" (p. 73). The surrounding text suggests that Hanson was also thinking about the more academic reasons outlined above, but I think the assumption in this quote deserves some scrutiny.
An essay that I read some years ago, and whose citation I now forget, disputed this kind of thinking using the example of cars. Nearly everyone can learn to drive a car, and we think nothing of it once we've got our licence. This is not, the essay points out, because cars look or behave anything like people, but because they have an interface suited to the task of controlling a motorised vehicle. Why expect that computers (or robots) should be any different?
Hanson might be correct in surmising that we interact more naturally with devices that look like us, at least in the sense that such interaction requires no skill beyond ones we acquire informally at a very early age — though I suspect that many people (Sherry Turkle, for one) would consider the concept of a natural relationship with an artificial being to be an oxymoron. But that's not to say that a hammer or refrigerator, for example, would necessarily be easier to use if it looked like a person.
I think Hanson means to imply that human-like interfaces are worth pursuing because they seem likely to be the most appropriate ones in at least some situations. I'm not yet convinced that human-like interfaces are the best way of interacting with anything other than humans, but maybe that's because I don't have any particular uses for androids.
Software interpretation of human communication and its discontents
I found myself using Google Mail today, having joined a company that uses it as its e-mail system. Aside from my typical frustration with the bloated, slow and browser-dependent interfaces sported by modern webmail programs, I was specifically annoyed that Google Mail, by default, hides part of the e-mail that I'm working on: namely, the signatures and quoted material. As a result, I found myself reading and sending e-mail messages without being sure how they appeared on the receiver's screen.
By coincidence, I also received an e-mail today from a friend apologising for the poor formatting of her previous e-mail. Apparently it looked fine in her e-mail client, but it was garbled by other people's clients (including mine). I recently received another e-mail with a signature containing two different e-mail addresses for the sender, one obviously wrong.
My experience with Google Mail illustrates why this might have happened: the e-mail clients of the victims in the above stories presented a view of an -mail that they deemed helpful, while other people's e-mail clients presented views that those clients deemed helpful.
The views disagreed. Instead of presenting the "true" content of the e-mail, the e-mail clients involved have presented their own interpretation of it. (By "true", I mean the universally-agreed encoding of e-mail messages, being plain text or at least HTML.) And, in doing so, the e-mail clients foiled human communication.
Regarding my particular complaint, I suppose that Google Mail's developers think they are being helpful by automatically eliminating "extraneous" information like quoted messages and signatures. As I said in my previous post, I'm all for eliminating useless distractions from user interfaces. But if signatures and quotes really are useless distractions, why include them in an e-mail in the first place?
I'm part of what seems to be a dwindling minority of people who adhere to the custom of selectively quoting the e-mails to which we reply. Once upon a time, Internet users would have been appalled at the wholesale quoting of earlier e-mails that seems to be current practice. If you're not going to use it, we thought, delete it and save the space.
Now, Internet bandwidth isn't as precious as it used to be, and one might say that only hoary old nerds would cling to byte-pinching practices developed in the days of 2400 baud modems. But I nonetheless think that selective quoting serves a more human purpose: it foregrounds what is important to the communication, and eliminates what is not.
Interventionist features like Google Mail's seem to me to at once encourage lazy communicators to fill their e-mails full of junk in the expectation that their software will correct it for them, and to frustrate careful communicators by making them fight against their software in order to send the message that they want to send. The winner is poor communication.
Who's for clutter and distraction?
A few weeks ago, The Register featured an article entitled Information is the UI in Windows 8, says design guru. I read the article 3-4 times and still have no idea what the eponymous design guru (Shane Morris) was on about, but the comments on the article reminded me of one or two battles I've fought and lost over user interfaces. I was reminded of this again while trying to disable a particularly annoying feature of LibreOffice the other night.
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool minimalist. I detest desktops full of icons; I fight constant battles against Windows programs that want to add themselves to prominent places on the "Start" menu, task bar and desktop; and I despise Gnome and KDE for emulating Windows. (For the record, I prefer Fluxbox.)
There is obviously a certain amount of personal preference here, but the comments on The Register's article make it clear that I'm not the only one. A few commenters mention the infamous <blink> HTML tag. When it was first developed, it presumably seemed like a good way of emphasising text. However, people rapidly discovered that blinking text distracted readers from the rest of the web page.
Google's home page is, I think, a legendary piece of web design. It replaced the complicated and distracting interfaces of Altavista, HotBot, et al., with an interface that gets right to the point of what people want from a search engine: a "search" box. Yet web designers -- apparently unaware of Google's success -- continue to stuff their sites full of links, images, Flash, Javascript and all the rest.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that the way to make a good user interface is to add as many buttons, sidebars, animations and other doodads as possible. So why do well-known web sites like Bigpond and NineMSN seem to do exactly this?
The obvious answer is "feature-itis", the process by which software gains features that seem good in themselves but whose over-abundance as a whole detracts from the comprehensibility and usability of the software. It's easy to say that some software or a web site should provide such-and-such a feature, and usually easy enough for a software developer to make the feature happen. But the proponent of a feature is unlikely to admit that it isn't that important and can be relegated to a second-level menu.
One of the pieces of information that I used to resolve my problem with LibreOffice illustrates this. A user of similar mind to me complained that the section title tooltip displayed by LibreOffice when scrolling through a document is "distracting and annoying". In response, Roman Eisele asserts that "some people will find this tooltip useful". So, on the strength of some unidentified people who might conceivably like this feature, Roman suggests resolving the original user's complaint with a feature that allows anti-tooltip users to disable the scrolling tooltip without disabling all tooltips (which is what I had to do in order to disable a feature that, for me, makes LibreOffice virtually unusable.)
I suppose there must be people who like interfaces that I find cluttered: plenty of computers have them. According to the November 2012 issue of APC Magazine (p. 57), Microsoft decided to remove the "Start" menu from Windows 8 in part because users "were pinning their favourite apps to the taskbar instead," which I consider to make for a very cluttered taskbar. By way of pleasing these users, the Interface Formerly Known As Metro seems to pile icons onto the screen in exactly the way that I hate most. Mind you, most of APC's writers seem to have grave doubts about it, too. I wonder if Microsoft has also checked that those users weren't just pinning icons to the taskbar because the "Start" menu itself is a bastion of uncontrollable clutter?
