The Unfinished Revolution
by Michael Dertouzos
List Price: $26.00
Pages: 240
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 0066620678
Publisher: HarperCollins
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 the information 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
Courtesy of HarperCollins, inc.
Excerpted from The Unfinished Revolution © Copyright 2009 by Michael Dertouzos. Reprinted with permission by HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
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