Start the Ball Rolling

Since automation among computers begins with scripts developed by people and agreements among people, we can prepare for human-centric automation without having to wait for new technology. We can then try the results with our current computer systems. If we want computers to "do it for us" we have to tell them what "it" is.

You can begin at your home or office by automating information exchanges or processes that you now carry out manually. Many commercial programs can help automate your electronic address and phone lists and calendars. But you can go further. I was able to cut by two-thirds the time I spend processing e-mail each day by combining with my Eudora e-mail handler a program called QuicKeys from CE Software that I have programmed to carry out sequences of actions, like sending a canned response to the recipient, a copy to my assistant, and trashing the original message - all with one click of my mouse on the right button.

You should also support the spread of medadata, and programs that can manipulate and translate it. Without this work you will not even be able to automatically add together the value of stocks you own in three separate portfolios on the Web, because the "total" from each of the three brokerages is on a different Web page, and is not identified as being a total of any medadata. Instead, it is simply painted on the screen. The total on the Web page for Portfolio A, for example, might appear as the fourth item from the left on Line 15. You could instruct a "screen scraper" program to automatically extract whatever it finds in that position. But if at some later time the brokerage house rearranges its Web page, as they often do, the toal would change position and the scrapter would pull the wrong information. Once brokerages start using XML and RDF so they can express the total of a piece of metadata and tag it with a descriptive name, like "total," then your computer could automatically calculate your overall portfolio value, daily, and have it ready for you at breakfast time.

Bigger automation gains will come once we stop being passive voyeurs on the Web ad start forming those all-imporant agreeents on menaing. If you are a manager, be a leader. Look at the information transactions between your customers and salespeople, between sales and manufacturing, between your subsidiaries and headquarters, and so on, lifting every stone you find. In each case ask: "Could we gain time or quality or other benefits by automating this interaction?" Chances are you can automate significantly, even using your existing computer systems. Once you know what you want to automate, the technical part is straightforward: You can introducte e-forms on widely used business programs, like Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes.

Since there are many information activities at most organizations, there is fertile ground. Going against you, however, will be people's resistance to reaching agreement across departments on what should be automated and on the conventions to be used. Overcoming that will require age-old management skills rather than new technology.

Even more rewarding are the payoffs that will come wihen your organization and others begin to automate your exchanges with one another. Here you must demonstrate the potential improvements, to build up interest among a few kindred souls within the other organizations who think as you do. They will comprise a most important core group that shares the same beliefs about what might be automated. Then convene a broader common interest group among the organizations that could benefit from such automation. Try to carry out a limited experiment among the organizations of your core group, to demonstrate the possibilities ahead. Avoid committees and standards groups at the beginning, because these bureaucracies invaiably introduce long delays. Eventually, such standards coalitions will be required to establish due process in maintaining and upgrading agreed-upon conventions. But they will be more effective and move faster if they are preceded by a few specific, successful test cases informally agreed upon at the grassroots level.


A nice example of what can be achieved across organizations is bibliofind.com, a coalition of several hundred independent antique and rare-book sellers. They have created a shared search engine. When you log onto the Web site, you enter the title, category, price, publisher, or other information about a book you are interested in. You generally get the names of several independent bookstores in return; say, one each in Amsterdam, New York City, and Gilroy, California. The shared convention goes further; you can place orders from these bookstores in a single, online shopping cart. Bookfinder.com is another service, which searches several book-finder services like bibliofind.com, abebooks.com, and usedbooks.com. Whether you visit bookfinder.com or any of the members services, you spend a couple of seconds to fill one two lines of a standard e-form, which searches the inventory of all the participating bookstores. Image how long it would take you to locate, visit and query each of them manually. You would never do it.

Bringing physical devices into the automation picture won't be so easy, at least until manufacturers make more appliances with special cables and plugs for intercommunication, and shared standards are agreed upon. This may happen quickly, though. Already, most automobiles have data ports that speed up the diagnosis of faults. Electronic appliances such as radios, music jukeboxes, alarm clocks, and washing machines are appearing with plugs and sockets for computer control. Market pressure may come from large organizations like airlines and hotel chains for machines with special sockets and exclusive standards.

Health care conglomerates that include hospitals and pharmacies could also drive demand. Doctors and druggists could automate prescriptions, saving precious dollars through greater efficiency and saving lives by avoiding errors and automatically locating suppliers of rare drugs. Hospitals, with proper privacy safeguards in place, could computerize patient records, and automate examination of those records to help researchers aggregate illnesses with common symptoms, in hopes of finding more effective therapies. The hundreds if companies making different items for the huge office supply chains could construct a marketplace on the Web where auctions for volume orders of each item are held automatically between buyers' and suppliers' computers. Such a system would lower costs through the supply pipeline, reducing prices to us.

There is no limit to the possibilities for automation. They are waiting to be discovered in every single business. Those who find them and act on them will be taking advantage of human-centric automation and will move ahead of their competitors. Hardly any of these activities carries the science fiction rush of an anthropomorphic robot that speaks with a tiny voice and cooks for you or sweeps your home. Never mind. The much greater excitement of human-centric automation lies in its off-loading human work from our brains and eyeballs, thereby helping us do a lot more by doing less. Go after it and get the automation ball rolling in your court!


Excerpt from "The Unfinished Revolution" by Michael L. Dertouzos

Brain Chips

I cannot close this chapter on human interaction with machines without touching on a subject that is at the pinnacle of computer hype. Some time ago, when I had just given a talk on the Information Revolution, a young man approached me and said, "What I really want is a brain implant so that I can move massive amounts of information rapidly and painlessly into and out of my head."

"You mean so that you can download and upload information without going through the slow eyeball, mouth, and ear interfaces?" I asked.

"Yes. Isn't that a great idea?" he replied.

"No. It's a lousy idea," I said, "unless you are talking about sensor or effector chips," and went on to explain.

If you cannot hear or see, sensory implants are a godsend. Thousands of people who have inner-ear damage but a good auditory nerve have cochlear implants that restore hearing by converting sounds to electrical signals that excite the auditory nerve. Retinal implants, still in the early research stage, work in a similar fashion and may restore some sight to people who have a deficient retina but a healthy optical nerve. Experiments are also under way with people who have lost motor function; a chip, embedded in a muscle, detects the electrical signals from the brain telling it to flex. The chip transmits this information to a machine that will steer the person's wheelchair, giving her control where she had none before.

If sensor and effector implants are so great, why not place chips into the brain and perform even more spectacular feats? Every night, while asleep, you could download into your human memory entire sections of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Or you could connect your brain chip to mine so that we could intercommunicate our thoughts directly and rapidly. Why even discuss spoken and visual communication with machines? Wow! Wow! Wow!

One basic objection is our ignorance. While we can channel simple electrical signals into and out of our body for sensor and effector functions, we don't know how to do so for more complex cognitive tasks. Where and how, within your brain, would a surgeon connect a chip's tentacles to communicate a simple command like "turn on the light," much less a concept like "freedom"? Scientists have been studying the brain for a long time, and they are still far from knowing how concepts are represented, let alone how to tap into them.

But let's be optimistic. Suppose after a while we crack the mystery of the mind and manage to connect chips to our brains so as to communicate our deepest thoughts. Wouldn't that make brain implants a great idea? Not quite.

Imagine that you and I and a couple of other people are successfully interconnected via brain chips. We might look cool with sockets in our heads. But we wouldn't be able to think; everybody's thoughts would be screaming for attention within our heads. We might then realize that some isolation among organisms is essential if they are to form a viable society. In humans, a balance between isolation and intercommunication is maintained by our seeing, hearing, speaking and gesturing, whose slow speeds, compared to thinking, most likely represent the best that nature or God could do to preserve simultaneously the individual as well as society.

Not yet convinced? Then consider the threshold people must be willing to cross to violate the sanctity of their body. People with heart disease will consider a pacemaker implant or heart transplant only if there is overwhelming evidence that their life is in imminent danger. Few people would implant a chip into their brain for lesss than life-and-death reasons. We have wisely set a high threshold for tampering with the core of our being, not just because of fear, but because of natural, moral, and spiritual beliefs.

When I recently wrote about this in a magazine column I got mail from some people who were upset by what they perceived as my opposition to "technical progress." But as with "intelligent agents," this is an occasion where people are confusing a wish with reality. As director of one of the world's most forward-thinking research centers, I invite, even lobby for, research in areas we don't understand, including how the human brain works and how we may construct artificial brains. But I will not casually blur that which is imagined with that which is possible just to thrill the public with the shock of exhibitionist thinking or the promise of a utopia.

Let's get real. Let's find ways that help computers understand us through natural interaction, but also have a chance of working in the coming years, based on what we can see on the horizon. That's what human-centric computing is about.


Excerpt from “The Unfinished Revolution” by Michael L. Dertouzos.

A New Metaphor

A good way to make human-machine interaction more natural would be to develop a better metaphor. A computer metaphor is a familiar object or activity that your computer imitates with its commands, display arrangements, and behavior. The two main metaphors we have today are the desktop and the browser. In the desktop metaphor, the display screen mimics a typical desk; information is kept inside folders, which can be opened, closed, and slipped into other folders. With Web browsing, the metaphor is downtown window shopping; you gaze at various “storefronts,” see one you like, and (click) you enter. Inside, there are more options to browse, you choose another, and again you enter. Like a linguistic metaphor, the power of a good computer metaphor is that it makes a new system you don’t know behave like an old “system” with which you are familiar. This lets you use the new system and get useful results out of it easily, since you don’t have to struggle learning new concepts and commands.

The desktop and browser metaphors are powerful, but glued together as they are in today’s machines, they make no sense because they work in different ways. Their makes claim they have to be different, since the operating system controls a computer while a browser controls a communications network. But that kind of excuse didn’t stop the telephone from looking and feeling the same to us, regardless of whether we make a local or a long-distance call, even though different equipment is involved in local and long-distance telephony.

We wouldn’t tolerate a telephone system that forced us to use one dialing procedure and keypad for local calls but a different procedure and keypad for long-distance calls. Yet we do with computers. We are forced to use the operating system’s desktop for “local” information on our own computer, and the browser for distant information on the Internet, even though we want to do the same things with information in both cases. Why confuse us with two different metaphors?

Human-centric computing demands that we merge the metaphors into a single system. A few developers are making cosmetic changes by adding a couple of features of one to the other. But no one is going beneath the surface to create a unified, single system. One reason for this is competition – rivals would have to cooperate or abandon a lucrative operating system or browser. Another reason is politics: The Justice Department’s two-year prosecution of Microsoft was built in part on charges that Microsoft was combining its Explorer browser with its Windows operating system which posed unfair competition for independent browser makers. It’s amazing that while we heard a great deal about every conceivable rivaling corporate interest, the far bigger human interest of ease of use was ignored. Even the judge’s Finding of Fact assumed that the division into browsers and operating systems was cast into concrete, ignoring the powerful “fact” that the boundaries between software systems should change to improve human utility.

But even a perfect system built from the ground up, one that captures what browsers and operating systems do today, wouldn’t be adequate. As we’ll see, there are many more things that our machines will do. And technology is advancing all the time, bringing new capabilities to the fore. Consider the millions of interconnected appliances that we will want to control. How will we “grab” them and “tell” them what to do? What’s going to be the metaphor? Giving them an address on the Web, as some manufacturers are beginning to do, and saying “Go get them,” is not enough. That’s like saying: “Everything in this world is in some physical location. Go get it.” Organizing these appliances according to what they can do will be more helpful.

The challenge for tomorrow’s systems builders is this: Find a new metaphor that captures not only what people can do with local and distant information, but also the new human-centric capabilities we want from machines in tomorrow’s computing terrain. Such a metaphor would go a long way toward making tomorrow’s systems easier to use.

One favorite and much-discussed metaphor is the assistant or servant. Think of your computer as an obedient servant that can understand your wishes and is familiar with your habits. You speak to it in your native tongue and it dutifully carries out your commands. Compelling, but a pipe dream. This puts us squarely in the domain of intelligent agents, which we do not know how to construct.

How about a virtual geographic metaphor? I favor this one because I dreamed it up……no doubt along with many other people. Information sites are organized as floors of various buildings, which sit along streets and avenues, aggregated into towns and cities, all shown on navigable maps on your screen. You zoom into and out of buildings, down alleys, across towns. The geographic mapping could be realistic, if you want to go to the Louvre, you navigate to Paris, and then to the museum. A more exciting prospect is to arrange your own information in a “virtual” map of your own creation. There could be a street of store you frequent, or a town known for its off-color sites. Shopping avenues might run north and south according to the category of goods sold – Foods Avenue, Clothes Avenue, Household Goods Avenue, Electronics Avenue, Music Avenue, and Books Avenue.

An interesting variation of this metaphor adds the notion of time. Moving your joystick forward, back, right, and left propels you north, south, east, and west, but pushing the joystick down takes you to the past of whatever site you are visiting, and lifting it up moves you to its future plans. Such a metaphor, which I have dubbed a “historicopter,” would be fantastic for studying the world, with every country contributing its history, current events, and futre plans to the experience via its Web sites.

To be complete, these geographic metaphors would have to be augmented with the actions that you could carry out on information, once you found it – for example, watch it, hear it, print it, change it, or run it as a program. Successful virtual information maps might be sold, traded, or given freely to people by organizations. They are technically straightforward to implement and would be easy to master, even for novice users, because moving in physical space, like talking and seeing, is a natural human experience with thousands of years behind it – a great asset for human-centric computing.

Other metaphors may be even better. Some people say we should have several metaphors, one for each occasion we use our machines. That’s technically pleasing, but not as economical and easy to remember as a single metaphor. Other people maintain we should liberate computers from metaphors altogether. They argue that tomorrow’s systems should be so natural and easy to use that they behave like the people, institutions, and objects we encounter every day. You just go out there and use them as naturally as you interact with people and things in the real world today. This is a seductive but unrealistic idea. Just to interact with other people you presume a level of intelligence on their part, which makes your interaction easy, but which, as we have seen, cannot be implemented by the machines.



Excerpts from “The Unfinished Revolution” by Michael Dertouzos

Speech and Vision: Different Roles

Speech and vision are the two principal ways we have used to interact with other people and the world around us for thousands of years. And since vision occupies so much more of the human brain than speech, we may be tempted to declare it the queen of human machine communication. That would be an easy – but deceptive – conclusion. Vision and speech do not serve the same natural roles in human communication.

Being Greek, I can still hold a “conversation” in Athens through a car window, using only gestures and grimaces – one clockwise rotation of the wrist means “how are you,” while an oscillating motion of the right hand around the index finger with a palm extended and sides of mouth drawn downward means “so, so.” A sign language like American Sign Language works even better. But when speech is possible, it invariably takes over as the preferred more.

If we take a closer look, we a puzzling asymmetry: We use speech equally for two-way communication. But vision is used mostly one-way – for taking in information – and only secondarily for generating visual cues that reinforce spoken communication. (Visual communication would have been a two-way proposition, too, if we were born built-in display monitors on our chests.) Why this difference? Perhaps the one-way power of vision was nature or God’s man-eating animals, useful and useless objects, lush valleys and dangerous ravines, where maximum “information in” was essential.

But then, why didn’t nature or God make speech just as powerfully a one-way capability as vision? I’ll venture that speaking and listening were meant for a different purpose – intercommunication, where, unlike survival, a two-way capability was essential. And since survival was more important than chatting, the lion’s share of the human brain was dedicated to seeing.

These conclusions run against the common wisdom, especially among technologists, that for human-machine communication, “vision is just like speech, only more powerful.” Not so. These two serve different roles in our natural selves, which we should imitate in human-centric computing. Spoken dialogue should be the primary approach for exchanges between people and machines, and vision should be the primary approach for human perception of information from the machine.

We can imagine situations where a visual human-machine dialogue would be preferable; for example, in learning by machine to ski or juggle. But in human-centered systems, we are interested in human-machine intercommunication across the full gamut of human interests, where, as telephone has demonstrated, speech-only exchanges go a long way. (Might these basic difference between speech and vision have contributed to the lack of success of various “video-phones”?)

If we can combine speech and vision in communicating with our machines, as we do in our interactions with other people, we’ll be even better off. Such a blending is beginning to happen in the research laboratories. But it’s not easy to do, since the technologies for speech and vision are in different stages of development. Nor is the obvious and natural wish to combine them in human-centered computers reason enough to ignore their different roles.



Excerpt from “The Unfinished Revolution” by Michael L. Dertouzos.

Elusive Intelligence

Upon hearing this kind of scenario about a computer system that carries out our commands, any journalist or lay person immersed in the Internet will jump up and say, “What you really need is an intelligent agent – an electronic servant that will do what you want in your stead.” That’s absolutely true. Such a piece of software would be as natural as having another human being next to us, and it would represent the greatest simplification possible. Give it to me and I’ll throw away every computer system I own and every new system I am designing. The problem is that despite the incessant reference to “intelligent agents,” as if you could go to the corner drugstore and buy them, no one has built them and no one knows how to build them.

A field of research called artificial intelligence was established in 1956 by scientists from Carnegie-Mellon University, MIT, and Stanford University with the twin goal of making machines behave intelligently and understanding how people think. The field is still going strong and has resulted in several innovations now considered in the mainstream of information technology. But the first goal – the injection of humanlike intelligence into machines, known as “the AI problem” – has eluded solution by some of the world’s best scientists and technologists for nearly half a century. And no such solution is discernible on the horizon. No one has been able to imitate by machine the common sense exhibited even by the average toddler.

The “intelligent agents” touted at the turn of the 21st century have been mostly programs that carry out a thin sliver of elementary, humanlike logic via what computer scientists call if-then-else procedures. For example:

If the car phone rings and it the radio is on, then mute the radio.
If a call is initiated and the radio is on, the mute the radio.
If the phone ia hung up and radio is one, then unmute the radio.

If a program like this shows a tiny portion of humanlike behavior, it is dubbed “intelligent,” usually for marketing purposes, reinforcing the illusion that intelligent agents are commonplace. But even the most advanced programs constructed to date in various labs can behave in a marginally humanlike way only in a very narrow context – like Mercury system did for airline reservations. That is very useful for human-centric computing. But it falls far short of the breadth of understanding insinuated by the ambitious term “intelligent agent.” Let’s not fall prey to the syndrome of accepting a wish, stated with a fancy name, as an established capability.

The future prospects for machine intelligence are unknown, as are the fruits of all high-risk, high-payoff research. There was a lot of philosophies, approaches, and beliefs, but no one can responsibly state how far we’ll be able to go toward emulating by machine the intelligent behavior we normally associate with people. That does not diminish the importance of looking for answers. The problem is central and merits more attention that it is getting today, as a result of past disappointments. The kingpin of machine intelligence is machine learning – the ability of a machine to learn from its “experiences,” as it goes along, rather then relying on a human programmer to tell it how to behave intelligently.

With no assurance that machine learning and machine intelligence will happen, we must set aside such wishful thinking and move along with human-centric approaches that will help us interact with our machines naturally – with speech and vision.


Excerpt from “The Unfinished Reveolution” by Michael Dertouzos.

Natural Interaction

Our computer systems are hard to use. They enslave us rather than serve us. If we do nothing things will get worse, as billions of people and physical devices become interconnected. We need a radical change to a new breed of human-centered computers. We must simplify our computers in a big way.

That’s a great wish. But what do we really mean when we say we should “simplify”?

Our instinctual reaction is to equate simplicity with leanness – of features and of controls. That’s certainly a good avenue to explore. The Web has already shown the power of this approach; its single control – a mouse click on any highlighted phrase or image – has captured with its simplicity and ease of use hundreds of millions of enthusiasts. We should throw away 90 percent of the features and controls that come in today’s bloated software.

But cutting down the number of controls isn’t the full story, and can even lead to problems. For example, a typical digital watch has two buttons. One changes modes. Press it once to set the time, again to set the date, again to set the alarm, another time to set the day of the week. The other buttons lets you scroll to a specific time, date, or other information you want to set, whatever mode you may be using.

Even thought the watch has only two controls, this system is not simple, because it causes people to become confused and forget which mode they are in, and which procedure they should follow.

Maybe it’s not the number of controls that should be reduced, but the many different functions a system can perform. That sounds promising until you imagine a car that can only carry out two movements – go forward or not, and turn right or not. In principle, you can drive this car anywhere; if you want to turn left, you just keep turning right until you point to the left. But that ridiculous contraption is not simpler to use than your current car, which has many capabilities, like accelerate, brake, and so on. So minimizing the number of capabilities a system has isn’t really what we mean when we ask for simplification.

How about configuring a system with a control for every conceivable action we might want to take? That won’t do, either. Such a system would confuse every one of us, and result in unwieldy manuals and unwanted interactions among endless features.

Specialization can help simplification. The bottle opener and shoe-horn symbolize this time-honored tradition. In the Industrial Era we gave custom-made, motorized tools to doctors, mechanics, plumbers, and gardeners that simplified their jobs. But in the Information Age those same groups of people, plus musicians, accountants, engineers, and lawyers, are trudging along with the same word processor, spreadsheet, database, and graphics editor. Specialization has promise here for overarching ways to simplify computer systems, before specializing them through applications.

Maybe we are after an impossible task. I often hear the excuse that software systems are inherently so complex that they cannot be simplified. Nonsense! This is the mind-set of lazy engineers. Since time immemorial humans have strived to simplify the world so they can understand it. At a time when we are beginning to unravel incredibly incredibly complex natural systems like our genetic makeup, it’s outrageous to claim that the software we put together is too complicated to simplify.

Perhaps our call for simplification means we want a system whose machine actions match our human intent. When we use a VCR, our intent is to tape a specific show. Instead, we struggle to set the start and stop times of the recording, the recording speed, the channel number. Programming the machine in this way is so far from our level of interest and so frustrating that the experience has become the butt of endless jokes. We should be able to command “Tape tonight’s ball game” and be done with it.

Saying that a system should let us carry out our intent at our level and with little effort is tantamount to saying that it should be natural to use. You were not born with a keyboard or mouse socket in your belly button to communicate with the world around you. You were born with ears, a mouth, eyes, and the ability to listen, speak and see. Human-centric computing begs that you use these natural human capabilities to communicate with your machines so you won’t have to burden yourself learning new, complicated approaches to do what you already know how to do effortlessly.

Finally we have hit upon the biggest lever of system simplification: natural interaction with machines. It is the first step toward human-centric computing.

Here is an example of the kind of natural interaction we can expect by 2005. It is an exact replica of a spoken dialogue between human and machine, using a Year 2000 advanced prototype called “Mercury” at the MIT Lab for Computer Science.

It’s late Tuesday night and duty calls. You have to make a sudden business trip. You need to book plane flights right now. So you call the automated Mercury airline reservation system. It picks up, and a machine talks to you.

What is your name please?

Victor Zue.

Welcome Victor Zue. You have successfully logged onto Mercury. How may I help you?

I want to go from Boston to London on November 7.

Okay, from Boston to London on November 7. Can you provide the approximate departure time or airline preference?

I’d like to fly United.

Sorry, I’m not sure what you said.

I want to fly United.

Okay. United flights from Boston to London on November 7. One moment please …
I have a nonstop United flight leaving at 7:30 P.M. and arriving at 7:10 A.M. the following day.

Please book this flight.

United Flight 998 has been added to your itinerary. You depart Boston at 7:30 P.M. and arrive in London Heathrow at 7:10 A.M. the following day. Where would you like to go next?

I want to go to New York City two days later.

Okay. United flights from London Heathrow to New York City on November 10. One moment please ….. Can you provide a departure or arrival time? The earliest nonstop leaves at 9:00 A.M. and arrives at 12:15 P.M.

Please book this flight.

United Flight 957 has been added to your itinerary. You depart London Heathrow at 9:00 A.M. and arrive New York’s Kennedy at 12:15 P.M. Where would you like to go next?

I want to return to Boston that same evening.

Okay. United flights from New York’s Kennedy to Boston departing between 5:00 P.M. and midnight on November 10. One moment please …… I have three nonstop flights, a flight departing at 5:30 P.M., a flight departing at 7:25 P.M., and a flight departing at 9:10 P.M. Please select one.

Please book the second one.

United Flight 7282 has been added to your itinerary. You depart New York’s Kennedy at 7:25 P.M. and arrive in Boston at 8:47 P.M. Shall I price your itinerary?

Yes, please.

Pricing your itinerary will take a while. In the meantime, I’ll summarize your itinerary for you. On November 7, you depart on United Flight 998 from Boston at 7:30 P.M. and arrive in London Heathrow at 7:10 A.M. You arrive one day later. From there, on November 10, you depart on United Flight 957 at 9:00 A.M. and arrive in New York’s Kennedy at 12:15 P.M. From there, you depart on United Flight 7282 at 7:25 P.M. and arrive in Boston at 8:47 P.M. The price for your itinerary is $1,404.95. Shall I e-mail your itinerary to you?

Yes, please.

Your itinerary has been e-mailed to zue@xxx. Shall I start a new itinerary for you?

No, thank you.

Thank you for calling. Have a nice day.





Excerpt from “The Unfinished Revolution” by Michael Dertouzos

Reach All People

The third step needed to make computers human-centered and help us finish the Information Revolution is to reach more people. Many more.

At the beginning of the 21st century there were some 300 million people interconnected over the Internet. That big number makes us feel pretty smug. Yet it represents only 5 percent of the world’s population. It’s scandalous to characterize the Web as “worldwide” when it spans such a tiny portion of humankind. The voices of billions of people in the developing world and the poor regions of the industrial world cannot be heard through anything other than television news tidbits and government information feeds.

If we do nothing, matters will get worse. The rich, who can afford to buy the new technologies, will use them to become increasingly more productive and therefore even richer. The poor will be left standing still. The outcome is inescapable: Left to its own devices, the Information Revolution will increase the gap between rich and poor nations, and between rich and poor people within nations.

This gap is already huge. In the U.S. economy, an average of $3,000 in hardware, software, and related services is spent each year per citizen. In Bangladesh it’s $1, according to that country’s embassy. I suspect that if I could find an “embassy” representing poor Americans, or the poor of any industrial nation, I would get an equally screeching dissonance between information technology expenditures in the ghetto and the suburbs.

Some people believe the gap will close by itself, because of the growing reach and potential benefits of the Internet. It can’t. The poor could have a crack at these benefits if, somehow, they were provided with the communications systems, hardware, software, training, and other help they need to join the club. Absent such help, they can’t even get started.

We cannot let this gap widen. It’s high time we begin closing it. Not just to be compassionate, but also to avoid the bloodshed that, historically, follows every widening rich-poor gap.

This may sound like a worthwhile social goal, but not something that will necessarily help the rest of us. Not so. First of all, if engineers begin to design computers so simple that they can be used easily by people with limited skills, the machines will be easier to use for everyone! The World Wide Web Consortium is already using this important principle in its Web Accessibility Initiative, which is creating technology to help peoplw with visual, auditory, and other impairments to use the Web. These improvements also make the Web easier to use for people without these limitations. The history of technology shows many more examples like this; whenever designers build utility for the least-skilled user, they enhance utility for all users.

Second, if we can increase the number of people who will benefit from the technologies of information, the productivity of the entire planet will rise. New technologies will not only help the poor become literate, learn how to plant, and take care of their health, but will also help them sell their goods and services over an expanding Information Marketplace. The potential is immense. Companies in developed economies could buy information work from people in less-developed countries at greatly reduced prices, as is now done with manufacturing. Entrepreneurs in developing countries could even help those in developed countries.

.......

We must not let this important objective (…call attention to the disparity) be forgotten, for it is essential to our broader quest. We must also persist because the Information Marketplace is huge and largely unexplored. If even a small number of Nepalese or a few inner city people found a way to become productively interconnected, they would serve as role models to their peers. A timid experiment could turn into a beneficial economic spiral.

Some people have an overarching fear about what computers may do to us. They believe that increased deployment of accessible machines will merely accelerate our becoming robotlike freaks who are driven by efficiency, instead of by the timeless pursuits and relationships that make us human. Other people are convinced that better use of information technology will free us from what is already an “inhuman” way of living and let us focus on what’s truly important to us. Is it possible for human-centric computing to enhance our humanity? Or does the horizon for “doing more by doing less” end at greater productivity?



Excerpt from "The Unfinished Revolution" by Michael Dertouzos

Give Us a Gas Pedal and Steering Wheel

The second step toward doing more by doing less is to raise the level of controls we use to interact with our systems, from their current, low, machine level to the higher human level where we operate.

Since computing began, designers and users have been catering to what machines want. Engineers design to suit what the computer, communications system, or peripheral needs. They then throw all the components at the users and expect them to make everything function together. Miraculously, we accept without protest!

As you sit in front of your computer trying to bend it to your wishes, I imagine you trying to control a very early vintage car. Instead of having a steering wheel, brake, and gas pedal, you must wear a ring on each finger. Each ring is connected with pulling cables to levers that control spark advance, fuel mixture, the valve clearance of each cylinder, the angle of each wheel, the tension on each brake drum. What you want to do, at the human level, is go from Boston to New York. But to get there you must operate at the machine level, wriggling all the wires and levers. The prospect is so harrowing you would not be willing to undertake the trip. Yet we do it every day when we fire up the computer. We need to replace the low-level controls with the equivalents of the steering wheel, gas pedal, and brake.

Finally, computers will be easier to use and make us more productive if we can stick to a few common and consistent commands to do what we want with information, regardless of where the information resides. It’s inconceivable to me that we are still using different commands between operating systems and browsers, just because operating systems work on information that is local to our personal computers while browsers work on distant information that sits on the Web. In both cases we want to do exactly the same things: enter information, see it or hear it, move it around, transform it, use it as a program to accomplish a task, and so on. Human-centric computing requires that we have the same set of commands for both of these cases, as well as for other gadgets and auxiliary systems that, inevitably, do the same things with information. This situation is as ridiculous as using your steering wheel to turn your car on city streets, but having to use the brake pedal to turn the car out in the country. Today’s systems not only force us to learn different commands, but also entirely different ways of working each time a system changes or is “upgraded.”

Many people confuse wishes with claims. Computer vendors have abused the phrases “ease of use” and “user-friendly.” What they usually mean is that you can change a few colors or icons on the screen, which is supposed to give the impression that the system is bending to your commands. Such feeble cosmetics are tantamount to painting a small trash can in pretty colors to chase away the bad smell. You would be better off if all the multicolor, multimedia bells and whistles were replaced by a thin, noisy pipe, through which you could speak with a wise old man at the other end. Unfortunately, we do not know how to make machines behave intelligently, except in extremely limited contexts. Nor can we create “intelligent agents” – another darling of the spin doctors – that can act in our stead, behaving the way people expect an intelligent surrogate to act. When I say we must improve ease of use and increase productivity, I mean improve the fundamental communication between people and machines, not wax commercial about unrealistic desires.

We have complicated things enough. It’s time we change our machine-oriented mind-set and invent controls that are much closer to what people want to do. We need the steering whee, gas pedal, and brake of the Information Age. New technology can help us in this quest.



Excerpt from "The Unfinished Revolution" by Michael L. Dertouzos

Integrate Computers into Our Lives

The need to change the mind-set of computer users and designers sounds obvious, but we are marching in the opposite direction. Everywhere we turn we hear about almighty “cyberspace”! The hype promises that we will leave our boring lives, don goggles and body suits, and enter some metallic, three-dimensional, multimedia, terabyte-infested, gighertz-adorned otherworld.

To which I respond with the technical term: Baloney!

When the Industrial Revolution arrived with its great innovation, the motor, we didn’t leave our world to go to some remote motor-space! On the contrary, we brought the motors into our lives, as automobiles, refrigerators, drill presses, and pencil sharpeners. This absorption has been so complete that we refer to all these tools with names that declare their usage, not their “motorness.” These innovations led to a major socioeconomic movement precisely because they entered and affected profoundly our everyday lives. People have not changed fundamentally in thousands of years. Technology changes constantly. It’s the one that must adapt to us.

That’s exactly what will happen with information technology and its agadgets under human-centric computing. The longer we continue to believe that computers will take us to a magical new world, the longer we will delay their natural fusion with our lives, the hallmark of every major movement that aspires to be called a socioeconomic revolution.

Once we change our mind-set in earnest, we will no longer put up with the maddening computer faults we now suffer. And we will be careful about what we accept from the proselytizers of technology. No longer will we be seduced by fancy buzzwords like
“multimedia,” “intelligent agents,” “push-versus-pull technologies," “convergence,” “broadband,” “gigahertz” and “gigabytes,” and a few hundred others already with us and yet to come. Instead, we will behave more like we do when we shop for a car: “Rather than tell me how fast the engine turns or whether it has an overhead cam, tell me about many people it seats comfortably, the gas mileage it gets, and its annual maintenance cost.” We must begin asking the same kinds of questions about computers and software: “Rather than tell me about all its gigas of processor speed and memory, tell me how quickly it can find and show me any movie I want to see, or help me find a replacement part for my lawn tractor.”

As users, we want to know how much more we can achieve with a given machine or software, and at what effort, compared with what we are doing now. We’ll accept quantitative or qualitative answers, as long as they address these kinds of questions. First, we’ll be told that computers are different and don’t admit to such measures. Nonsense. If we insist, designers and manufacturers will be compelled to respond. As they do, they will gradually adopt the new mind-set too. Eventually, they will be anxious to innovate, develop measures of usefulness, and brag about the real utility their products and services bring, versus that of their competitors.

And when the computers “vanish,” as motors did earlier, we’ll know the Information Revolution has finished!



Excerpt from "The Unfinished Revolution" by Michael L. Dertouzos

Rise of the Information Marketplace

Appliances, mobility, nomadic software, and the people that use these capabilities will not come together spontaneously and wondrously in the new terrain to create an era of human-centric computing. Nor is it enough to say that “convergence” of all media to digital form will achieve this goal. That’s already here. What we need is a model of an underlying computer and communications infrastructure that will tie the elements together at a higher level, closer to what we want to do. Today’s Web and Internet are not yet there. Stripped of cosmetic adjectives, they are basically used for voyeurism and exhibitionism. And I don’t mean sex! I am talking about the millions of people and organizations showing off their wares for money, pride, or sharing, and the many millions who click away, peeking at these exhibitions. Much more than that lies ahead. The model toward which we are headed, which I have been forecasting for 20 years, is finally emerging: the Information Marketplace.

By 2010, over a billion people and their computers, along with some 100 billion appliances, will be interconnected. What will they all do? They will buy, sell, and freely exchange information and information services.

Make no mistake: The sharing of information and e-commerce over today’s Internet is only the tip of the Information Marketplace iceberg. Take, for example, the “content” that the press and Wall Street were hyperventilating about throughout the late 1990s, in the wake of proposed megamergers like that between America Online and Time Warner. All the content you can imagine – TV, movies, theater, radio, newspapers, magazines, books – accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s industrial economy. On the other hand, a whopping 50 percent of that economy – some $10 trillion –is office work, or, as it used to be called, white-collar work. This includes buy and sell transactions, reviewing mortgage applications, processing insurance forms, dealing with medical information, filling and reviewing millions of government forms, teaching and learning, selling customer services, and a myriad of business-to-business services. That’s information work – the processing of information by skilled humans, and secondarily by machines, and the delivery of that work where and when it is needed. This is barely happening over the Internet today, so no one talks about it. But it will be everywhere on tomorrow’s Information Marketplace. Human-centric computing must make it easy for people to offer their work across space and time if the Information Marketplace is to reach its full potential.

By 2020, and by my reckoning, some $4 trillion of this information work will flow over the Information Marketplace, shaking up the distribution of labor. Just imagine what 50 million Indians could do to the English-speaking industrial world using their ability to read and write English and offer their office skills, at a distance, for about one-third of what the West pays today. Such a move would have colossal economic consequences, in the distribution of work, internationally. It would also mark a poetic comeback for India, which may then be in a position to exert economic power on a nation like England that taught the Indians English to dominate them. As much as information work will flow from poor to rich, even more will flow from rich to rich – services that will be increasingly delivered via the Net because of speed and convenience. By the time this activity and the electronic commerce in goods level out, the “buy-and-sell” part of the Information Marketplace will grow from some $200 billion in 2000 to some $5 trillion annually, roughly one-fourth of the world industrial economy.

The “free exchange” part of the Information Marketplace will be just as important, because people have as much free time as work time, and they value what they do with it just as much. Already, the lives of many people are affected through family e-mail; collaboration, playing, and dating; entertainment through listening to music and viewing images and videos; accessing information of personal interest; engaging in discussions about literature, hobbies, and social issues; publishing their views, and much more. These uses will grow; when I speak publicly, I always ask those people in the audience who use e-mail to communicate with family members to raise their hand. The ratio, largely invisible in 1995, was consistently over 90 percent in 2000. Many new activities will arise as well that we can’t predict today.

Taken together, the monetary and non-monetary activities of the Information Marketplace, driven by the onrush of faster computers and communications, computerized appliances, mobile gadgets, and portable software, will propel us toward a world overflowing with information and information-related activities. The question is, “How can we build this world so we are ensured of doing more by doing less?” rather than drowning in information overload and computer complexity. Only by throwing out last century’s model for computing and adopting – indeed, demanding – a new computing philosophy, a new master plan, that lets people interact naturally, easily, and purposefully with each other and the surrounding physical world.

Human-centric computing will transform today’s individual computers, the Internet, and the Web into a true Information Marketplace, where we’ll buy, sell, and freely exchange information and information services using systems that will talk with us, do things for us, get information we want, help us work with other people, and adapt to our individual needs. Indeed, it is these five basic capabilities of computer and communications systems that are the pivotal forces of human-centric computing.

As builders of computer systems start turning these forces into useful technologies, the rest of us who are collectively frustrated by today’s computers can accelerate the process by tirelessly repeating the rallying cry of human-centric computing: “Information technology should help people do more by doing less!” If we shout loud enough, entrepreneurial companies will make this request their goal. They will recognize the huge, pent-up demand for human-centric systems, and will build them, upstaging the massive computer-communications establishment and shifting the market in their direction.

………in the 1990s, when networking advances seemed to be leveling out, and it looked like nothing big could possibly happen, the biggest change of all took place – the World Wide Web arrived as a software application for Internetted computers. It hit the steadily growing community of interconnected users with a quantitative and qualitative jolt. Creating and browsing Web sites captivated the world so much that the number of interconnected users shot up to 300 million by the end of the 20th century, as they and the rest of the world began experiencing the awesome socioeconomic potential of the Information Marketplace.


Unlike the Industrial Revolution, which has run its course, the Information Revolution is still growing. All we have today is several practical activities, an abundance of exciting promises, and a gigantic tangle of complexities, confusions, and fads – to be sure, a revolution in the making, but one that is unfinished. The missing ingredient is human-centric computing. To put it into action requires three big steps: changing the mind-set of users and designers; ensuring that our machines are easier to use and make us more productive; and insisting that new technology reach many more people.


Excerpt from "The Unfinished Revolution" by Michael L. Dertouzos

Human-Centric System Design

I have a personal "human-centric" story to share.

When I went to the M1 Service Center at Tampines Mall, Singapore to pay my phone bill today, I realised that I had forgotten to bring along my bill and did not know the amount to pay.

The M1 Customer Service Officer told me that she was unable to check the outstanding balance from the computer terminal at the payment counter. Billing enquiries could only be made at other counters at the service center and there was a long queue.

I was in a hurry to attend to other errands on my Saturday off and it would be a waste of time to join the queue.

She then suggested that I send a text message with just the word "Balenq" (Balance Enquiry in short) and send it to 1627, the M1 telco service number.

In under 3 seconds, I received a reply via SMS indicating my phone account number and amount due. The information was collated and linked to the M1 database of my phone bill account.

In 10 minutes flat, the whole transaction was completed. If I had to join the queue, I would have to wait for at least an hour or so.

This is the type of integrated "human-centric" system design which Michael Dertouzos wrote about in his book "The Unfinished Revolution."

Michael's theory on "how to make technology work for us - instead of the other way around" must have influenced and inspired the system designers at M1 to build a "human-centric" system to provide better service to its customers.

Charting New Terrain

If the quirky machines that surround you are causing you grief, imagine the mess you'll be in when there are 10 times as many of these creatures biting at you in the next few years. That's where we are headed with the huge variety of new devices coming our way. Let's not be passive victims. Let's grab "progress" by the throat and redirect it so it serves us. If we don't deliberately do so, starting now, tomorrow's much larger menagerie of hardware and software systems will make our lives even more servile and complicated.

To achieve human-centric computing, we must pay attention to both the human and the computer side of the relationship. We begin with the raw material we have to work with - the computing terrain. We must understand how it is shaped and think ahead about how it will change, because technology constantly evolves.

By 2015, single-processor PCs will level out at around 50 times the speed of Year 2000 machines, because of fundamental limits on the smallest circuits that can be "printed" on a chip. To get greater performance, designers will harness microprocessors together, like horses on a cart, up to a thousand or so, before the tiny machines get in each other's way. These combined moves will make future machines tens of thousands of times faster. During the same period, the average communication speed between machines on the Internet will increase a few hundred times, using today's pipes - mostly telephone lines and television's co-axial cable. The number of people who use wireless communications will grow dramatically, but communication speed will remain well below that of future wire line phones and coax cables. The speed of communication among stationary machines will get another thousandfold boost when sometime in the next two decades the trillion-dollar plunge is taken, as it inevitably will be, by telephone, cable TV, and other companies to thread every home and office in the industrial world with glass fiber lines. Ultimately, these high-speed terrestrial links will interconnect a huge number of antennas that will define increasingly smaller wireless communication speeds over the Internet will eventually become ten thousand times faster than what they are today. Storage capacity on computers will keep up with this maniacal pace and costs will continue to drop from the Year 2000 level of $15 for a gigabyte (the equivalent of 500 paperbacks) to well below $1.

"Who needs all these gigas of power, speed, and storage?" you may ask. You do! But you don't know it, because the numbers measure what machines do, rather than what people care about. You want to know: "How quickly can tomorrow's system locate and ship to me a replacement part for my bathroom fixture? How well can I collaborate on producing a manual for my company's new product with a coworker who lives eight time zones away? Can I tell the computer to book me a flight to Israel, and have it carry out all the negotiations?"

A human-centric computer that can perform these functions quickly and effectively with minimal instruction from you will have to be simpler to use on the outside, which means it will have to become more complex on the inside - hence the need for all the gigas. But like a car, even though its inner workings will be complicated and powerful, all you should need to use it fully is the equivalent of a simple gas pedal, brake, and steering wheel. This ascent toward true human utiltiy will take time, but we can accelerate the process if we are not lulled by the siren song of the gigas. Starting now, we must judge computers' performance by how well they satisfy our needs, not by how fast they spin their wheels.

While the "horsepower" of computers and communications will increase remarkably, three shifts in the new terrain will drive even greater change: interconnection of a growing number of appliances and physical devices to our computers; an increasing use of mobile computers connected through wireless communications; and a new breed of highly mobile software.

For the half century of their existence, essentially all the machines we have used have been operated by us. This is about to change in a big way. Run-of-the-mill appliances will become first-class computers citizens. Microprocessors with the ability to communicate with our computers throughout a house, an office building, or across the Internet will be embedded in lots of physical objects we care about. These interconnected appliances will weigh us as we stand in the bathroom in the morning, prepare most of our breakfast and have it ready just as we enter the kitchen (while also ordering foodstuffs that are depleted); deliver, as we eat, an urgent memo we have been anxiously awaiting and return our spoken reply; open the garage and lower the house temperature as we leave for the office; and announce, as we exit the driveway, a special morning program we were expecting and can now listen to while commuting directions are displayed on our windshield for avoiding the latest traffic jams. The processors will control the physical appliances tirelessly, 24 hours a day, while giving us instant access to them and the information on all our personal systems, and on the Web, when we want it, wherever we are, and on whatever device happens to be handy.

Putting microcomputers in physical devices isn't new. What's new is the promise that these physical appliances will be harnessed by tomorrow's computers to serve your needs. Many languages and systems are already being developed to help appliances communicate with computers. Unfortunately, they are following the patterns of today's computer and communication systems: They work, but they are complex and hard to use.

Interconnecting appliances to our computers is driven by a fundamental, natural force: Every day you interact with all sorts of physical things to achiever your purposes. Computerizing some of these exchanges so they become easier, faster, mre reliable, and automatic will greatly enhance your ability to do more by doing less. This means that the number of these computerized appliances will far exceed the number of PCs. It also means that we we'll computerize only those appliances whose utility justifies their interconnection "cost" - not everything in sight, as the hype suggests. If your main goal is to feed your family, you won't buy shoes with embedded chips. And even if you are rich, you may elect to sink your hands in your garden dirt, rather than use your computerized soil sensor.

The second big change in the new terrain is growth of wireless mobility. Tomorrow's computers, phones, and many other devices will be able to communicate easily without wires - be it across the room to control your entertainment center, across town to check on your house's security, or across a continent to help you reach an associate. By 2003 cellular phones, many with Internet access capability, will exceed in number of PCs. The desire for wireless mobility is huge, for it stems from a powerful, natural force: People move. If machines can help us reach the humans and things we care about, wherever we and they may be, we can do even more by doing less. This change has already begun with laptops, PDAs, and cellular phones. But the rapidly advancing wireless terrain will extend it further, with the result that roving humans will get incresingly closer to the computer and communication power they now have at their desk.

.....

The third big change in the computing terrain will be in software. The devices we'll carry as we move will require software that can provide us with a "continuity" of services, regardless of which device we use. This will cause the software to become detached from specific devices and flow among them, carrying the functions we need, where and when we need them. For example, information about your health diet, and caloric intake isn't nearly as useful on your office PC as it would be on your kitchen table's info outlet, or on your PDA when you're in a restaurant 5000 miles from home and the creme brulee appears on the dessert trolley. And when your daughter, sitting next to you in the kitchen, is dying to find out if she has an e-mail message from her boyfriend, she should be able to do so on the same device you used a second earlier to consult your diet plan.

This notion of dressing different machines with the information you want, where and when you want it, will be a widespread feature of tomorrow's human-centric systems and will result in a lot of software transfers among them. Think of the software as capturing your information personality and becoming nomadic, so it can roam onto whatever device you want to use.

Applications software - from word-processors to Web browsers - and the way it is distributed will also change, due to economic reasons, but not the ones we have been hearing about. For years, people have been saying that the low marginal cost of copying software would drive itsprice to zero. This hasn't happened because software makers have been changing their products annually, mostly to keep making money through new features. This trend, and the growing ease with which nomadic software will move over the Net, will cause us to gradually stop buying the familiar shrink-wrapped software packages. Instead, we will "rent" the programs we need by having them periodically downloaded from the Net for a fee. The result of these trends is inevitable: The entire software enterprise will evolve from a product business to a service business. You'll pay a monthly fee to your software service provider, who will ensure that your software needs will be met, often automatically without your being aware of the upgrade .... as long as you keep up with the payments. And software revenues, instead of going down, will become steady and even rise.

The ease of moving software through networks, by the way, has motivated some manufacturers to hail the arrival of so-called network computers, anew breed of inexpensive boxes largely devoid of programs and bells and whistles that are targeted to replace PCs. You will fill them with software retrieved on the fly from the Net. This is a laudable dream that appeals to organizations that like to manage their software centrally. But in practice, tomorrow's machines will be neither pure network machines that acquire their functions online, nor pure PCs stuffed with software from the factory. They will use a mix of local and distant resources through flowing, nomadic software, because that will best serve people's needs.



Excerpt from "The Unfinished Revolution" by Michael L. Dertouzos

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 head-locks. 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 menageries 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 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 Bernes-Lee, sitting 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 I go back to my “expert” approach of typing random entries into the various wizards and lizards that keeping 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 communication 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 these differences. 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 system, but rather an endemic mind-set that has characterized computer design for decades. Only a radical change can fix it.

It’s 11 PM 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 classification, 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 a ancient badlands, 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!

There are two problems here. First, the “manual labor fault,” which reflects the lack of automation on today’s Web and in all of today’s computer systems. We do not yet off-load human brain work and eyeball work onto our machines. We shovel and shovel, doing by ourselves mental labor we shouldn’t have to do. The second problem is the “information access fault,” which reflects our inability to get at the information we need when we need it. Both faults can be repaired.

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. If you want a company directory, press 3, then enter the letters of the last name of the person you wish to speak to.....”

Here we have a human being, on whose head a price cannot be set, obediently executing instructions dispensed by a $100 computer. Welcome to the “human servitude fault.” You are serving the inhuman machine, and its inhuman owners who got away 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. Our docility in putting up with this abuse is reprehensible.

Then there is the famous “crash fault.” You are working along nicely and something untoward happens in the bowels of the machine, causing it to crash. If you haven’t done your “duty” of saving your work every few minutes, you are in for some grief.
And when you reboot the system, you are rewarded for your tolerance of the crash by a reprimand implying that you turned off your machine improperly! Things don’t have to be that way. Telephone switching systems hardly ever crash, yet they use software in their computers that is just as complex as the software in your PC.

Most faults like these abound: the “excessive learning fault,” where a word processing program, which does what a pencil used to do, only somewhat differently, comes with a 600-page manual. The “feature overload fault,” where megabytes of software features you’ll never use are stuffed into your machine, making the features you do want to use hard to find, slow, and prone to crashes. The “fake intelligence fault,” where the machine purports to be intelligent but is not, getting in your way instead of helping you. The “waiting fault,” where layers and layers of software piled up on top of each other through the ages create a spaghetti-like mess that even its maker can’t untangle.

It gets worse. Trendy handheld PDAs (personal digital assistants) demand that you learn entire new sets of commands, and go back to first grade to relearn how your fingers should pen letters of the alphabet, when you write on their little screens, so their programs can understand you. These quirky devices overlap each other’s functions and pose more demands on our attention. “Where should I put my calendar – in my PC, my PDA, or my brand new cell phone?” “Ah!” bellows the voice of an all-knowing friend! “Get a synchronizer to keep them all in step.” And so it is that yet another piece of software enters your life, with its thick manual, new commands, and many versions yet to come.

Periodically, on top of all these insults, the dreaded time arrives when you must change computers. Suddenly, all your work is hanging by a thread. You will squander entire days trying to reinject your old programs and files onto the new machine. And once you have ensured their survival, a whole bunch of new software conflicts will rear their ugly heads.

So total is our brainwashing and habitual acceptance of these indignities that even as they are happening, we brag that we have the latest breed of this or that machine that runs 30 percent faster than our neighbor’s computer and has this new set of great features!

We need a radical change.

It may sound harsh, but even though they have helped us do amazing things we never could have done without them, computers have increased hype more than productivity. The markets call them user-friendly, knowing they are difficult to use.
And despite the chest beating about the Internet giving a voice to people throughout the world, the new technology is only used by a tiny fraction of the human population.

The real utility of computers, and the true value of the Information Revolution, still lie ahead. And I’m not talking about a few improvements. The Web and the Internet of today, compared to where we are headed, are like steam engines compared to the modern industrial world. By the time information systems reach jet-plane status, well into this century, we will focus on utility over fads, triple our productivity, use our computers as naturally and easily and with as much pleasure 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 towards unbridled and growing machine complexity.

We must set a new goal which is as obvious and simple as it is powerful: Information technology should help people do more by doing less. Human-centric computing is the approach that leads to that goal. It is what will finish the Unfinished Revolution.



Excerpt from: The Unfinished Revolution by Michael L. Dertouzos

The Rich People's Computer

Technology Review
January 1999

The Rich People's Computer?

Computers threaten to widen the gap between the rich and poor. It's in everyone's interest to narrow it.

By Michael Dertouzos

The information gap between rich and poor in the world is difficult to assess. For example, it took me three months to find out from a perplexed Bangladeshi embassy official in Washington, D.C., what fraction of their economy is devoted to hardware and software products and related services. He finally calculated the fraction at one-tenth of 1 percent. In the United States, the corresponding figure is 100 times larger-fully 10 percent of our economy goes to information technology. Since the average Bangladeshi is 30 times poorer than the average American, the disparity, per person, between our annual expenditure on information technology and theirs is even more staggering-on average, $3,000 for each American, versus $1 for each Bangladeshi!

I suspect that if I could locate an "embassy" representing poor Americans, I would find an equally screeching dissonance between information technology expenditures in the inner city and the suburbs. It stands to reason that people struggling to get their daily bites of food have nothing left for the more ethereal bytes of information. Take this disparity to its logical next step: The rich, who can afford to buy the new technologies, use them to become increasingly productive and therefore even richer while the poor stand still.

The conclusion is as logical as it is inescapable: Left to its own devices the information revolution will increase the gap between rich and poor nations and between rich and poor people within nations.

Some experts, including Bill Gates, argue that the new technologies will help the poor become literate, learn how to plant new crops, take care of their health and sell their services over an expanding information marketplace. His view is consistent with my own, subject to one big "if": The poor could have a chance of reaping these benefits, if they were somehow provided with the communications systems, hardware, software and training needed to join the club. Absent such help, they can't even get started.

It's time we begin providing this help, not just to be compassionate but also to avoid the bloodshed that, historically, follows a widening rich-poor gap.

Fortunately, there are things we can do to help: Communications could be provided by low earth orbiting satellites (LEOS) that whip around the earth: When these birds are over the wealthy industrial nations they are very busy, but when they are over the developing world, they are doing nothing. Let's pay the low marginal cost to leave them on.

Manufacturers of hardware and software systems and providers of training, terrestrial communications and other such services could offer their goods to the poor at very deep discounts. If we, the citizens of the rich industrial nations, truly want to help, we can pay the cost by instructing our governments to offer attractive tax breaks to these suppliers. The suppliers, too, could share the costs, since an expanding information marketplace will mean more business for them.

Individuals could help with donations of funds and of their time. And organizations such as the World Bank, which spends more than $15 billion annually in structural loans to the developing world, could make a big difference by putting some of these funds into bytes-to-bites projects.

Stimulated by these exciting prospects, a few of us techies got together with a colleague from Nepal, fully expecting to boost his nation's economy by 20 percent through clever use of the information marketplace. Unfortunately, we quickly found out that even if we got the communications, hardware, software and training for free, we would still fall short of our goal: Only 27 percent of the Nepalese are literate. And of these, only a small fraction speak English. When we asked what services that smaller group could offer, we hit a brick wall. Many are not skilled, and those who are are already busy running their nation's businesses.

Maybe we were too ambitious when we envisioned a future workforce in Nepal selling office services to New York and London via the Web. What if we focused instead on selling Nepal's famous crafts, like custom-made rugs, on the Web? That got us into all sorts of other concerns about establishing trust among distant buyers and distributing the goods. The potential of the modern information age seemed overshadowed at every turn by the ancient forces that separate the rich from the poor.

Are such difficulties reason to give up and leave the information revolution to its own devices? No! We should persist, because the information marketplace is huge and largely unexplored. If even a small number of Nepalese or a few inner-city people found a way to become productively interconnected, they would serve as role models to their peers. Readers are invited to suggest creative ways in which the poor could become productively engaged in the information marketplace.

We have overcome great challenges to construct the modern computer. Yet this marvel interconnects only 1 percent of the world's 6 billion people. It is, in effect, the rich people's computer. For our own and our fellow human beings' welfare, we should now go after the tougher challenge of turning our proud achievement into the people's computer!

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=11809&ch=biotech

Michael L. Dertouzos

Dertouzos, who had a rare gift for putting complicated technology into human terms and making it accessible to non-technical audiences, died on August 27, 2001 at Massachusetts General Hospital. He was 64.

Dertouzos was buried next to his parents at First Cemetery in Athens, where he was born and raised. Personal letters from MIT President Charles M. Vest and Microsoft founder Bill Gates were read at a dinner in Dertouzos's honor Tuesday night, sponsored by Athens College.

The MIT delegation included MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) Associate Director Victor W. Zue, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Director Rodney A. Brooks, and Vice President for Resource Development Barbara W. Stowe, who represented President Charles M. Vest. The group also included LCS research scientists and staff members Timothy J. Berners-Lee, Jean-Francois Abramatic, Lissa Natkin, Stephanie Seneff and Anne Wailes. They were joined by retired LCS Associate Director Albert Vezza and senior research scientist David Tennenhouse.

Dertouzos joined the MIT faculty in 1964 and became director of LCS in 1974. Under his leadership, LCS became one of the largest research labs at MIT with 400 faculty members, graduate students, and research staff. LCS dedicated itself to the invention, development and understanding of information technologies, always within the context of their human utility.

"We made a big mistake 300 years ago when we separated technology and humanism," Dertouzos said in an interview in Scientific American. "It's time to put the two back together."

President Vest said, "Michael was larger than life. He was at once a leader, builder, visionary and caring human being. Few individuals have so personally and profoundly shaped their institutions and professional fields. Yet he did so in a manner that respected and involved all of his colleagues. I will miss his personal friendship and counsel very much."

"Michael was a leader in every sense of the word. He knew how to motivate people; he was passionate about his work and passionate about the people he worked with. For many of us, this is more like losing a family member than losing a colleague," said John V. Guttag, head of the department of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

LCS members and alumni have been instrumental in the development of numerous innovations, among them time-shared computers, RSA encryption, the X Window system, the ArpaNet and the Internet. Most recently, LCS spearheaded the $50 million Oxygen project in 1999 in conjunction with MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab. Oxygen is intended to make computers easier to use, "as natural a part of our environment as the air we breathe."

Zue commented, "Michael fervently believed that developing technology is not enough by itself. One must also strive to demonstrate that it is good for something. Under his stewardship, LCS has been mindful of balancing technical excellence with social relevance."

The Lab is currently the North American home of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an open forum of companies and organizations that helps promote the Web's evolution and ensure its interoperability. Dertouzos was instrumental in bringing the W3C and its director, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, to LCS.

Berners-Lee said, "If it hadn't been for Michael, there would not probably have been a World Wide Web Consortium. He was a spring of enthusiasm, capability, insight, and experience which drove a half-formed idea of W3C into an international reality. Ever since, Michael's strength of leadership, clarity of thought and warmth of heart have been a constant support and nourishment and inspiration. He will be dearly missed."
In the LCS director's statement, Dertouzos wrote with characteristic enthusiasm for human progress through technology: "We feel extraordinarily privileged to have a hand in shaping the Information Revolution -- the third major socioeconomic movement of our world.

"But our quest goes beyond utilitarian increases in human productivity to the broader ways in which information can help people. We find ourselves in the junction of two interrelated challenges: Going after the best, most exciting forefront technology; and ensuring that it truly serves human needs. It is this mixture of forefront technology and human utility that is the hallmark of LCS research."

Professor Harold Abelson of electrical engineering and computer science, who co-authored a paper with Dertouzos, said: "Michael was a leader of mythic proportions, both at MIT and worldwide. Much of what we take for granted in computing at MIT -- including Project Athena and the World Wide Web Consortium -- is a direct result of his leadership, his vision, and his entrepreneurial skill." Dertouzos played a key role in creating Project Athena, which he suggested be named after the Greek goddess of wisdom.

Stephen A. Ward, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at LCS and a former doctoral student of Dertouzos, said, "Michael Dertouzos brought a unique combination of intuition, humanity, and style to our faculty. Michael's impact on MIT and his mentorship of students and colleagues stand as an indelible monument to his leadership, vision and personality. He will be remembered as one of the greats of MIT and computer technology."

Dertouzos, whose father was an admiral in the Greek navy and whose mother was a concert pianist, was raised in Greece. His earliest memories were of war-torn Athens and of people starving in the streets, an experience that deeply affected him for the rest of his life.

As a teenager, Dertouzos dreamed of going to MIT, but when he won a Fulbright scholarship it was to the University of Arkansas, where he earned the BS and MS degrees. After selling soft drinks and working with shaft-angle encoders at Baldwin Piano, he applied to the MIT doctorate program. Upon receiving the Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1964, he joined the faculty as an assistant professor and became a full professor in 1973.

True to the MIT spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship, Dertouzos holds patents on a graphical display system, an incremental photoelectric encoder, a graphic tablet, and on a parallel thermal printer.

A PROLIFIC AUTHOR ON HUMANS AND COMPUTERS

Dertouzos is the author of eight books. His latest, "The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do for Us" (HarperCollins), published this year, introduced the concept of "human centered computing." Computers, he wrote, should serve people, not the other way around. Today's machines are overloaded with excessive features, inadequately address our needs, and demand too much of our attention, he declared.

"Michael argued eloquently for human-centered computing. He thought deeply about how information technology could help everyone, not just the technical elite," said Guttag.

In the best-selling "What Will Be" (HarperCollins), published in 1997 when the Internet was first beginning to take hold, he wrote about the many ways in which information technology would transform our lives.

In 1986, Dertouzos was asked to chair the MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity, to examine why US firms were losing competitiveness to their overseas industrial rivals. The result was "Made in America," co-authored by Richard K. Lester and Robert M. Solow (MIT Press), which became one of the most influential business books of the 1980s, with over 300,000 copies in print.

"Michael's books were one example of his educational skills. He was fearless in entering the arena of other pundits attempting to forecast the future of computers and their application. Among his colleagues he was known for his concern for the big picture," said Fernando J. Corbató, professor of electrical engineering, emeritus, at MIT, and the inventor of time-shared computing.

AN EYE TO THE FUTURE

An avid sailor and woodworker, Dertouzos spent much of the past quarter century studying and forecasting future technological shifts -- in describing, for experts and ordinary citizens alike, what could be. In 1976, he predicted the emergence of a PC in every 3-4 homes by the mid-1990s. In 1980, he first wrote about the Information Marketplace, a vision of networked computers that has transformed the world economy.

An eloquent speaker, who was admired for his integrity and his disdain for hype, Dertouzos was frequently sought out by the media, industry and government agencies for his expertise and insight on the relationship between computers and their human users.

During the Carter Administration, Professor Dertouzos chaired a White House advisory group that redesigned the White House information systems. In 1995, he represented the US in a delegation to the G7 Conference on the Information society. In 1998, he was co-chairman of the World Economic Forum on the Network Society in Davos, Switzerland.

"Michael had a broad understanding of technology and a teacher's knack for explaining ideas. One direction in which this shone was his skill in interfacing with government sponsors of research. He was skillful in evoking the best research ideas from within the laboratory; he could educate without being condescending," Corbató said.

In his final interview, printed in the August 22 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dertouzos spoke about the qualities that he most valued in teachers, qualities which were a fundamental part of his own approach to his interactions with the MIT community:

"Don't forget the impact that love has on education," Dertouzos said in explaining his skepticism of computer-based distance education. "If you are loved by your teacher -- and I mean this in the most innocent and Platonic sense -- if your teacher really cares for your well-being -- and you know that because your teacher will ask about you, will scold you for not doing the right thing, and will give you stories about why you should do this or do that -- the learning can be unbelievably different."

Dertouzos, a resident of Weston, married Hadwig Gofferje in 1961. They divorced in 1993. In 1998 he married Catherine Liddell, who survives him along with his two children, Alexandra Dertouzos Rowe and Leonidas M. Dertouzos of Boston, and a granddaughter, Kiera Ann Rowe.


Source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/dertouzos.html

Foreword to the Paperback Edition

By Tim Berners-Lee

As a visionary and leader, Michael Dertouzos took as his job not only to lead in the right direction but also to make sure that everyone understood that direction. This included everyone, expert or not. He was a teacher as well as a technologist. His vision was not just one for technology, but for humanity. And he addressed, most importantly, the relationship between the two.

Though, alas, we must speak of Michael in the past tense, his death last summer, while natural, was early and a surprise. This book, which he had just finished, is not of the past. The revolution described in these pages is something in full swing. The urgencies that Michael saw as he wrote apply absolutely to us all now. We don’t have him with us to drive home the points personally, so we will just have to imagine him, as we turn these pages, perhaps on stage at the World Economic Forum gently teasing Bill Gates, or perhaps in jovial but earnest conversation over lunch with his pen and little notepad ready next to his plate.

Everyone who met Michael knows that as a person he connected very directly with others at a raw, visceral level. I first met him in a café in Zurich, Switzerland, at a time when I was looking at possibilities about the future of the World Wide Web. Michael’s approach of putting the good intentions face up on the table firmly and with unilateral commitment was disarming, delightful, and a rock-solid foundation for what became the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), based initially at the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at MIT. In Michael, I found someone committed to computer and communications in service to humanity. I met someone committed to and appreciative of the cultural diversity which makes our world so rich. I found someone who exuded the spirit and confidence to enable those around him to recognize and do what they dreamed of.

This book helps us step back. It is so easy to get caught up in the excitement of the latest technological development, a fantastic Web site or a more dazzling computer display. These things are inherently appealing to the tool-building urge that evolution has given us. We are entranced by the exciting possibilities of the new building blocks. Sometimes, though, it is wise to pause in this headlong creative rush to wonder whether all the things we are weaving together are making any sense in the long term and on a larger scale. Michael was constantly doing this, demanding to know what passion lay behind the surface excitement, and where was the real benefit to humanity. He would keep discussions at LCS focused on the principle that it is not technology, but technology for humanity.

You can read the book to get the full picture from Michael, but I will mention some ways in which this message, that the revolution of the World Wide Web, for example.

The bane of my life is the implication that it broke upon the public consciousness in the mid-1990s and indeed, like a breaking wave lifted us all up, and then dropped us (at least the .com speculators) on the sand again. Before the wave, it was so difficult to explain to people what the Web was all about, during it there was a huge “ah-ha!” and, after it, the thought that it is over, understood. Many people assumed that the Web was, in its plan and in its entirety, whatever particular facet of it they first met. But this is far from true.

I look at computers as improving in three ways – by helping us to communicate better with each other, by helping with the actual processing of date, and by being less of a pain in the process. In none of these areas are we anywhere near the level we can imagine.

As a communication medium, computers provide a mixture of different media. The Web was supposed to have been a collaborative medium, but most of the way it is now used is as a one-way publication medium. The plan was to get to the point in which a group of people could collaborate on a project across the Web, like a family sitting around a table making a photograph album. E-mail coexists with the Web in a friendly but arm’s length existence. (Haven’t you ever wanted to link to an email or reply to a Web page?) Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and the other forms of instant messaging fill the void of instantness, but are poor from multimedia point of view.

At the other end of the scale, we have very patchy results in the area of getting machines to do our “heavy lifting” for us. In general, we are hampered in the world of data by the fact that the data in calendars, address books, and financial accounts and other databases are isolated – each application is an island, unable to benefit from the knowledge held by others. When you manually copy information about a meeting from a Web page into your appointment diary, you are the human servicing the computer just as Michael describes.

We make progress, step by step.

Nowadays, when I have meetings with colleagues at the W3C, we talk on a telephone conference bridge named after the local Zakim bridge. The people on the phone bridge can attend at the same time in a chat room, which parallels the spoken meeting. Zakim, the phone bridge, with bit of hacking by Ralph Swick at LCS, appears as a robot presence in the chat room. Zakim knows who is on the call, and can also help mute noisy lines and dial people into the call. At the same time, he keeps a list of people wanting to speak, and tracks the agenda for the meeting, taking on some of the role of meeting recorder. Zakim also keeps a list of the current conferences and who is on which conference on a virtual Web page. That Web page is in the Semantic Web “RDF” language, designed to be read by other agents.

In the daily life of the Consortium, the domains of different agents are beginning to overlap enough to be useful. The organization chart connects to the list of working groups. The list of working groups connect to the mailing list system, and to the list of documents. The list of documents connects to the access control system, which has lists of groups, which connect to the mailing list system again. Link by link the Semantic Web of data is beginning to form in our organization. We are starting to build agents that will exchange data and be aware of security and privacy. We have such a long way to go but the area is full of tantalizing possibilities. Every few days a new link is put in; a bright idea combines information from here and from there, and provides new insight, new help in some way. The last thing to do is imagine that the information revolution is over.

We have, in computers, a white, infinite canvas….we can make computers do anything we can imagine. That is a mathematical face. Any aspect of the way we use computers, the way computers present themselves to us, is the result of our programming. There are some interesting fundamental constraints on what is possible, which mathematicians make it their job to explore, but within those bounds, we are totally in control. We have no one else to blame. There is no reason that computers have qwerty keyboards, or keyboards at all, except that someone thought they were a good idea. The same goes for window systems, menus and “Save As” dialog boxes. Many other domains of human endeavor may be limited by the total amount of land on the planet’s surface, and harsh realities of human life. But the computing space is one that is ours for the creating. In computer science, inactive whining is not in order. One person can build a complete computer system out of software whose kit of parts - the source code of all the constituent programs – is available on the Internet. So any person on the ‘Net’ is in a position to fix what they don’t like. And we as a race are free to make the Web the place we really want it to be. Those are the challenges that this remarkable art has thrown to us. Humanity’s response to them will define its destiny in the next millennium. It is wise to think about where we would really like to be and how to get there. That is what Michael Dertouzos does in this book.