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