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.