Robots Aren’t Us

These are excerpts from what appears to have been a New York Times column which you can now find at http://www.lexisone.com/balancing/articles/n010008e.html – Why Nobody Likes A Smart Machine – on human-machine interaction.

Dr. Norman, a cognitive scientist who is a professor at Northwestern, has been the maestro of gizmos since publishing ”The Design of Everyday Things,” his 1988 critique of VCRs no one could program, doors that couldn’t be opened without instructions and other technologies that seemed designed to drive humans crazy.

And the worse news is that the gadgets of Christmas future will be even harder to command, because we and our machines are about to go through a rocky transition as the machines get smarter and take over more tasks. As Dr. Norman says in his new book, ”The Design of Future Things,” what we’ll have here is a failure to communicate.

“Badly designed so-called intelligent technology makes us feel out of control, helpless. No wonder we hate it.”

“Our frustrations with machines are not going to be solved with better machines,” Dr. Norman said. “Most of our technological difficulties come from the way we interact with our machines and with other people. The technology part of the problem is usually pretty simple. The people part is complicated.”

Toys are us? Maybe. Robots are us? I, Robot? Not yet, Isaac A.