ryan.freebern.org

I’m tired of using systems that only do what I tell them to. It’s sort of like having an annoying roommate who does the minimum amount of household chores, and only when you bug him about helping out for a change. The capacity is there for my computer to be context-aware, to look for patterns and try to anticipate my needs. It can do this without being annoying–I don’t need another Clippy to help me compose business letters. I need a system that tries to learn my usage habits and then offers to change its behavior in unobtrusive ways to accommodate those habits. I need a computer that’s just a little bit smarter.

I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that

People think that making our computers into “smarter” tools is a bad idea. They say they don’t want a system that does things they don’t ask it to–as if they have one of those right now. They say you can’t make a smart computer that will actually be smart in a useful, non-aggravating way.

Like the Dread Pirate Roberts says, nonsense. You’re only saying that because no-one ever has.

It’s easy to make a smarter computer. All you need is some simple algorithms that look for repetitive behavior, on any timescale, analyzes it to figure out what’s being done, and then offers to do it automatically. The problem isn’t figuring out how to do it, it’s causing the paradigm shift in software design that will make this sort of analysis a natural and expected part of any application. Smartness needs to be used regularly and shown to be so effective that users begin to demand it. Why use an app that makes you do extra work when this smart app makes everything simpler?

For example, the computer can pay attention to when I power it on: usually around 6:20 a.m. on weekdays and 8 a.m. on weekends. It can notice that on days that my calendar says I’m away from home, the start time is erratic, and on days when I have a morning appointment, I don’t turn it on until afterwards. Then it can ask if I would prefer it to power itself on automatically based on these observations, and if I say yes, most days my computer will be sitting waiting for me, powered up, when I want it to be.

The system can notice what I do with it on a regular basis. If I tend to start a certain set of programs immediately after booting, it can ask if I want it to start those programs automatically after booting, and arrange their windows the way I arrange them. My web browser can notice what sites I usually go to at certain times of day and pre-cache parts of those sites to speed up their loading.

And on a smaller scale, if I’m going through a text document adding the same few characters to every line, the system can see what I’m doing after the first few lines and offer to do it for me, show me what it would do, and allow me to tweak that result if it’s not quite right.

Adding context

The more context the system has, the more it can respond to our needs. A computer with a video camera can tell when someone’s sitting down in front of it to use it, and spin up its hard drives in anticipation. A computer hooked to a weather station can adjust the estimated travel time for a trip if the current weather indicates road conditions are bad. A computer that knows when your alarm clock is set for can learn how soon after waking you tend to start it up, and get itself going for you by that time. A computer that pays attention to your calendar can have driving maps at the ready when you need to go somewhere you’ve never been before. If you want many more interesting ideas about context-awareness, read Bret Victor’s in-depth “Magic Ink” paper. It’s long, but well worth the read if you find this sort of stuff intriguing.

First thing in the morning, a “status report” would be great: something that summarizes useful stuff, like the weather forecast for today (detailed) and the next two days (brief), how many emails I have waiting, how many new items in my newsreader, any important news stories that broke overnight, and other customizable information based on my interests. It should read my calendar remind me of today’s scheduled items; if I’m traveling and have put my destination on the calendar, it should find the correct forecast for my destination. All this is available with a good portal website, but I’d want it to also integrate with the other devices in my life. It could query my DVR and find out what was recorded last night, what was not recorded that I would have liked, and what’s going to be recorded soon. It could find out if I missed any calls while my phone was off during the night, and show me the names (if available) and numbers of the calls, and say whether they left messages. Ideally, it could even query my car (wouldn’t a car interface like this be great?) and find out if there are any issues that need to be addressed. And so on.

Wrapping things up

I don’t think I’m asking for much. I want a computer that is stable enough to survive hardware failures and able to notify me when those failures need to be dealt with, usable enough that I can be very productive without needing to simultaneously have two hands on my keyboard and one on my mouse, simple enough that taking it apart and fixing items is a snap, and smart enough that it anticipates my needs and provides the information and behavior I want before I even realize I want it.

It sounds like a pipe dream, but I don’t think the stuff I’ve asked for in these five articles are out of reach, either from an engineer’s, a programmer’s, or a customer’s standpoint. With effort in the right directions, I believe all of this can be accomplished, and I don’t even think it would take that long once the right people set their minds to it.

I’m one of those people. As a computer programmer, I can start doing my part by attempting to write smart software that is context-aware and tries to learn patterns and anticipate needs. I’m just a small part, but if everyone does their part, it won’t be long before we have stable, usable, simple, smart computers that are more fully extensions of our lives than just dumb tools.

(This post is the fifth and final part of my five-part post series “Reimagining the PC.” You might like to start back at the beginning.)

This entry was posted on Friday, Apr 20, 2007 at 6:26 am and is tagged design, technology, usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.