Thesis 76

Everyware must be conservative of time.

One of the reasons that the Fukasawan vision of information processing dissolving in behavior is so alluring is because it promises to restore a little simplicity to our world. As a recent ethnographic study by Scott Main-waring, Ken Anderson, and Michele Chang of Intel Research underscores, daily life in the developed world now exposes us to a multitude of physical and informational infrastructures, each of which requires some kind of token to mediate. Simply to get through the day, we carry keys, cash, credit cards, debit cards, transit passes, parking receipts, library cards, loyalty-program cardsand this list is anything but comprehensive.

Moreover, in the course of a single day we may use any or all of an extensive inventory of digital tools and devices, each of which has a different user interface, each of which behaves differently: music and video players, telephones, personal computers, cameras, cable and satellite television controllers, ATMs, household appliances, even vehicles.

Everyware, of course, promises to replace this unseemly shambles with a compact and intuitive complement of interface provisions, ones that require far less of our time, energy and attention to deal with. The appeal of this paradoxical visionit might be called high complexity in the service of simplicityshould not be underestimated. But the inevitable flip-side of it, at least if our experience with other information technologies is an accurate guide, is that almost all users will face the prospect of wasted time and effort at one time or another.

Philip K. Dick, never one to overlook the all-too-human complications likely in any encounter with high technology, depicted more than one hapless protagonist wrestling with ornery or outright recalcitrant pervasive devices.

In (appropriately enough) Ubik, Joe Chip is threatened with a lawsuit by his front door:

The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you."

"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this [apartment]."

In his desk drawer he found the contract...Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.

"You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.

From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's money-gulping door.

"I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out.

Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door before. But I guess I can live through it."

And this is just to get out of the house and on with his day. Self-important doors are probably not even the worst of it, either; this is the kind of moment we can see strewn through our days, like landmines in the meadows, upon the introduction of an incompetent ubiquitous technology. Accordingly, we should assert as a principle the idea that ubiquitous systems must not introduce undue complications into ordinary operations.

You should be able to open a window, place a book upon a shelf, or boil a kettle of water without being asked if you "really" want to do so, or having fine-grained control of the situation wrested away from you. you should not have to configure, manage, or monitor the behavior of a ubiquitous system intervening in these or similar situationsnot, at least, after the first time you use it or bring it into some new context. Furthermore, in the absence of other information, the system's default assumption must be that you, as a competent adult, know and understand what you want to achieve and have accurately expressed that desire in your commands.

By the same token, wherever possible, a universal undo convention similar to the keyboard sequence "Ctrl-Z" should be afforded; "save states" or the equivalent must be rolling, continuous, and persistently accessible in a graceful and reasonably intuitive manner. If you want to undo a mistake, or return to an earlier stage in an articulated process, you should be able to specify how many steps or minutes' progress you'd like to efface.

You shouldn't have to work three or four times as hard to achieve some utterly mundane effect (like drawing a bath, starting a car or sharing contact information with a new acquaintance) with everyware as you would have without its putative assistance. Nor should you be forced to spend more time fixing the mess resulting from some momentary slip in a sequence of interactions than the entire process should have taken in the first place.

Will this occasionally approach "AI-hard?" Probably. Nevertheless, we should insist on excluding ubiquitous systems from our everyday lives unless they are demonstrably more respectful of our time than information technologies have tended to be in the past.