If there is one thing I know about my mother, it is that she very technologically inept, and that apparently gives me a way to achieve her love (you would think being her first born was enough.) I have become her own personal IT department, but I always wondered why it was that she could not grasp some of the simplest of things. Take for instance her phone, which she was adamant she did not need a new one because her old one worked just fine. If I had a dollar for every time I heard that phrase, I could probably retire right now and live a happy life, but I digress. Seeing my mother's clamshell phone, me and my father tried to urge her as much as we could to upgrade to a smart phone, but it was not until I read the passage about "The Complexity of Modern Devices" that I realized that I was one of the "experts" in this situation, and my mother was an average Joe. You see my mother, like many other tech-illiterate people out there, was not savvy enough to treat the technology they are given as a piece of technology, but rather, as the author points out, treats it like a human. She expects the phone to know what she wants it to do, and when she inputs what she believes to be the correct command and the "correct" outcome is not given to her, she blames herself. If you had asked me prior to reading this piece, then I would have agreed with her, it was her fault that she could not get her picture message to send correctly. What I now realize is that it is actually the programmer of the phones fault, for not thinking like an average Joe when they created the device currently giving her trouble. Of course, I can fault her for not trying to learn to think like the phone would, but that is besides the point. So why do we have to have devices that can not understand what it is we want them to do exactly? My answer to that question is binary. If we check back at what the definition of binary is, we will remember that it is simply 2 possible states; yes/no. What that tells me is that because of the fact that computers only "think" in yes/no, then they will never be able to actually think on their own. Everything that they do is simply a regurgitation of whatever information they were programmed with. My favorite example of this are the old PC games like Zork, where you are told a scenario and then asked what you would like to do. If you were to respond with something logical, the game would only allow you to complete that command if it were in its accepted command lists. So until we make advancements in the way our computers think, say like artificial intelligence, then we will have to be content with our devices not actually being "smart"devices.
Norman, Donald A. "The Complexity of Modern Devices." The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic, 2002. 4-8. Print. "Eaten by a Grue: A Brief History of Zork." Mental Floss. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Mar. 2015.
You see my mother, like many other tech-illiterate people out there, was not savvy enough to treat the technology they are given as a piece of technology, but rather, as the author points out, treats it like a human. She expects the phone to know what she wants it to do, and when she inputs what she believes to be the correct command and the "correct" outcome is not given to her, she blames herself. If you had asked me prior to reading this piece, then I would have agreed with her, it was her fault that she could not get her picture message to send correctly. What I now realize is that it is actually the programmer of the phones fault, for not thinking like an average Joe when they created the device currently giving her trouble. Of course, I can fault her for not trying to learn to think like the phone would, but that is besides the point. So why do we have to have devices that can not understand what it is we want them to do exactly?
My answer to that question is binary. If we check back at what the definition of binary is, we will remember that it is simply 2 possible states; yes/no. What that tells me is that because of the fact that computers only "think" in yes/no, then they will never be able to actually think on their own. Everything that they do is simply a regurgitation of whatever information they were programmed with. My favorite example of this are the old PC games like Zork, where you are told a scenario and then asked what you would like to do. If you were to respond with something logical, the game would only allow you to complete that command if it were in its accepted command lists. So until we make advancements in the way our computers think, say like artificial intelligence, then we will have to be content with our devices not actually being "smart"devices.
Norman, Donald A. "The Complexity of Modern Devices." The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic, 2002. 4-8. Print.
"Eaten by a Grue: A Brief History of Zork." Mental Floss. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Mar. 2015.
--Michael