Designing Agentive Technology. Christopher Noessel

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СКАЧАТЬ CHAPTER 13 Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It

       APPENDIX A Consolidated Touchpoints

       APPENDIX B A List of Referenced Agentive Technology

       Index

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

FOREWORD

      Chris has written a surprising book. He’s written something so inherently human that you can’t help but be swept up into the new world of agentive technology. To be honest, it’s just not fair! It sneaks up on you because Chris effortlessly shows the progression toward agentive technology—toward our giving agency to technology—to be simply an obvious step in human evolution. That’s a profound, and useful, shift of mindset.

      Chris tells the story of artificial intelligence from the perspective of human imagination (sci-fi, scary) and of technical capabilities from the perspective of human needs and desires (real, narrow, beneficial). It’s a sleight of hand that brings perspective to some of the “sky is falling” noise that’s out there right now around AI. More importantly, this approach makes it all so relatable (and, yes, readable). You won’t leave here knowing how machines learn, but you will appreciate better how machine learning might impact the humans who rely on it. You’ll also be introduced to the implications of that reliance over time. These might surprise you—it’s not about AI as a sinister over-lord, but rather the seemingly mundane implications of a machine’s lack of empathy.

      Again, humanity. I’m so struck with how human this book is.

      It’s a book about invention and the evolution of ideas, technologies, and desires. I think maybe the single biggest trick Chris performs here is that by providing the history of various tools and their creators (like temperature control technology), the obviousness of technical assistants is almost shown to be a refined human need, as opposed to a new technical capability. This completely changes how we should approach the design of agents. It argues for, well, human-centered design, now, doesn’t it?

      And that, finally, is what leaps from these pages: the need for new practices in human-centered design. Without approaching the problem from a “framework” perspective (thank you), Chris offers the first word on some of these practices. He adds depth to the understanding of how agents differ from tools (both hardware and software). And by covering agentive technology’s human impacts, he shows that industrial design, UX design, and service design don’t adequately address what’s required to understand and solve problems of agentive technologies.

      This is just the beginning of a new conversation in design, for sure, but wow—what a great start!

      Phil Gilbert

      General Manager, Design

      IBM Corporation

      March 22, 2017

INTRODUCTION

      Thanks for picking this book up to give it a read. But, seriously—how do you have the time?

      I look at my should-read book stack and at the precious minutes of free-choice time I have, and I’m dismayed. With a little research, I find that there are around 1,500 books published in my mother tongue around the world every day. That’s one every 57.6 seconds. Even if only one in 10,000 of them is truly amazing, that means there’s a new one to add to the stack each week. There’s just no way to keep up.

      It’s not just reading. We’re all under pressure to do more and more with the time we have. If it’s not an existential bony finger reminding us to carpe every diem, it’s just the nature of the world to tell you that you should be doing more. You should be flossing more, bonding with your sweetheart and children more, and taking longer to eat your meal that you should have homegrown and cooked yourself. You should be looking at your finances more, meditating more, getting outside and exercising more. Sleeping more.

      If you look at actual studies like the annual American Time Use Survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there’s not a lot of wiggle room in our schedules. If you’re one of their mythical average Americans, you dedicate all of 16—count-em—16 minutes of time to relax and think each day.¹ Even if you try to carve time away from the optional activities like television and movies, it’s quite likely some of the non-optional activities like sleeping and household chores could easily expand to consume the excess.

      External time pressures aren’t going away, and I doubt we’re going to lose the internal desire to maximize the precious little time we have.

      Enter technology.

      For decades, technology has helped us move faster. It used to take hours to get furniture off a carpet and then take the carpet outside, drape it over something, and beat it clean. The vacuum cleaner shrank that to minutes. It’s part of the point of this book to show that lately, some technological innovations are shrinking that time to nearly zero. Consider the Roomba and what it means to get back those minutes of time you used to spend beating your rugs clean. These technologies aren’t just helping you do things. They’ve begun to do things for you. And as you’ll see, faster isn’t the only benefit that these agentive technologies provide.

      That’s an exciting development, but to the best of my knowledge, it’s happening in a haphazard way—product strategists, owners, designers, and developers doing smart work in their own organizational silos. But could we do it better if we got clear on what we’re talking about? Say if we took a big, broad look at what makes these things special and unique and saw what patterns and problems emerged? That’s what this book is about.

      So thanks for making the time. I think what you invest here, and the technology that results with this new thinking, is going to make the future a brighter place.

      PART I

Seeing

      In the first part of this book, I hope to do something that is not only arrogant but also damned difficult. I hope to change the way you look at technology. First, I want you to stop seeing it as a collection of tools or gadgets and instead see it as an evolutionary flow around human problems, whose parts ultimately integrate to become a new category of thing.

      To help you see it this way, we’ll start by looking at the rich example of the thermostat and how it evolved from the past to the present. Then I’ll show you that this example isn’t some special, isolated case. Rather, once you know to look for it, you can tell that it’s just on the verge of happening pretty much everywhere else. Then we’ll move our focus from the present into the speculative future to see how this new category of technology will change the world.

      We’ll finish СКАЧАТЬ