My Vacuum Isn’t Speaking to Me Right Now
So we talked briefly on giving emotions to machines. For instance, making a vacuum afraid to go near stairs for fear of falling down them. I thought that was a cool idea till I imagined my vacuum screaming bloody murder that one fateful day it fell down the stairs. Then what if it thought I wasn’t meeting its emotional needs? Would I wake up one morning and find a note on my pillow saying, “Goodbye, I’m sucking on someone else’s rugs now.” ? Running to the door, I’d see it swaying open in the breeze and the truth would hit me: my vacuum is gone, gone forever. Falling to my knees I’d weep with my head in my hands. I’d then call my vacuum every day and leave sobbing messages asking for it to come back. It would ignore me for a while, but then eventually would realize I wasn’t really that bad and come zipping right back. Yeah, yeah….that’s how it would happen.
Anyhow, that whole discussion on man/computer interaction opened a whole new door in my brain. Not only did it make me realize that Star Wars really must have taken place along time ago…considering they were still mashing buttons WITH THEIR FINGERS to set off their planet-destroying death ray rather than just telling the central computer to ignite those suckers on Alderaan. Do you even remember the computers on that damn thing?? Not only was their search engine miserable (they had to plug a damn robot into the wall trying to look up the princess….I mean, come on!), but it took R2 like…5 minutes just to turn off all trash compactors on the detention level. My shoe has faster processing speed than that!
After reading Poincaré’s thoughts on creativity, I found it interesting how it could mesh with Licklider’s thoughts on Man-computer symbiosis. For instance, when describing his journey on Fuchsian functions, he notes a particular amount of mathematical work that had to be done following a moment of inspiration. Licklider, at the beginning of his article on symbiosis, notes that the development of man-computer symbiosis will have men setting the goals, formulating hypotheses, determining the criteria, and performing the evaluations while computers did all the “routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking.”(74).
Time being the huge factor for man, seeing as we don’t have much of it, it’s incredible to think about the advances that could be made if we came up with an idea, had a computer run the complex, scientific processes (seeing as they seem prone to make less mistakes in logistics), and then viewed the results of those processes to determine the next route to take if that particular idea didn’t mesh out. How much time would be saved in research and how many advances could one great mind make in a lifetime with enhanced interaction with a computer? The thought is astounding.
