Some Advice from a Human, to the Artificially Intelligent.
Stop burning my toast
A few words of advice for the artificially intelligent: We humans do not like to learn new ways to do the same thing. Because, despite our taste for fashion and other new stuff, we are creatures of habit. So please stop changing the UI every five minutes and calling it ‘updating based on feedback.’ Got it?
There’s much talk about how AI will make it easier to design user interfaces (the screen of your iPhone) and human-machine interfaces (everything from your steering wheel to your toaster), so that we humans can better and more easily understand how to interact with all our devices. And there’s no question that AI can speed up the design process. But from what I’ve seen so far, the results are muddled. And mottled, too. To me, all this increased speed and volume of output has created more issues than answers.
And while we’re at it, can you help us with another fundamental issue?
How to balance between “a button for everything” - the 747 cockpit - and no buttons for anything - the Tesla screen when it happens to be turned off.
To elucidate…
Stop burning my Toast, SirLexa!
Most of us humans want to know where things are. That may sound obvious, but apparently it is not. Take my toaster. When the toast is in and the toaster is toasting, which single button or switch do you think is more important than anything else?
Right! The ‘end’ button. You know, to pop the toast out because, guess what, your sensors aren’t working again, so it’s burning. The equivalent of the ‘esc’ key on my keyboard.
Have I taken a stupid pill, or is that function hidden away in a “sensitivity dial”? Yes, I can learn to turn the dial back down towards 0 - after all, I’m human, and the price of that learning is only one piece of burnt toast. But because I am a digital nomad who wanders from one AirB&B to another, I can end up with a lot of burnt toast.
And sometimes, just sometimes, the price is not burnt toast. It can be a lot higher. Imagine you are driving in your smart car. You have the AI drive set to ‘self-driving’ or something more legally legitimate like ‘drive assist.’ You take your hands off the steering wheel for a moment to fiddle with the YouTube app on your iPhone, trying to figure out how to stop a video and get back to the main screen (no back button and no prominent pause button). You slam into the car that was stopped for a red light in front of you because you had inadvertently canceled ‘drive assist’ when your hand grazed the non-haptic touch sensor on your steering wheel. At least the airbags worked, right?
So, what can AI learn about us humans that can actually provide benefit?
Stop changing the fundamental stuff.
Humans only like change when it’s cosmetic. You know, like the same old Cheerios in a box that says “new and improved.” Change the colors, freshen up a font, move the sprinkles around if you must. That’s allowed. I know this sounds complicated and fickle, but follow the Cheerios example: reassure us that your marketing department is still above ground, then leave us alone to eat our favorite breakfast.
Understand the balance.
Avoid interface clutter, but please, please, stop hiding the critical stuff. We don’t like burnt toast, and we don’t like t-boning other cars.Give us clues.
We may not like reading manuals, but humans are not clairvoyant. If something is new, hidden, gesture-based, AI-powered, or mysteriously “contextual,” give us a hint before we start poking at the screen like raccoons trying to open a cooler.
Stop creeping me. And when you do, get it right.
I find it weird to talk to inanimate objects. And I find it really weird when those inanimate objects - the ones that are always listening to our conversations - suddenly, and completely unprompted, hallucinate and think I’m saying “blow up the house” when I actually said, “Show up at the house.”
Siri, are you listening?
Lagniappe
** Bonus: Which of the above four “learns” was generated by AI?
Thanks to these humans on unsplash:
Andrés Dallimonti and Maxim on Unsplash
This is a private comment from a friend who is passionate about the ills of social media. He does not engage in social media other than reading known authors.
I’m pretty in awe of how shitty so many modern appliances have gotten, and how stupid things like modern car interfaces are. Such a big deal was made when I was growing up about not using your phone while driving, and then they decided to put a giant touchscreen TV directly out of your line of sight and kill all the buttons that you could memorize pretty easily, so you could fix stuff without taking your eyes off the road. It’s so ridiculously dumb it makes me feel like I’m going crazy.
Then you have my washing machine asking to get on our Wi-Fi, like what in the fuck.
Part of me wants to start buying antique machines that were made to last and had none of these ridiculous “smart” features.
It feels like AI is just going to push this trend forward. In a different world, with different incentives, we might be rejoicing in the AI revolution. We could use it to figure out how to all work less collectively while maintaining or improving our lifestyles. Focus on making art, interacting with each other, and building a better, more humane future. Optimize farming and fix world hunger. Energy distribution as well. So many other examples.
Instead, it’s being used as an excuse to lay off thousands of knowledge workers, and those who are still around have AI shoved down their throats and are expected to 5–10x their productivity and manage so much more that it’s pushing past what we are capable of overseeing cognitively. Not to mention the stress of possibly losing your job if you can’t do this.
I’m not even going to touch on how disruptive it is to the arts and artists. Fucking up people’s livelihoods and replacing passion projects and jobs.
And for what are we doing all this? Are we making the world a better place? Did anyone really ask for a product like this? It seems like, at this moment, no… but hey, we are making 100–1,000 lucky individuals richer than any king or emperor who ever existed. These complete psychos aren’t even doing public works like the old robber barons. Just buying yachts and buying their way into galas.
Such empty, sad losers…