Becoming machines

So we are going to talk in a pretty natural way with computers in a future near you — conversational interfaces will grow big and change our life with machines forever. But how?

We’re still struggling on finding the perfect touch interface, mostly trying to evolve the ones from the mouse age — but, this time, the way of interacting is so unprecedented we better get ready to go back to the square one once again and think about usability with fresh eyes.

Where to start? A good example is from usability basic definition. Let’s have a look at the Wikipedia:

Usability is the ease of use and learnability of a human-made object. In Software engineering, usability is the degree to which a software can be used by specified consumers to achieve quantified objectives with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a quantified context of use.

So:

• What is a human?
• Which is its modern concept of learnability?
• What is a machine?
• How can we measure its effectiveness and efficiency?

While these questions have three-words-long straightforward answers in our minds, anthropologists and other thinkers, as usual, aren’t on the same page, with their rigorous plausible and chronologically accurate pseudoscience-like theories ready.

For example, we aren’t humans anymore.

Let’s take the french anthropologist Marc Augé and its non-places, from Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995).
Non-places are “a place we do not live in, in which the individual remains anonymous and lonely”. Few examples are a motorway, a hotel room, an airport or a supermarket.

Surprisingly enough — at least, for us Italians — the Wikipedia page of non-places ends with these words:

Whereas shopping malls are (at least in Italy) yet prejudicially regarded by adults as non-places, they seem to be natively concerned with the identity of the so-called digital natives.

Aw, our dear digital natives media used for flooding with pop-technology its TV channels few years ago.

In his seminal article, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Marc Prensky defines the term “digital native” and applies it to a new group of students enrolling in educational establishments referring to the young generation as “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, videos, video games, social media and other sites on the internet.

A distinctive feature of digital natives is their way of communicating, which is the language of computers.

Command languages often have either very simple grammars or syntaxes very close to natural language, to shallow the learning curve, as with many other domain-specific languages.

Simple grammar and easy to learn. Bingo. But what we’ve found pretty interesting is that we’ve found the words close to natural language while looking for today’s meaning of natural language.

Probably because modern language isn’t natural anymore. Fringe-ly scary.

In 1960 command line interfaces were designed in a limited positional number of parameters and actions, in order to obtain some sort of simplified language for human-machine interactions.
It is an interaction standardization that kept growing its user base during the widespread use of the internet: while everyone scatter around a mall finding its perfect purchase, online shopping standardized it in exploring a store, filling a virtual cart, reviewing the order and pay — in this now obvious order.
Mobile age gave the finishing blow: short data exchanges and small screen problems were solved with quick interactions and concise interfaces — roughly the most basic design guidelines in mobile applications.

That produced the simplification of life and interactions with computers and, as our digital natives definition proves, with other people. In other words, interactions are now split in concise experiences, regardless these are with humans or machines.

We prefer short actions, like taps, swipes and nicknames instead of wasting effort on building clear sentences. We prefer structured approaches like forms and its form fields instead of wasting effort on vague and freeform requests.

Can we say that we’re part robots now? Sadly, that’s not our point. Conversational interfaces, which allow a human to talk naturally with a machine, are coming so we are again at a crossroad.

Are we going to keep evolving or regressing humans in robots, concentrating on structured bots with natural (for now) interactions like short essential interactions, modularized orders and structured sentences? Are we going to develop neutral functional identities?

Are we going to keep evolving or regressing robots in humans, investing in true conversational interfaces with ancestral (still natural for us?) interactions like long detailed interactions, composed orders and unstructured stream of consciousness sentences? Are we going to develop personal identities, with a defined sex, sense of humor, and formality?

We sense that these simple questions are good enough for start thinking seriously on how (and if) conversational interfaces will work with veteran users and the new breed, the conversational natives.

We’re going to leave some time for you to get your own answer. Our one will come this article next half.

And why the Italians?

(continues with Becoming humans)