When Humans are Better than Search Results
In 2015, Father’s Day is Sunday, June 21st. I know that because I asked Google. In a moment of panic two weeks ago, under the inclination that I may have scheduled an important meeting at a time I ought to spend with family, I typed “father’s day 2015” into the search bar, hit enter, and was relieved & reassured by the instantaneous and surely accurate response.
More recently, on the walk back from the coffee shop on a Saturday morning, I was stopped by a complete stranger who had “a totally random question”:
“When is father’s day this year? Is it tomorrow or is it next weekend?”
I told him the correct date, and recanted my own moment of panic the previous week.
Afterward I couldn’t help but wonder, why did this guy opt for asking me rather than getting his phone out and asking Siri, typing his question in to Google, or looking it up on his computer later? Wouldn’t it have been easier, more convenient perhaps, to ask the internet? He wouldn’t have had to stop walking. He wouldn’t have run the risk that a stranger might judge him as a bad son for not knowing the date of Father’s Day, or a facetious “let me Google that for you”.
Whatever this fellow’s motivations were, the exchange stuck with me. Why ask a person when the computer is more accurate and often faster?
Assuming he had the option, sending his query through the so-called cloud would have involved a certain number of steps:
1. Get phone out of pocket
2. Unlock phone
3. Make sure that cellular data is turned on
3. Navigate to the preferred web browsing app
4. Open the app and wait for it to connect
5. Type in query and hit enter
6. Wait for results to load
7. Receive desired response
Of course the number of steps involved might vary. Maybe he always has data turned on. Maybe, if he’s using an older iPhone for example, there’s an additional step of typing in a passcode. It’s possible that he’d have to open a new tab to keep track of his last use of the app. Let’s say these steps would likely number between 3 and 9. (On a side note, Golden Krisha’s recent “The Best Interface is no Interface” has some wonderful analysis of similar smartphone processes).
Alternatively, having seen a human being coming his way, he saw the option to simply ask and receive a response. Two steps. If he had asked me, “What’s the square root of 2?”, he would have been out of luck. That’s a question for the internet. But people know when Father’s Day is, and people can share that information without booting up and connecting to wifi.
Beyond the ability to occasionally deliver a more speedy, just-as-accurate response, people can offer experiences not often delivered by tech. We can recognize each other’s emotions and react accordingly, and we have strong opinions that help us make subjective decisions. Most importantly, humans can converse, we can improvise, make each other laugh, and share our stories directly. And we can do all of this without having to wait for our brains to load an app.
This is not to minimize the impact and usefulness of technology. The future may hold a plethora of software and an internet-of-things that are fast, accurate, know our preferences, inject humor and delight into interactions, and feel human.
In the meantime, it would be a damn shame to fool ourselves into believing that today’s tech has those capabilities; that maybe if we just stare at the screen long enough, it will figure out who we are and how to talk to us. Until technology has all the qualities that make us human, there are still times when humans are better than search results.
Jeremy Tinianow is a co-founder of Seekr: an experience-driven travel platform.
For more information, visit http://www.seekr.is/
