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OK, enough lurking I assure all of you (and alarm many of you) that many people in the Computer Science, AI, and robotics community are working hard to provide machines with agency. The notion that they are simply "programmed" is naïve. I assure you that today's computers do pattern matching, analyze situations, make decisions, and follow complex heuristics and laws of dynamical systems so that they do actions that confound, confuse, and delight their creators, that go beyond the everyday notion of "simple programming." (I won’t even get into the debate about what it means when a program is so huge and complex that no single person understand it, or when programs use neural networks, or dynamical systems, or hidden Markov markers so that they learn and acquire new knowledge and skills on their own, where this knowledge is encoded in such an abstract form that (once again) even the people who built the machines are left guessing how they work.) Many claim that such systems are bad scientific models of human behavior because although they often do a good job of providing human-like behavior, they are just as difficult to understand as people, so they do not aid in the scientific understanding of what is going on. And as for Rob's question about tools. Long ago I argued that the combination of tool+human made people stronger, faster, and smarter. Cognitive artifacts, I argued, were tools that enhanced people's cognitions, and the most powerful of all such artifacts was writing. Are speech and language artifacts? Yes, although they evolved rather than were designed. Writing was designed and is not natural, which is why although everyone learns their native language, not everyone can learn to read and write: it is difficult, somewhat arbitrary, and in my opinion, at the limit of human capabilities. (You can tell something is near the limit when not everyone can do it, despite years of teaching and trying.) Note that a cognitive artifact does NOT make a person smarter. Rather it changes the task the person needs to do. It is the combination of artifact+person (tool+person) that is smarter than either alone. This is the focal point of my book "Things that make us smart" and it plus agency are the focus of "Design of Future Things." Don Norman Don Norman Nielsen Norman Group Breed Professor of Design, Northwestern University Visiting Distinguished Professor. KAIST, Daejeon, Korea [log in to unmask] www.jnd.org/ -----Original Message----- From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Rob Curedale Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2009 7:12 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: networks The question of flexibility is interesting. Tools seem to magnify one human ability such as a bicycle or scuba gear. Would you consider the internet or writing to be less flexible than speech or a telephone? Rob Curedale | President | Curedale Inc | 22148 Monte Vista Drive Topanga CA 90290 USA | tel: +1 310.455.2636 studio | cell: +1 616.455.7025 | www.curedale.com | [log in to unmask] | On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 8:44 AM, Victor Margolin <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > The problem becomes more complex, however, as devices and systems are > invented to replace human agency as in an ATM machine instead of a bank > teller, on-line shopping instead of a music store and on and on. I have > previously made a distinction between human-human exchanges and > machine-human exchanges, arguing that machines may substitute for humans but > they are less flexible.