I Want My Tools to Adapt to Me

I want my tools to adapt to me...

I don't want to learn all about the latest gadget and then figure out how I am going to use it.

I want my tool to figure out what I am trying to do and then help me get the job done.

I want my tools to adapt to me...not me to an overly engineered world!

If this were true, if my tools adapted to me, what would the world look like? A wonderful vision is painted by Howard Rheingold and Brenda Laurel. http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/12.html

Here are a few paragraphs from this blog:

"Ideally, we won't see computers of tomorrow, because they will be invisible, built into the environment itself. Try to imagine a computer that is nowhere to be seen, and is set up to attend to your every wish, informationally speaking. You enter a room, and the room provides multisensory representations of anything, real or imaginary, you can think of to ask it to represent. You could, for example, go skiing in the Alps with wraparound full-color three-dimensional visual display, authentic panphonic soundtrack, biting cold air, ultraviolet-rich high-altitude sunshine, spray of powder snow on your cheeks, the feeling of skis beneath your feet, of being impelled down a slope.

But you shouldn't have to limit your use of such a universal information medium to a real terrestrial experience. You could explore a black hole in a neighboring galaxy, navigate through tour nervous system, become a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court. If you want to extend your senses into the real world in real time, you can look at quasars with x-ray radiotelescope vision, CAT scan everything you see, hover above the earth in a weather satellite, zoom down to take an electron microscopic look at the microbes on a dust mote on a license plate in Kenya.

If you want to communicate with one person or an entire on-line network, you have all the media at your disposal, along with additional "dialogue support tools" to augment the interaction. Or the interaction might be private, limited to you and the informationscape -- for reasons of work or play.

Perhaps you want to know something about blue whales. Everything written in every magazine, library, or research data base is available to you, and an invisible librarian is there you help you, if you wish; just focus your eyes on a reference file and it fills the screen. Ask the librarian questions about what you want to know, or allow it to ask you questions. But you don't have to just read about whales. You can listen to them, watch them, visit them. Just ask, and you'll be underwater, swimming among them, or in a helicopter, watching them while you hover above the crystalline Baja waters.

All the roles of the different components can be changed radically by adding a "help agent." The help agent oriented the user by saying things like "ask her about a place," or "ask him -- he knows what to look for." The idea was to create a kind of "informational butler" that would observe both the user and the information system, keep a record of that individual's preferences, strengths, and weaknesses, and actively intervene to help the user find or do what the user wanted to find or do.

What we are getting at seems so strange and so counter to everything we have been taught that it takes a while for it to sink in: In essence, we are saying that when it comes to computer software, the human habit of looking at artifacts as tools can get in the way. Good tools ought to disappear from one's consciousness. You don't try to persuade a hammer to pound a nail -- you pound the nail, with the help of a hammer. But computer software, as presently constituted, forces us to learn arcane languages so we can talk to our tools instead of getting on with the task. What people are going to want from us is not more deadhead entertainment, but personal power. "

This adaptive meta system is offering personal power. That is the first step. However, personal power that can not be shared does not seem like power at all. I want more than that from my tools. I want my tools to adapt to me so I can have not only personal power but I also want to affect my world. I want my tools to make my contribution available to others if they choose to accept my offering of added value. I want to be part of a meta system that needs and uses the results I have created.

This can happen if the meta system also empowers the meta offerings. That means the not only are the offerings accepted but the offering about the offerings, how to align them, how to improve them, how to evolve them to work together, offering value, affecting how quickly the entire system can evolve. The result is an evolutionary system that adapts not only to me but to the needs of all participants in the meta system.

In a world free of interface and engineering constraint, where the tools adapt to the task at hand, future outcomes can be investigated and mitigated by the tools before changes are found to be flawed…or unsafe. We can proactively decide our future and the future of our children.

In this world everyone has personal power… and personal responsibility. The meta system has power…and the group has responsibility. The world has power…and responsibility.