The Design of Future Things: Chapter 4

The new rage in autonomous cars: built-in desk!

The Design of Future Things, Donald A. Norman

Summary:
Chapter 4 is entitled "Servants of Our Machines", and it talks about the friction inherent in man-machine interfaces. 

He starts off with a (sadly apocryphal) story of a man trapped in a traffic circle for 14 hours (presumably at which point his car ran out of gas) because lane keeping wouldn't allow him out of the inner most traffic circle lane. This is meant as a 'demonstration' of how technology going wrong can have very unfortunate consequences. 

He then talks about automation and technology, supposedly in the context of "We are slaves to our tech". From the text, I never got the sense of "slaves to our tech", never saw a clear example of it. He went through a few examples of automation putting bank clerks in the unemployment lines, car crash prediction systems warning drivers, and etc. But I did not see a clear "We are cursed to forever toil under the thumb of technology" example. Ohh well. 

Norm (envision "Cheers") then talked on "go to conferences to get an idea of what is 20 years down the line", that the cool things around the corner tend to be behind closed doors and iron curtains pending release, etc. A core issue from one of the previous chapters is restated, in more words and more general terms, "We'll never have a good and natural interface with our intelligent devices, because of plain flat no fair difficulty of interacting with the real world, and other issues". 

Don then goes into a future rant about how kitchens will decide what foods to cook based on your medical records, how your entertainment system will automatically choose and buy your entertainment, and how cars will drive themselves. The cars driving themselves is then expanded upon in a more rigorous way, showing "What could happen in the next 10 years, and why it probably won't happen".

He rounds out the chapter with a section on inappropriate automation: we're at the point where the human doesn't need to be in the loop for hours at a time, but when the human is needed, they lack the context to quickly take over. We're at this awful middle ground between full and no automation which causes pain, suffering, and death. 

Discussion:

1. Why is this paper interesting or significant?

It includes some interesting concepts in taking drivers off the roads, while still keeping the flexibility inherent in individually owned vehicles. It provides some viewpoints worth considering when you come to a point where you can say "I can automate some of this task, but not all".

2. What are the faults of this work?

I think a lot of the core problem is that he isn't taking into account market forces. He talks about a kitchen making decisions for you, decisions you might disagree with. I uphold that a stove that says "Bugger off y' tosser, you innit gettin' eggs today because The Doctor says your cholesterol's to high. So sod the bloody hell off, ya' twat!" (british slang callously stolen from here) isn't going to be a hit among the majority of the consumer crowd. He talks about us becoming slaves to poor interfaces, when, at least to some extent, we won't accept poor interfaces in the first place. Basically, if a device automatically makes choices that we tend to disagree with, we'll stop using the device. The same doesn't necessarily apply to poor automation implementation, of course.

He says that a large part of the problem with automation is that it fails hard to the human, who in turn lacks the situation awareness to actually respond. To this I would say "Get rid of the human, or improve the transition". In the case of a self driving car, what are the cases that are going to cause a fail over to a human? Your LIDAR comes unplugged and the car is now traveling blind. FAIL QUICKLY!!! REMOVE THE AUTOPILOT!!! SOUND THE ALARMZ!!1! ... except, not quite. First, in this specific case, you'd almost certainly have two+ scanners, specifically to protect against a single fault- why you generally have two of every important light on a vehicle, and get stopped if a light is out. Second, even if that does happen, there's a fairly good chance that there is some manner of natural and safe avoidance action that can be taken- once LIDAR is gone you still have a decent enough world model, with good enough IMU to, say, pull to a shoulder after a few seconds of trying to alert the driver. The problem with failing hard to the human isn't a problem with automation, but a lack of thought and implementation on handling failure conditions, which is an engineering and design problem to a certain extent. And a legal issue, of course. Lawyers and car enthusiasts take all the fun out of the driverless highway system.

3. What is the possible future work extending from this work (i.e., if you had implemented this work, what would be your next steps – either continuing or fixing this work, taking some of these ideas and applying them to others’/your work, or starting new work from some of these ideas)?

I believe the next step is to develop an autopilot system that can be retrofitted to all vehicles. Once this is done, legislation can be passed requiring the system for a vehicle to pass inspection (added benefit of boosting the manufacturing sector temporarily). Once the legislation is in place, and all (legal) cars have been retrofitted, we can turn on auto-driving on the highways, and I can sleep on the 3 hour drive to Fort Worth; even lay down in the back seat on the 2 day drive to Jacksonville (which'd drop to about a 24 hour drive due to not needing a hotel stay). I figure we'll keep manual driving inside of a city for the next few years due to the uncertainty in pedestrian detection, and because of navigation difficulties, but in time we'd get rid of that too, favoring full automation for passenger transport. These are the next steps.