Title: Design of Future Things
Author: Don Norman
Publisher: Basic Books, May 2009
This chapter described the problems of automating machines. The author stated that people are becoming the servants of their machines, but that it's too late to go back to living without machines. After some new technology is first deployed, it always delivers previously unseen benefits, with problems not originally thought of. While intelligent devices can interact well with the physical world and other devices, they cannot interact well with humans.
The author discussed potential automations, such as cars that drive themselves and entertainment systems that decide what you should watch. He mostly focused on the automobile, stating that it is the most advanced area of automation that impacts our lives. The difficulty is automating the driving process while still avoiding the problem of over-automation. The author discussed cars communicating with each other wirelessly, forming swarms or platoons to travel in so that their communications help each other to travel together.
| A depiction of a car communicating about an accident to other cars. Source: blogs.cars.com |
Most of what this author seems to say is just rehashing what he said in previous chapters. I understand that repetition is necessary for understanding, but it gets rather annoying to keep reading the same things. While he did bring up some good points involving automation, he seems to be against automation in one section of the chapter, then for it in the next. Also, the swarm of cars seems like a good idea in theory; however, when technology is capable of it, I feel that in practice it would be a horrible idea. The cars would have to be entirely automated, because I can see the unpredictability of humans causing cars to suddenly swerve out of the swarms, causing massive accidents.
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