Chapter One

Why Change

Weird animals surround me in my home, at work, everywhere I go. Every day I must spend hours feeding them, healing them, waiting for them. And the fighting! They hold each other hostage in asphyxiating headlocks. I scream at them, but they just grunt or stare back stupidly. When we do get along, and I'm feeling affection for them, they suddenly turn around and bite a chunk off my hide.

You are surrounded by these creatures, too -- the personal computers, laptops, handheld assistants, printers, Internet-savvy phones, music storage drives, and other digital wonders. They are everywhere and multiplying fast. Yet instead of serving us, we are serving them. We wait endlessly for our computers to boot up, and for bulky Web pages to paint themselves on our screens. We stand perplexed in front of incomprehensible system messages, and wait in frustration on the phone for computerized assistance. We constantly add software upgrades, enter odd instructions, fix glitches, only to sit in maddening silence when our machines crash, forcing us to start all over again, hoping against hope that they didn't take a piece of our intellectual hide with them. We'd never live in a house, work in an office, or ride in a car where we had to put up with a menagerie of such beasts. Yet we do it every day with our computer menagerie.

We shouldn't have to.

We have already gone so far down the road of serving computers that we've come to accept our servitude as necessary. It isn't. It is time for us to rise up with a profound demand: "Make our computers simpler to use!" Make them talk with us, do things for us, get the information we want, help us work with other people, and adapt to our individual needs. Only then will computers make us productive and truly serve us, instead of the other way around.

Is this possible? Certainly.

Before I reveal an entirely new approach to computer systems and their uses -- a new plan for human-centric computing -- let me assure you that in our new century, we have every right to expect fundamental reform. For 40 years computers have been shrines to which we pay dutiful homage. When something goes wrong, the "user"you and I -- feel that if we somehow had behaved better the trouble would not have arisen. But we are not at fault. The trouble lies in the current approach to computing.

If computers are to live up to the promise of serving us, they will have to change drastically and never again subject us to the frustrating experiences we have all shared.

Several colleagues from the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and I are flying to Taiwan. I have been trying for three hours to make my new laptop work with one of these "smart cards" that plug into the machine and download my personal calendar. When the card software is happy, the operating system complains, and vice versa. Irritated, I turn to Tim Berners-Lee, sitting next to me, who graciously offers to assist. After an hour the inventor of the Web admits that the task is beyond his capabilities. I turn to Ron Rivest, inventor of RSA public key cryptography, and ask him to help. He declines, exhibiting his wisdom. A young faculty member behind us speaks up: "You guys are too old. Let me do it." He gives up after an hour and a half. So Igo back to my "expert" approach of typing random entries into the various wizards and lizards that keep popping up on the screen. After two more hours, and two batteries, I make it work, by sheer accident and without remembering how.

My friends on this flight were hardly incompetent. The problem was what I call the "unintegrated systems fault." Technologists design today's hardware and software systems without worrying enough about how these different pieces will work together. If the slightest conflict arises among an operating system, a communications network, a digital camera, a printer, or any other device, the modules become deadlocked, as do their makers, who point to one another, leaving you to resolve their differences. After I published this Taiwan anecdote in an August 1999 article in Scientific American, I received scores of letters from people who said, "I know exactly what you are talking about. Please fix it." The problem is not simply a "bug" to be worked out in existing systems, but rather an endemic mind-set that has characterized computer design for decades. Only a radical change can fix it.

It's 11 P.M. and I check my e-mail. Ninety-eight new messages have arrived since yesterday. At 2 to 3 minutes per message, my average response time, I'll need 4 hours to handle them. I'd like to grant them my highest security classfication, DBR -- "destroy before reading."

How do we handle this "overload fault?" We don't. Mostly, we feel guilty if we cannot respond to all the messages that come our way. Better e-mail software can relieve a lot of this burden. Better human behavior can go further. Human-centric computing means more than changing the hardware and software of computer systems. We must also improve the ways we use technology.

My son is searching the Web for information on Vespas, the Italian scooters that conquered Europe in the 1950s, which he loves to restore. The search engine has given him 2,545 hits and he is busy checking them out. His eyes squint and his brain labors to minimize the time he needs to decide whether he should keep or toss each entry. I imagine him in an ancient badlands, furiously shoveling through 2,545 mountains of dirt, looking for one nugget of hidden treasure. His shovel is diamond studded and it is stamped "high tech," so he is duly modern. Yet he is still shoveling

Courtesy of HarperCollins, inc.

Excerpted from The Unfinished Revolution © Copyright 2012 by Michael Dertouzos. Reprinted with permission by HarperCollins. All rights reserved.