The Unfinished Revolution: Making Computers Human-centric (Hardcover)

However, overall the examples are trite and simplistic. Dertouzos' five great functions that the next round of technology will express are commonplace aspirations (and have been for forty years). Anyone familar with the much hyped MIT Oxygen project, won't find this book moving their thinking along, or their expectations.

There is a lot of dreadful naivete throughout the text about world cultures and societies. Especially the comments on poverty - get technology in, to get poverty out. Short on political analysis. There is an argument that technological advances in developed countries come about precisely because of political systems that stablise poverty in less developed countries.

Certain statements about the amount of time people in India have on their hands are simply astonishing. Dertouzos contrasts the busy lifestyle of the West (especially that of married couples) with the relaxed lifestyles of the East - India seems to have caught his fancy in this regard. Apparently with the help of the internet Indian matrons could counsel Western wifes, stressed out from their busy lives, about how best to hold their families and marriages together. Really an unforgiveable propagation of colonial myths about the oriental worlds; distractive materialistic West, philosophical unworldly East. No mention here of the dreadful subsistence poverty, child slavery and ante natal mortality that is endemic in the subcontinent.

On the contrary, the calm Indian mother, with time on her hands, will just log on and dish out the family therapy. Presumably this is after an unhurried reflective day working for twelve hours in the rice field or grim cosmetic jewellery factory, and after that a satisfying slap up feed of rice and pulses boiled in water that carries world renowned levels of parasitic infection.

As the book moves on we get more stuff about mobile computing and of course the promise of bluetooth and friends to have everything in the environment waffle digitally away to everything else.

He discusses ASP services at length (application service providers) without indicating an awareness that there are already companies offering these services ("rent your software"). However despite Dertouzos enthusiasm for the effort,there is little evidence of widespread industry enthusiam for the idea. Likewise his support for XML may not be borne out by actual takeup over the next few years.

Dertouzos is right in many of the points he makes about technology not being sufficiently focused on human requirements (read Jef Raskinn to get a better handle here), and AI not being able to handle content as we would like, but his whole presentation is far too elementary; and he is doing himself a disservice here. I suspect the audience is more informed that the book presupposes.

It is definitely a view from an MIT grounded researcher who has tried to write tomorrow's newspaper. At a more subtle level it is a book expressing a certain confidence in the capcity of (primarily American) technology to shape aspects of the social world in the common good. It is an unchallenged implicit moral thesis in the book.

Unfortunately much of what is assembled here is already known or is not that big a deal anyway. The general problem with the book is that is pitched at too low a common denominator. Given that much of the information is and has been available in magazines (Scientific American covered the Oxygen project in 1999) and on the web (look up the Oxygen project and you'll come away with a better technical grasp of the world Dertouzos is trying the create). The text is by no means profound. In fact it is largely unselfconsciously trite which is almost equally unforgiveable. A much better book is somewhere in there trying to get out, and hopefully in several years time it will.

Dr. Dertouzos is always on the cutting edge of the information revolution in his role as the head of MIT's Computer Laboratory. The core of this book is captured in chapter 8, where MIT's new Oxygen project is described. This is a prototype of "human-centered" information technology. The system combines a portable device for wireless communication, a stationary system built into a room (with transportable software from the portable device to the stationary system), and a network to support the interactions of users to the technology in new ways.

The strongest part of the book is in complaints about the limitations of current information devices and networks. These will be familiar to any computer user, but it is refreshing to hear them from someone involved in drawing the outlines of the future. These include bulky software that does too much (like the word processing program most of us use that keeps automatically reformating what you have typed into something you don't want), weak interfaces between multiple programs and products so they crash when combined, the need to type so much information in, lousy search engines that waste your time, horrible telephone robots for getting to the right number, difficulties in sharing information, and the burdens of unwanted and unneeded e-mail.

His solutions focus on five areas: Letting people converse with information devices in ways similar to how you would speak with a service person in a business; using e-forms to capture your information once and to then automate the sharing of that information with organizations who legitimately need it; finding answers by building on information that others have learned whom you trust; changing the method of distance working and learning so that the interactions are made more realistic and better summarized; and allowing you to tap into personalized, custom software preferences wherever you are and with whatever device you are using.

Each area contains several examples of how these changes might work, many drawn from actual Oxygen applications that are now operating. So you should think of this book as focusing on what will be technically feasible in the next five years or so.

I hope that Dr. Dertouzos will write a sequel to this book that looks further ahead than that in order to begin to spell out an even more improved version of information processing. As much as I was attracted to his vision here, I found that it mainly focused on enhancing the ways that I do things now. I thought that more could be done to help individuals operate in new ways that would vastly enhance human progress. Problem-solving software designed to help structure issues, gather information, analyze it, get feedback from others on the process, and compare to the potential for perfection could be one such example.

Seeing this book also made me realize that much more work of this sort is needed. Without detailed scenarios of how to create solutions that people really want, technologists will continue to provide user unfriendly technology. I suspect that we need a vast experimental activity where people attempt to find new ways to get benefits from technology while removing its hindrances.

Those who read about "human-centered" technology will, of course, want to know what the catch is. You will find towards the end of the book that Dr. Dertouzos points out that making the humans a little more standard in their interactions would allow the information technology to work better. So the vision is still a little along the lines of making each of us fit into the round hole in the technology board. With more technology advances, I hope that aspect will quickly disappear. It certainly should be a primary objective.

After you finish reading this book, I suggest that you create your own scenario for a better way to get a task done with information technology. Then send it along to Dr. Dertouzos, so he can share it with others. In that way, you can help speed the unfinished revolution talked about in this book.

Let's focus on making vast improvements in human benefits, net of human frustration and stress, in all of our technologies rather than focusing on selling products to other technologists! That's the real mindframe shift that is needed!

Dr. Dertouzos is always on the cutting edge of the information revolution in his role as the head of MIT's Computer Laboratory. The core of this book is captured in chapter 8, where MIT's Oxygen project is described. This is a prototype of "human-centered" information technology. The system combines a portable device for wireless communication, a stationary system built into a room (with transportable software from the portable device to the stationary system), and a network to support the interactions of users to the technology in new ways.

The strongest part of the book is in complaints about the limitations of current information devices and networks. These will be familiar to any computer user, but it is refreshing to hear them from someone involved in drawing the outlines of the future. These include bulky software that does too much (like the word processing program most of us use that keeps automatically reformating what you have typed into something you don't want), weak interfaces between multiple programs and products so they crash when combined, the need to type so much information in, lousy search engines that waste your time, horrible telephone robots for getting to the right number, difficulties in sharing information, and the burdens of unwanted and unneeded e-mail.

His solutions focus on five areas: Letting people converse with information devices in ways similar to how you would speak with a service person in a business; using e-forms to capture your information once and to then automate the sharing of that information with organizations who legitimately need it; finding answers by building on information that others have learned whom you trust; changing the method of distance working and learning so that the interactions are made more realistic and better summarized; and allowing you to tap into personalized, custom software preferences wherever you are and with whatever device you are using.

Each area contains several examples of how these changes might work, many drawn from actual Oxygen applications that are now operating. So you should think of this book as focusing on what will be technically feasible in the next five years or so.

I hope that Dr. Dertouzos will write a sequel to this book that looks further ahead than that in order to begin to spell out an even more improved version of information processing. As much as I was attracted to his vision here, I found that it mainly focused on enhancing the ways that I do things now. I thought that more could be done to help individuals operate in new ways that would vastly enhance human progress. Problem-solving software designed to help structure issues, gather information, analyze it, get feedback from others on the process, and compare to the potential for perfection could be one such example.

Seeing this book also made me realize that much more work of this sort is needed. Without detailed scenarios of how to create solutions that people really want, technologists will continue to provide user unfriendly technology. I suspect that we need a vast experimental activity where people attempt to find new ways to get benefits from technology while removing its hindrances.

Those who read about "human-centered" technology will, of course, want to know what the catch is. You will find towards the end of the book that Dr. Dertouzos points out that making the humans a little more standard in their interactions would allow the information technology to work better. So the vision is still a little along the lines of making each of us fit into the round hole in the technology board. With more technology advances, I hope that aspect will quickly disappear. It certainly should be a primary objective.

After you finish reading this book, I suggest that you create your own scenario for a better way to get a task done with information technology. Then send it along to Dr. Dertouzos, so he can share it with others. In that way, you can help speed the unfinished revolution talked about in this book.

Let's focus on making vast improvements in human benefits, net of human frustration and stress, in all of our technologies rather than focusing on selling products to other technologists! That's the real mindframe shift that is needed!