If your car were as hard to manage as your PC, Michael Dertouzos says, you might never get out of the garage. If you think your computer’s wasting your time, maybe driving you crazy, he says: you’re probably right. The first problem is that we think of our information machine as one thing, a cyber-something that demands a techno-transformation of ourselves. We got over that eventually in the Industrial Revolution, which was driven by motors; but we don’t take them as an invitation to enter motor-space, or to surrender to motor-ness.
We bring motors into our lives-of different sizes and speeds in automobiles and electric toothbrushes, and the good ones we adapt to our uses, not us to theirs. The next generation of computing will do something like that. Dertouzos says it should be less about machines, more about us, about our bodies and spirits as much as our heads. Computers for the whole human being are this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Michael Dertouzos, director of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science, and author of “The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do for Us.”