When I read Don Norman’s article ‘Natural User Interfaces Are Not Natural’, it reminds me of iphone, ipad which based on Gestural interface, and the Kinect.

Gestures will form a valuable addition to our repertoire of interaction techniques, it already become a very important part of interaction system. Gestures are a very important way of communication, Gestures have been part of the interface scene for a long time. ‘The 1998 review by Brad Myers describes work in the 1960s and reminds us that they were first commercially deployed in systems for computer-aided design and with the Apple Newton of 1992. Myron Krueger’s pioneering work on artificial reality in the early 1980s was my first introduction to gestural interaction with large, projected images.’

Gesture is intuitionistic and effective. The Gesture based interaction system will make users feel more participational, just like playing magic, to make the interaction system more humane and user friendly.

But Most gestures are neither natural nor easy to learn or remember. Few are innate or readily pre-disposed to rapid and easy learning. More important, gestures lack critical clues deemed essential for successful human-computer interaction. However, gestures is still a powerful mode of interaction, it now practical to deploy these systems on inexpensive, mass-produced items. We have already seen great advances in their use. The Nintendo Wii make users feel like they are really in the game, they are play this games by their bodies, it is more like realistic. But if you played too high, the controller of Wii might be threw out or hit others. In fact, I did this once.. At that time, I threw the controller to the screen…

The gesture based system has already own a great success on Iphone and Ipad.

However, compared to other interaction systems, gesture has no difference. They also need to follow the basic rules of interaction design,

All of our gesture will be a valuable addition to interactive technology, but they also need better development.

Gestures has been very popular, many people have formed a habit, even in the operating system does not provide a gesture is also used gestures to operate the system. Gestures, however, there is still much room for development, technological advances can solve a problem, but it might bring some new problems at the same time. Standardization is very important, so that different systems can be achieved in a uniform standard. Gestures still need time to perfect the technology to do better. Therefore, we need to continue to improve the technology.

Technology is constantly in progress. The Internet side, in Fred Vogelstein’s article ‘Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out’, which referred to facebook and Google’s competition, it looks really like a movie. Google would like to seek greater cooperation with facebook to attract big brand’s advertising investment, but was rejected by facebook. Facebook executives weren’t leaping at the chance to join with Google; they preferred to conquer it. “We never liked those guys,” says one former Facebook engineer. “We all had that audacity, ‘Anything Google does, we can do better.’  Network in Google’s definition, is a detailed analysis of each activity on the network, building a network map of the world’s strict formula. However, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline, online or offline is no different. In terms of personal information, facebook is more humane,
Similarly a person, you can see on facebook what kind of music he likes to listen to, what kind of movie he likes to watch, which restaurant he went to last week, which NBA games he watched last night, all kinds of information are kept up to date, very specific, like a real contact with this person outside. But on Google, the search only to the more basic and the official information, feel less vivid and comprehensive picture of this person. So this is a real threat to Google. Even if Google was also started to allow users to improve the personal information of the service, as similar to facebook, but now have facebook, why users have to spend time and effort on Google to do the same thing? More and more people are willing to share their private information on facebook, because they think compared user experience, facebook paid more attention on the confidentiality of user information. More and more people share their information on facebook, in the end, do we own Facebook, or does the Facebook own us, or absorbed us?  The future of social networking must pay attention to the feelings of users, if tedious advertisements or disclosing user information for profit, social networks may be lose their users in a very short period of time.

In Bill Joy’s ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us’ , it said that the speed ​​of technological progress will be faster. Will we be a robot or a combination of synthetic human and robot in the future, or something like that?

Through robotics, will human get eternal life?

Human beings might easily fall into the situation that people have to accept the decisions made by machines or robots, People will live rely on the machine. The machine will make more and more important decisions, instead of human beings.
Between the various parts of the system and the role of feedback is too complex, the system will change chain reaction, difficult to predict the final result. In particular, to human activities into account, the situation is more and more complicated.
We constantly research and develop, improve the technology, but at the same time we are afraid of technology. If it is possible that there is one day, robots are more powerful than our human beings, and we have to rely on machines to survive?
Technology started in human nature, with mobile phones and the Internet, more and more people prefer to communicate on the Internet, and less face to face and talk to people, the Internet has shortened the distance between people, but on the other hand, the convenience of the Internet also pull away the distance between human’s hearts. Is technological progress, really an absolutely good thing?

Because of the existence of the Internet, our lives are full of convenience. As said in ‘The Web Means the End of Forgetting’ written by Jeffrey Rosen, with the Internet, all information will be recorded, we do not forget anything anymore. Each of our experience will be permanently stored (like facebook and twitter does). Technology makes our life full of convenience,  but it might bring some side effects,  will people come to rely on the machine,  and can not work without machine?

Response of The Web Means the End of Forgetting

This reading really reminds me a big scandal—-Nude Picture Scandal, which happened in Hong Kong, 2008. This big scandal has passed for couple years, but when people mention the names of the actors in this scandal, everything goes through again and again. People always talk a lot about Edison Chen, the main actor whom taken thousands of nude picture of different female movie and singing stars. Despite Edison Chen did the public apology for many times, it seems that changing his bad public image goes like a mission impossible.

Everyday, you can get fresh entertainment news; I mean this kind of new is gossip, usually.  Undeniably, many people love scandal, paparazzo become “a great job”. We should say “YES” that PAPARAZZI bring a lot commercial value in magazine, newspaper, even in some TV shows. We may think about that scandal builds a person a bad image, but also brings the person more opportunities to go public, increasing the exposure.

Many examples of this kind of scandal, it happened in Kate Moss, Blake Lively, and Rosie Huntington Whitely the actress of Transformers 3. When you type the key word, maybe the actor or actress’ name into any Internet search engine, you can get some scandal stuff.

Let’s go back to the main topic —- the web means the end of forgetting.

Internet mass hunting can change a person’s life, seriously, even a lay folk. Every people need the private space, it means every people can hold the power to protect his or her privacy. Personally, privacy cannot be bargain. Bargaining one’s privacy can be immoral; it can break the balance of our society. To be honest, sometimes I stalk others’ Face book or other social network. I was trying to get the information about my ex boyfriend online. People often get interested in something very vague. Another example from my best friend, I never ask anything about her relationship. When I find her Douban account (a Chinese social network) is suspended that I know she just finished a relationship with a guy. I see she create a new account, it usually means she meet a new guy.

For me, I do not want others know everything about me. I used to be a person, but now I am I, the current state.

The world, the society, is changing so fast; people are always changing, of course. History just means history, something passed. I do agree to build a new system to protect personal information online, and also do the deleting of the 3 months passed (whatever, it may a period) data. The web means the end of forgetting, it is true. Forget and give up the bad, and not useful data is better for our lives.

The first thing I thought of when reading Norman’s essay was:  “omg microsoft kinect!”

I don’t know how many people watched it yet, but this year’s E3 conference Microsoft demo’ed more Kinect Sports videos for your entertainment:

http://youtu.be/OYLp3ml9KJk (skip to 3.18 for the football match)

http://youtu.be/UDMJbeqmmi8 (for srs, a very serious star wars kid)

I’m reminded of this year’s E3 when Microsoft presented Kinect games and most of the audience was laughing at them because of how stupid it looks. They had this Kinect game that was supposed to mimick a football match, and it was there were these 2 guys; running on the spot towards the screen while his friend yelled various positions whilst staring at the screen. Another one I remember is Star Wars game, and this kid was swinging his hands wildly while the clone army walked towards him like zombies. It was so awful. I kept wishing that he had a controller at least, because he looked beyond stupid swinging an invisible lightsaber. (same goes for the chick swinging a golf-club-that-is-not-club)

The lack of object makes these gestures seem entirely illogical, because we normally associate an action to an object, much like how we tend to write verbs on nouns. By removing the necessary instrument/object reference, you end up with a lot of gestures but nothing to associate them with and that is a bit difficult to get used to. By contrast, Wii Nitendo has a Wii remote – which allows the user to feel like the action has meaning towards an object even if the object is dissimilar (for instance Wii Boxing, you basically are holding a remote and punching air but somehow it feels better than just punching nothing) I think that may be one of the reasons why Wii sells better than Kinect, even though Kinect’s motion sensors are ‘better’. This example illuminates one of the points that Norman brings up; that gestural interaction needs to be better researched, and has it own time and place. The most successful games with gestural interaction tend to be those that *are* already based on gestures – for instance Kinect’s Dance Central is an upgraded version of Para Para Dance Machine (arcade only), which is an upgraded version of the late 90s Dance Dance Revolution (you can buy the ddr mat for playstation home use). I really cannot imagine a text heavy game like Scrabble or old school RPG like Suikoden or Xenosaga being played purely on gestures – would you ride a chocobo by squatting in midair??? Although, Nitendo Wii is developing a dual-user interface Wii U for their Zelda game…. (will be open to it, but wary about actual execution) it’s not purely gestural though, it’s half-half again.

What struck me the most about Don Norman’s essay is the familiarity of argument – then I realised that I heard all this before, but on a different note. Gestural interfaces, Norman purposes, are unnatural because different gestures mean different things in various cultures and GUI scientists have to write feedback loops into the system as well as make these loops visible for people to explore it. Fair enough. Except that this entire (or most of it anyway) argument has *always* existed as far as human species is concerned. This problem is NOT at all unique to GUIs or computer interfaces, it’s a problem that affects most of humanity. That is, the problem of language.

There is really no such thing as a ‘natural’ communication interface. Every day, the behaviour that we practice and the language we speak to the gestures we make are all acquired from infancy – for instance, speaking in English; we have to learn vocabulary, grammatical rules, structuring of sentences. Our social behaviour is ‘unnatural’ as well, we learn to use the potty and not dump rubbish on streets, we learn that we need to wear clothes in public etc etc or as Piaget noted: ‘there is nothing natural about speech’ because our behaviour is mostly acquired.

I’m not very convinced that the way to overcome gestural interfacing problems is by developing help menus or tutorials or standardising gestures as he suggests; part of the joys of language is the richness and variety and to standardise would be to lose much of that. Instead, another possible way would be to create the ‘base’ physical interface (an interface that reads all physical gestures) and then build the semotic interaction on top of it (based on how often the gestures are used, when they are used; a kind of ‘fitness’ test to weed out movements; another would be to create a ‘library’ of common movements so a headshake would be properly interpreted in context) so you have something akin to a cultural specific gestural interface or Google Translate for gestural interaction. Plus, like most language, one can always acquire it. Maybe next time besides learning English and text-speech languages, we’ll be learning gestural language in schools as well.

Learning, or rather self-replication is crux of the next reading by Bill Joy. He paints a truly horrible scenerio(s) based on the development of 3 types of technological growth: robots or augmented post-human cyborgs (GNR), molecular electonics/nanotechnology and genetic modifications. Robots that take over the world by being more efficient and adaptive than human bodies, molecular electronics that create weapons of uncontrollable destruction and genetic modification of bodies, foods that cause unknown weaknesses and therefore all human species self-destruct.

What really drives me up the wall about the essay isn’t so much the ‘omg apocalypse!’ scenerio, but rather that he oversimplifies and has many assumptions that really need to be questioned. First, he never ever defines what ‘natural’ is. What is natural? What constitutes as a natural being? How does one define ‘natural/organic’ versus the ‘machine’? His general definition seems to be: ‘anything that can reproduce = natural, therefore if a machine can reproduce by replication it gains the status of  human/organic’. It’s a fairly workable definition except that 1. not all reproduction is in replication (i.e we are not replicas of our parents) 2. replication does not necessarily give an evolutionary advantage (which is the same weakness in GM foods; because they aren’t plague resistant at all since they have no diversity) 3. it oversimplifies things to Nature vs. Machine dichotomy, when in fact there is a huge lot of grey area and it isn’t always one or the other.

Nature/Machine debate goes all the way back to Aristotle’s silver chalice (where an object exists in 4 states of being) to Heideigger (a human who views a tool as an extension of his body, ‘in hand’ rather than ‘at hand’ as an apparatus) to more recent studies via Levy’s ‘cosmopedia’ (a predecessor to wikipedia, where humans could collectively upload their intelligence via machines) or  Latour/Haraway’s dialogue (actor network theory, where *both* objects and humans had ‘agency’ or ability to affect and leave traces behind; he’s one of the few people who really epoused the idea that there is very little difference between human/object/machine in terms of a network, only varying levels of agency while Haraway’s cyborg manifesto examined the more ‘spiritual’ side of how a post-human society or ‘cyborg’ beings may exist in the future) I personally think that Bill Joy’s views on robotics is rather dated, because we are already *in* that present world and have been for a long time. For instance, what does he think of prosthetic research? Prosthetics have been around for a long time, and I can’t imagine a wooden leg being any more ‘natural’ than a mechnical one. Does he feel that a man with a mechanical limb is any ‘less’ human because his limbs are augmented by machine? Are people in wheelchairs, mechanical arms or steel-braced spines less ‘human’ because of the ‘machine’ in them?

The second problem I have with this text is with the word ‘intelligence’ – why does he treat all intelligence as equal? Ants are intelligent. The cockroach that I fail to kill is intelligent. Plants are intelligent. My cat who knows when dinnertime is, is also intelligent. My computer is intelligent too, it knows when to sleep after 15mins and lets me watch youtube. My classmates, tutors and friends at Parsons is intelligent. Are all the variables listed above intelligent? Yes. Are all the variables listed above *equally* intelligent? hell no! (the cat is always the smartest) And that’s what really bothers me, this guy NEVER EVER compares intelligence; that intelligence is a scale, a qualitative thing rather than a set quantity or object.

So let’s assume that you create an intelligent computer. This computer runs on genetic algorithms or evolutionary computing strategy, which means it can chart possibilities, learn methods and adapt to unknown scenerios. (it works like this: 1. lets say your goal is ‘fastest way to finish line’ 2. feed all candidate data 3. write a code for fitness test i.e. ‘all solutions must be under 10mins’ 4. computer takes all candidates and comes up with billions of possibilities/mutations and tests them based on your fitness test so only the ‘strong’ solutions survive 5.solution is found, or solutions recombined until a sufficient solution is found)) All of Bill Joy’s nightmares come true – here is a truly ‘intelligent’ computer that can evolve, create new solutions by combining old ones, test for viability and even adapt them in various unknown situations. Oh, horror.

But what he neglects or forgets to mention is that *all* computers run on code, and code by itself has constraints. You can never ever have a limitless potential computer because it *always* is restricted by code rules. (this isn’t necessarily just a machine thing, as humans we are always limited by mortality) You may have an infinitely intelligent computer who can plow through billions of data in seconds, but this infinitely intelligent computer can only be intelligent in ONE and only ONE way. Machines aren’t like humans in the sense that we can ‘read’ things based on generalities. For instance, doing laundry – in humanspeak, we’ll just say: ‘go do your laundry’, in machinespeak we’ll say: ‘in this day, in this hour, here are the ways of which you can do laundry and i want you to optimise the best way of doing laundry’. Assuming the task changes midway from laundry to sweeping, we’ll have to rewrite the entire fitness algorithm and constraints for the machine to cope with having a new goal.

And that’s why the future DOES need us. It’s true, we are less efficient and more biased than our machine counterparts. We are less good at plowing through billions of data, and multitasking various processes at once. We aren’t even very good at finding solutions. However, what we can do is verify solutions do work and create the ‘rules’ that a machine needs in order to perform. We are needed because of the constraints we create for the machine, and in the same way these constraints allow a machine to work it also gives us a failsafe predictability for them to stop.

So even if someone writes a code like: ‘machine, your goal is to be efficiently smarter than every single human alive’; it is still a constraint because 1. limited by every single human so if an alien arrived it would not be smarter than alien, 2. we know the machine will stop at the last human alive 3.even as it becomes efficiently smarter, it cannot do anything with its intelligence as there is no goal that says ‘become smarter and kill all humans’ so it basically has knowledge but no execution powers.

Finally, I find this last bit on moral and pursuit of science a bit whiffy of bullshit. This is a terrible analogy and I apologise for it (it’s 4am) but he reminds me of those people from Christian Evangelical groups who believe in Abstinence From Sex Is The Only Way when everyone in highschool is already ‘doing it’. You just can’t CAN’T tell people: ‘don’t be curious!!’ because people will, always will be even when they *know* bad things will happen. So just like how catholic highschoolers get pregnant and abstinence fails, telling people to relinquish weapons and give up research for ‘moral responsibility’ is a pretty poor tactic.  As a whole, humanity has never really cared very much about long term effects as long as we get what we want (be it highschoolers having sex, or scientists doing their research or phds taking weapons grants) NOW.

I personally believe that Planned Parenthood probably has the right tactic when it comes to this kind of thing, because even if the context is different the motives are fairly similar (i.e. people with too much curiosity). The first way would be via education and teaching safety and protection. Bad things like the White Fungus Plague happens when there is a lax in lab standards, or when people aren’t aware of the hazardous of material handling – basically knowing a little, but not enough. You want this information to be free and easily accessible until it becomes ingrained in everyone so people don’t cook up grey goo in their backyard. So when educating scientists, consider adding classes on ethical standards and responsibility along with practical lab behaviour so people would know and see that their actions had real and painful consequences. Show them how Sarin was developed because some chemist tried to synthesise ethyl alcohol from plasticiser and denatured alcohol during Prohibition; how some dude wanted his drink so badly he came up with a Jamaican Ginger that formed the basis for one of the most deadly organophosphates in the world.

Secondly, put failsafes or make it a legislation/law that all machines built with genetic or evolutionary strategy systems must have’the red button’ to override all other commands for self-destruct/stop. Make it opensourced so everyone can use and develop into it, then make sure everyone puts it into their program in case of emergency.

Finally, I don’t even know if it’s possible since it’ll require way too much cooperation – but a greater move towards transparency and global cooperation would be good. We live in a world where the globe gets smaller and smaller as all countries become more and more dependant on each other. Having more transparency means more knowledge shared, and less ‘secrets’ that could be potentially disastrous. For instance SARS and China, because the govt. kept the spread quiet, people didn’t know what symptoms to look out for and it spread to various countries while claiming victims. All this would have been prevented if governments were more transparent about what was really happening, and cooperated by sharing information they had. In the same way, governments need to share the research they do especially in regards to gene-modified species (because they can potentially mutate with native species, or overrun native species thus killing diversity like what happened in Australia).

All four articles in this week’s reading express fear, uncertainty or even doom whether it has to do with the use of technology, its social long-term implications or human survival. If technology creates so much uneasiness, why do we keep producing? Are we losing focus on what is really important? Is the innovation of new technology done just for the sake of creating or is the aim to improve our quality of life? I feel like these questions need to be explored in order to have a clear understanding of my role as a designer and the implications of my work on future generations.

Fred Vogelstein’s piece illustrates the tension between creating a useful interface for the people and using it as a tool to generate profit. Although Facebook set out to create a “personalized, humanized web,” the focus gradually shifted to increasing the company’s monetary gain. Humanity quickly dissipates in this scenario where making a profit poses a higher priority over responsibility to the user. Facebook’s competition with Google further exacerbates the loss of focus. Although Google prides itself on not exploiting its customers’ personal data, it still, disturbingly, takes advantage of Internet search history for target advertising.

There is definitely something secretive and deceptive about the way the Internet functions. We are encouraged and are given multiple platforms on which to lay our information out on the table, information that we can never take back. This seems unjust because I believe that all humans are fallible. This issue is intensely discussed in Rosen’s article where he uses the example of Stacy Snyder who lost her job and ruined her career over an inappropriate photograph on Facebook. In the end, it is always the user that gets blamed. Is that really fair? Do innovators not have a responsibility to save the user from him/her self? This makes me think of an old English proverb that states “the first faults are theirs that commit them, the second theirs that permit them.” Even though it is the user that gives life to technology, I feel like responsibility should be shared with the producer. I strongly agree with the idea presented in Rosen’s article of “reputation bankruptcy”, where personal information is cleared every ten years. We must be compassionate and empathetic, are these not the qualities that us human?

Having presented the above philosophical conundrums, it is easy to understand Bill Joy’s outlook of doom for the human species as a whole, as he believes that humans will further depend on technology in their every day lives because technology will “gradually become immortal, intelligent robots.” Fortunately, I have a more optimistic outlook on the future and on the survival of the human species. As machines become more intelligent, so will humans. Humans have a natural ability to adapt. Because technology is ubiquitous, no one will fall behind on its growth in our increasingly globalized society. Advance of robotic intelligence seems to have been, and will be, parallel to human intellectual progression. Therefore, the human will always be able to control what he/she produces; the problems that will keep arising will not be that of technology but rather of morality.

Moral responsibility is what I am exploring here as I am planning to step out into the sphere of technical innovation and development. After carefully reading the assigned articles, I believe understanding the human psyche is a very important factor in creating interfaces in the 21^st century. There is no doubt our lives are constantly complicated by technological possibilities and its implications but we cannot live in fear, shift blame and point fingers. There is no going back to the old days of a computer-free society. Therefore, we need to find a way to live with what we have created in a more civil compassionate way because the only things that can destroy the human race are humans themselves.