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The Editors Recommend
When Things Start To Think.
An Associated Press report from Issaquah, Wash., in 1997 told of a man
who pulled a gun and shot his personal computer several times. The
police took him off for mental evaluation. According to Gershenfeld,
"they should have instead checked the computer for irrational and
antisocial behavior." Which is to say that Gershenfeld, director of the
physics and media group and co-director of the Things That Think (TTT)
consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, is
yet another computer wizard who thinks that computers and other high-
technology devices are too hard to use. "There is a disconnect," he
says, "between the breathless pronouncements of cybergurus and the
experience of ordinary people left perpetually upgrading hardware to
meet the demands of new software, or wondering where their files have
gone, or trying to understand why they can't connect to the network. The
[digital] revolution so far has been for the computers, not the
people."Neil Gershenfeld. Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1999 ($25). That said, Gershenfeld goes on to describe a number of ways in which devices might be designed to anticipate the user's needs and operate almost invisibly from the user's viewpoint. Taking health care as an example, he envisions what Things That Think might do. "In a TTT world, the medicine cabinet could monitor the medicine consumption, the toilet could perform routine chemical analyses, both could be connected to the doctor to report aberrations, and to the pharmacy to order refills, delivered by FedEx (along with the milk ordered by the refrigerator and the washing machine's request for more soap)."
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