Читать книгу Designing Agentive Technology - Christopher Noessel - Страница 13

Reducing Physical Work

Reducing Information Work

Putting Physical and Information Work Together to Become Agentive

Getting to a Working Definition of “Agentive”

Drawing a Boundary Around Agentive Technology

Recap: Agents Are Persistent, Background Assistants

In the prior chapter, we followed temperature control technology from its evolutionary origins through several stages—from the moment our distant forebears developed the need to control their temperature by behavior to using handheld fans and windows, and from the invention of the automated thermostat to the Nest Thermostat.

Tracing this journey is important because it is not unique to thermostats. These increasingly sophisticated technological solutions to the broad general problem of human temperature management illustrate two points. The first is that the evolution of tools can be viewed as iterated solutions to some core human need. The second is that agents are a natural solution to a great many computable human problems, as designers attempt to reduce effort and maximize results.

In this chapter, I’ll define what an agent is and is not, use the thermostat as an example of one, look at some other technologies through a similar lens, and then make the case that far from being a sci-fi future, agents are beginning to appear in the world around us. They’re not yet ubiquitous, but it’s easy to see how they will be.

To start, let’s go back and look at the temperature management tools. But this time, let’s ask what work they are doing on behalf of the user.