Читать книгу Designing Agentive Technology - Christopher Noessel - Страница 30

Hello, philosopher. You’ve been waiting to ask this question, haven’t you? A light switch, you might argue, acts as an agent, monitoring a data stream that is the position of the knife switch. And when that switch changes, it turns the light on or off, accordingly.

Similarly, a key on a keyboard watches its momentary switch and when it is depressed, helpfully sends a signal to a small processor on the keyboard to translate the press to an ASCII code that gets delivered to the software that accumulates these codes to do something with them. And it does it all on your behalf. So are keys agents? Are all state-based machines? Is it turtles all the way down?

Yes, if you want to be philosophical about it, that argument could be made. But I’m not sure how useful it is. A useful definition of agentive technology is less of a discrete and testable aspect of a given technology, and more of a productive way for product managers, designers, users, and citizens to think about this technology. For example, I can design a light switch when I think of it as a product, subject to industrial design decisions. But I can design a better light switch when I think of it as a problem that can be solved either manually with a switch or agentively with a motion detector or a camera with sophisticated image processing behind it. And that’s where the real power of the concept comes from. Because as we continue to evolve this skin of technology that increasingly covers both our biology and the world, we don’t want it to add to people’s burdens. We want to alleviate them and empower people to get done what needs to be done, even if we don’t want to do it. And for that, we need agents.

To bring this working definition home, let me end this section by forwarding some practical questions you can ask of a given user task that recurs with some predictability. If the answer to all these is yes, then you should probably employ an agentive solution.

• Can the user reasonably delegate tasks off to another? Students learning a language cannot hand that task to an agent and expect to acquire the skill. Similarly, I cannot send an agent to the gym in the hopes of building up muscle. Ethically, I should not accept a paycheck to perform a task that I then secretly hand off to an agent to do it for me.

• Can the trigger for the task be reliably handled by a computer? If, for example, the triggering event is a question of subjective judgment, then a person should handle initiation and most probably execution of the task.

• Does the user have a need for focused attention on some aspect of its performance? If not, why bother the user?

• Can the task be reliably performed with no user input, including preferences and goals? If it can, then why bother the user with it at all?

Recap: Agents Are Persistent, Background Assistants

Far from being a one-off invention in the form of the thermostat, agentive technologies are appearing all around us, for many long-standing human problems. We can see them if we train ourselves to understand how they’re different.

They are

• Software that persists.

• Watching a data stream (or many) for triggers.

• Performing a task for a user according to their goals and preferences.

They are not

• Tech that assists a user with the performance of a task. That’s assistive tech.

• Conversational “agents,” which are properly thought of as assistants.

• Robots, the software for which is tightly coupled to the hardware. An agent may embody a robot, and a robot may operate as an agent.

• Automation, in which the human is incidental or minimized.

They are different in that

• A valet is the model.

• Design focuses on easy setup and informative touchpoints.

• When it’s working, it’s most often out of sight.

• Touchpoints require conscious attention and consideration.

• The goals of touchpoints are information, course correction, and helping the agent keep on track.