Beyond Intelligent Machines: Just Do It (1993) (cs.umd.edu)

pdf of the original magazine article: https://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/papers/Shneiderman1993Beyond.pdf

Thanks for sharing. This is awesome-

I love this article! I worked with Ben Shneiderman at HCIL, and when he sent me a copy of this article to review, I was inspired by the "Dynamic Queries" of his "Dynamic Home Finder" demo, to implement something like that for SimCity (the Frob-O-Matic window). [Video and transcript below.]

Here are some of the main points of his article:

Don't label machines as "intelligent".

It limits the imagination. We should have greater ambitions.

Enable humans to accomplish tasks that weren't before possible, instead of trying to enable machines to accomplish tasks people can already do.

Predictability and control are desirable qualities. Give users the feeling of mastery, competence, and understanding, sense of accomplishment.

The "intelligent machine" label limits or even eliminates human responsibility.

If you treat machines like people, you're likely to end up treating people like machines.

Ben Shneiderman called his lab HCIL instead of CHIL, to explicitly put Humans before Computers.

Here's his description of "Dynamic Queries" and the "Dynamic Home Finder":

>Dynamic Queries. These animations let you rapidly adjust query parameters and immediately display updated result sets, which makes them very effective when a visual environment like a map, calendar, or schematic diagram is available. The immediate display of results lets users more easily develop intuitions, discover patterns, spot trends, find exceptions, and see anomalies.

>Figure 2 shows a screen from Dynamic HomeFinder, a prototype interface for real-estate agents that uses dynamic queries, written by Christopher Williamson of UM. Users can adjust the cost, number of bedrooms, and location of the A and B markers, among other characteristics, and points of light appear on a map to indicate a home that matches their specifications. Clicking on a point of light brings up a home description or image.

>Users of Dynamic HomeFinder can execute up to 100 queries per second (rather than one query per 100 seconds as is typical in a database query language), producing a revealing animated view of where high- or low-price homes are found-and there are no syntax errors.

>Our empirical study of 18 users showed Dynamic HomeFinder to be more effective than a natural-language interface using Q&A from Symantec (C. WIlliamson and B. Shneiderman, The Dynamic HomeFinder: Evaluating Dynamic Queries in a Real-Estate Information Exploration System," Proc. SIG Information Retrieval, ACM Press, 1992, pp. 338-346).

https://www.cs.umd.edu/users/ben/papers/Williamson1992dynami...

That inspired me to implement a version of the "Dynamic Home Finder" in SimCity:

Multi Player SimCityNet for X11 on Linux (Dynamic Home Finder / Frob-O-Matic demo at 3:35).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA&t=3m35s

Transcript:

Here's an interesting thing inspired by Ben Shneiderman.

We can look at the ... This is the "Dynamic Zone Filter".

So we are going to set this to be dynamic.

Now it's going to show all the zones, but it's not going to show the ones that don't pass this filter.

So this filter is currently all the way open.

Now we're going to change population density.

This is a two-ended slider.

This is the segment of the population density, from zero to 81.

So everything else will disappear.

Say I'm looking for a home. I want low population density. But I want high rate of growth.

And now, these are the places that have low population density and high rate of growth.

And then you can just interactivally ... So each of these filters out some of the places.

So you can look at ... I don't want high traffic density. I d...

Thanks Don for that mention of the old paper, which is still on the right track. My new paper appeared on line Friday and will be temporarily freely accessible:

> Shneiderman, Ben (2020). Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence: Reliable, Safe & Trustworthy, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction,36, 6 (Published Online March 27, 2020). https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2020.1741118

I have spent a year developing these ideas, but the evolution was dramatic, based on thoughtful feedback from the 25+ people mentioned in the Acknowledgements. Speaking at U-W, Stanford, UBC, NSF & ONR and elsewhere helped repeatedly reshape my arguments. All that commentary added to the journal editors’ confidence that this was an important paper, so they fast tracked reviews & production and gave it priority in the publication queue. Please send this link around to your colleagues, where appropriate.

Feedback welcome... Stay healthy... Ben