Conversation with the machine

The way how machine communication is evolving is starting to change, more into a conversation with hints provided by the system to improve efficiency then a list of operations to execute one after the other. The machine initially started as a processor to receive a list of holes on paper, which would process inside the machine, with the output of another paper element that had values on them.

With the introduction of the desktop and the monitor, the way to use a program would be typically to prepare a file or a command with options on the command line and then hit Enter. The program would execute and do something, either print on screen or print on the printer.

The GUI in Windows and Apple in the 80's and 90's made this slightly more interactive, with generally the limitation that it did not have access to worldwide information immediately. The GUI could however look into databases or execute other processing whilst the user was active on the screen. This is a very important point.

The web applications in the 90's started to come up as well, whether intranet or internet. These applications would typically be a mixture of serverside script and client-side script for some simple validations. Now, the user would typically not have to install and maintain a binary on the client side, which facilitates a lot for the maintainer on the server side. Everybody could just log on and use the services without many problems.

In Web 1.0, HTML however, we would generally prepare a form or a screen that we only submit at the very end of our operations. In a way, you could say that we would have to know how the server would process the information, more or less, before we could efficiently use that screen. Will this ever change? I don't know yet, but it's possible.

With Web 2.0, the way how we interact with servers is slightly changing. Maybe it's HTTP technology or we haven't reached the immense bandwidth yet that is necessary, but I see slight trends in which our conversation with the server is getting more continuous (or approaching a continuous state).

For example the suggest box. The system in its entirety already goes off to the server after a couple of keystrokes and from there, it might all start to change the conversation. Maybe it will hide a couple of fields thereafter or it will allow new functionality to appear from there on.

The changes in this field are that we are becoming more integrated with information overall, but let the machine help us better to use the system (and ourselves as society) better and more efficient. This is the power of IT. It is quite interesting therefore to know how scalable continuous conversation systems are. The messages are typically quite small, but involve XML translations, bandwidth and a good deal of common sense architecture and timeout decisions.

So, the point is to show that initially, human computer interaction was quite basic and the human operating the machine had to know intricate details about the functioning of the program. Over the years this is changing, with MS-Word for example we could already more or less just use it as a rich typewriter. It probably can be made more efficient for example by letting the server find similar phrases in other books to avoid claims of plagiarism, to give a weird example.

So, a probably useful addition to how we interact with computers is that we allow the server to give us hints. Make it as if the computer is looking over our shoulder what we are doing and analyze our intent whilst we are interacting with it. Suggest improvements or more efficient work will let the machine teach us. A more powerful example is where the machine learns from the wisest users automatically and then makes the efficient suggestions to less efficient users of the system.

How can/will/should user-machine conversations evolve from this point onwards?