Thomas Quillinan: Human beings have to adapt

Quillinan, when asked abut his association with witnessing, makes the distinction between looking and seeing. Seeing refers to having concentrated attention where looking refers to a more general perception of only the barest details of an environment.

If you are looking around in a crowd, you often just see the different heights in the crowd. However, when looking around people seem to pick out familiarities and recognize for example a friend in a crowd. ‘Seeing’ a crowd may involve focusing on each person’s face and identifying how many women and men there are for example. When people look at a computer this distinction is important, argues Quillinan. Often people are looking at a computer but they are not really seeing what they see. Also, even more then seeing one needs understanding when interacting with a computer, Quillinan argues. Human-computer interaction, human interface design is very important for this reason. To understand what the difference is between what one person sees and another person sees is a particular problem for engineers and people who are designing systems. A lot of times when people are building computer systems, they are building it in the way they think it should be done. Even if it is a large organisation and there are defined guidelines for doing things, there is often an institutional memory about how things should be done. This is usually not intuitive for somebody who’s coming at this for the first time.

Realizing the impact computers and systems have, the question that arises is whether, and if so in what ways, computers are intelligent.

There are many standard definitions for intelligence. For example that intelligence reproduces or that intelligence self preserves. Those for example computers don’t do. Quillian argues that computers are not alive, and therefore they can’t be intelligent, not in the traditional sense.
Also the requirement that was formulated in the interview with Sunil Abraham, that systems to be participants in human communities should be capable to self destruct, requires intelligence according to Quillinan. To him computers are very interesting toys and tools, which can do an awful lot of useful things. They are not intelligent though.

Instead of having the computer adapt to the person, the person is supposed to adapt to the computer. People have different ways of communicating with a computer, but the computer has only one way of communicating with the user.

Instead of both adapting as in two people communicating, who even if they don’t speak the same language use certain universally accepted truths about communication regardless of the language that they speak, computers don’t have that ability; they don’t have the ability to adapt to any user at all. When people tune their presence to systems they have to train them selves into communicating in a way that the computer wants them to communicate. A person is forced to change, states Quillinan, that’s the only way it can be done. Because systems have a lot of executing power, things only get worse according to Quillinan. Often times people will blindly do, what the computer tells them to do. And regardless whether it makes sense or not, they still follow it. A classic example is people who blindly follow their GPS-units to narrow footpaths because the GPS unit said to go there. People seem to suspend their own judgement. In crisis situations the trust in the computer only seems to ameliorate, as Quillinan finds in his research on crisis management.

The adaptation of human beings to computers can be understood as a result from the ‘master and slave’ model, which defined the design of computers and systems since the early days.

They have been designed to slowly take over the position of the masters, and eliminating the slaves, by developing higher and higher levels of thought needed to interact with them. This can be changed, but how is very difficult. It would require a complete change in the mindset of how we use computers. Quillinan thinks out loud when he suggests that asking them for advise maybe, and then making your decision as a human being, would already create different systems. This would seriously challenge the current model in which on the basis of input of data and having something operating on that data, the result is taken as ‘gospel’, as Quillinan formulates it.

Current computers and systems do not have the ability to negotiate with a human being about what is a good idea or not. To program such negotiation with a human is very difficult because all people mean different things when they say something. You have to be able to negotiate what you mean, the terms of reference with the computer. And then it has to have some sort of training so it understands what you mean by things, and Quillinan illustrates, “You can’t say well, I want this to be sparkly instead of a single colour”. Today computers are good at competitive tasks without boredom, which humans are really bad at. And they will do the same thing hundreds of millions times if you ask them to without complaining. Humans are good at higher level thought; solving a problem in an a-symmetric manner. Computers can only do what you tell them to do. Quillinan agrees that they have become masters to a certain degree, but the flipside is that they are also our slaves. They do the really ugly tasks that we don’t want to do.

The way things have changed over time is dramatic. In the way things are computed we follow a model of things just happening in the order we specify and that’s how most computers run. But there are alternatives, things like, instead of making things happen in order, we have some sort of logic based thinking where you backtrack trough the information you have and then you figure out what happens next. That’s an alternative way of computing. And while such computers exist they’re not very popular. The physical production of computers, it’s all emulated on sequential and parallel manner and that’s in some ways more logical, because what you’re doing in such a logic based approach is that you’re forcing the computer to behave the way the human wants. Still people are very active in researching other models of designing systems, but overwhelmingly people have chosen to follow the imperative model and do things in that way.

The reason that we use the imperative model is a result of being mostly funded by the military but also has to do with how cheap it was to produce components. And those components went out and therefore, in fact it is - I wouldn’t say Bill Gates’ fault - but it’s the success of companies like Microsoft and IBM in producing cheap computers, this model is there. It is much more expensive to produce other sorts of computers now, Quillinan explains.

Asked to comment on the rhythms, frames, loops and organisation of time in machines and between people in communities, Quillinan emphasizes that
scale is the most important difference between those two.

When asked about the interaction of rhythms between humans and systems Quillinan emphasizes that humans operate on a completely different rhythm to computers.

Human beings are very irregular, even though they have certain regular intervals as well. If these rhythms meet either human beings are forced to warp to computer rhythm or computers have to become more intelligent and this would involve that they would be capable to find out how the human being is feeling.
Nevejan finds it interesting he uses ‘feeling’ as factor of distinction for intelligence, because in presence the feeling is very important because it helps you stay away from pain towards homeostasis; it helps you move towards well being. The sense of presence is the sense of survival in which feelings and emotions and literal sensations are key informants.

One of the major advantages computers give us is the lack of having to be in one place. And especially with the access to the Internet, one can be pretty much anywhere in the world and still interact by way of computer.

It is one of the joys of computers to have this lack of place, which defines what you will do based on where you are, Quillinan finds.
Normally when you are interacting with computers you are using a keyboard and you are looking at a screen and this configuration defines what sort of inputs and outputs you can receive. People, who are designing these systems, utilize this habitual knowledge to design place in computers and how computers talk to you. But in a kind of a wider aspect, how one feels when using computers, depends on the place you are physically in. If you’re sitting at a beach typing on your laptop Quillinan imagines “people to feel much happier because they are in a happier place. Where as if they are in a dungeon, with water dripping down their neck, it is a little bit less”.

Because of their scale and speed, computers and systems have changed important concepts of space, of speed, of connection, of impact. Computers have changed people’s perception of the world and the effect of their actions is really profound.

Quillinan agrees, but also emphasizes that at core he is an engineer and to him computers and systems are tools and the creativity behind computers he understands as being human-inspired. The tools themselves he never considered to be beautiful or creative at all.
Nevejan argues that the input of data and the processes they do, seem to be of a different category than the impact their outcomes have. Quillinan agrees that computers do change people, but interacting with your computer often times means interacting with other people. Especially in social networking interaction with computers is actually influenced by interaction with other people. In that regard they’re more than just tools; they do have some impact in your life. If it were just a dumb terminal you were entering data into to do something and return result, nothing really changes, one just uses it to do something very quickly. Quillinan supposes that the difference between what he means by tool and what Nevejan means by computer, is that Nevejan focuses on how computers change human beings, where Quillinan sees a computer as a facility, which allows human beings to change by interaction with other people.

In relations the witnessing and the recognizing of the other is very important. Computers facilitate a lot of relations, argues Quillinan, but it depends on what you’re using your computer for.

There are two different ways of having relations when using the computer: with people one does know and anonymously, with people one does not know. If you are using it on a professional basis, people know who you are. You tend to format your communication in that sort of manner, you tend to be a bit more formal, and you tend to be a bit more restrictive in what you say. Where as if you are just commenting anonymously on the Internet, you can pretty much say what you want, whether it’s nasty, or obnoxious or not.
Anonymity gives you the ability to say things for example in a political sense, says Quillinan, that he would never say if someone knew who he was. Quillinan does not like it that strangers know his views in certain things and in an anonymous fashion you can have an influence on what other people think, which he personally finds very interesting. In computer networks, when people don’t have to interact ever again with that person, they are truly cruel, and they are really nasty. Where as when they are in person they tend to tone down their real feelings. There is not as much violent hatred in real life as on the Internet for example. How communication between people is formatted not only depends on computers and systems like the Internet, but also depends very much on how people relate to each other and how you communicate with other people through computers is very different from how you communicate in person.

Quillinan agrees that one can describe computers and systems as formatting tools of human presence. The interaction, the formatting, it tends to be depended on the application, he argues.

If you’re just trying to communicate in one way, versus two way communication, then a big screen with data in a very clear organized fashion is fine. Where as you want to have interaction you have to have a different sort of set-up. Other aspects of formatting, according to Quillinan, are scale, impact and how many interactions one actually wants to have. On the one hand a person’s impact on the world is larger on the Internet, you have much more ability to reach people in many more places. But it is also smaller, because it’s one voice among billions rather than thousands in a big speech, for example.

When designing interaction between human beings and computers, certain values are important. To Quillinan pleasing the eye is a very important value: in the user interface, the ability to look at something and feel comfortable with the colours, the styles, is very important. The original computers interacted by flashing lights at you and now they allow you to feel more comfortable with what’s going on. They do this by emulating something physical, representing physical things like folders and a desktop to make interaction more smooth. Other values like transparency and identity for example, computers do not have. As stated before, for Quillinan it are tools that facilitate communication and relations.

Quillinan is working on a use case of crisis-management for a European funded project. They are modelling crisis as it happens. For example, if an area of the Netherlands is flooded, certain things have to happen towards resolving this crisis and this involves interaction between people and computers in fact.

They are developing a model of crisis-management and using that to simulate different disasters to see how the overall plans that are in place, can be adapted to reflect these. Whether these plans are good enough, or whether they need to be modified to reflect this sort of crisis. The most basic task of crisis management is to save lives. You don’t care about anything else until all the lives have been saved or as any as possible. Once the lives are saved, you want to prevent any more property being damaged. And after that, it is to return things to normal.

In the simulation models Quillinan is working on official lines are the starting point of design. Both political realities as well as personal complexities, like the hysteria of the women who thought her backyard was flooding, are not taken into account. Computers do things very fast, but they’re not fast enough ‘to simulate the entire world in high-speed’, as Quillinan formulates it. They have to work with subsets: they are modelling the overall organisational model, looking at the crisis-coordinators of the Netherlands and how they direct orders to the organisations beneath them, the police organisation or the fire organisation. The simulations want to influence overall policy changes rather than ‘go to this street, put out the fire in that house, evacuate people first of course’

Witnessing is one of the issues in crisis management. In a crisis different people witness the same thing in very different ways, and one person will say, ‘there is a major flood in my street’, while another persons says, ‘oh it’s not that bad, it is puddle, it will go down’.

So both people call the emergency services and who do you believe? And where is that input taken and how is it dealt with? This is a huge problem. One solution is to base this on reputation: if a policeman calls, and says there’s a serious flood in the neighbourhood, it tends to be taken more seriously than when a random citizen calls saying ‘there is a huge flood in my backyard’.

Perception of the outcome of a disaster is a second issue in crisis management. Quillinan elaborates on several examples he knows. For example schools officially are not evacuated by the state anymore. So if your children are at school you’re expected to go and get them. But people have very strong perceptions of children. If you let a school flood and all the children die, that would be very bad. And you can imagine the government failing and falling because of that. Ethical positions in crisis management seem to be mostly defined by political perception, Quillinan finds. Even though the ethical position might be to save as many people as possible, it’s actually to save as many of the right people as possible. But defining who is worth saving or not is a very dangerous thing to do.

One of the biggest problems in most crisis has been lack of understanding, lack of knowledge of what’s happened in the past. Poor decision making that’s happening today, has happened before.

The one thing that systems can contribute in the first place is knowledge, according to Quillinan. By analysing all the different scenarios that have happened, or trying to create those, it is possible to ask the system, ‘this number of schools have been flooded, how many people do we need to save all those children?’ and that’s the sort of thing computers are very good at. The identity of systems in crisis management is to be knowledge repositories. They have a lot of knowledge about what has happened in the past and what is happening now and can correlate between the two of them.

The other task is of course to facilitate communication. The advantage of dealing with organisations such as the police department, fire department, is that they have a very rigid hierarchy. This means that you can direct order and you have people who have a strategic overview. You have an institution of knowledge of where the different units are located, where to you can direct your resources.
Not only hierarchal information is in the focus of attention of Quillinan and colleagues, but also input from members of the public. This tends to be more chaotic and difficult to coordinate. When studying the post mortems of previous disasters, Quillinan finds that often what went wrong is that people didn’t notice something that was important. So they didn’t notice that this particular plane didn’t have enough fuel in it because a meter was broken. The cause is never this huge problem, it always tends to be very small.
Another issue is that in crisis people will tend to do what the computer tells them to do. They seem to have more trust in a computer when there is a crisis taking place; even more so than normal, thinking ‘it knows something that I don’t’, as Quillinan states it.

Asked about witnessed presence in systems, middleware or applications, Quillinan finds that the difference between applications and infrastructures is dramatic. Even though he claims that computers are tools, at the application level they have to deal with humans.

There is a certain compromise made to deal with humans. The easiest way to get a lot of information is to fill it out a text form, one line after another so the computer can deal with it efficiently. But that doesn’t allow humans to use it. On the infrastructure level, computers talk to computers most of the time, so the communication tends to be much more efficient. But also in infrastructure there are institutional, human based constraints put up in computers, they can’t just discover how they talk to each other. Computers witness other computers extremely primitive; they recognize that they’re there or not there. A computer doesn’t change because it’s dealing with an HP computer, instead of a DELL computer. It doesn’t make any difference to it; it doesn’t have any feelings; computers don’t have feelings; human beings have feelings.

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