Loren, Actually, the lack of automatic control is the Star Trek universe is a crucial aspect of the story line. In one of the TOS episodes, the enterprise is refitted with a new-fangled AI controler. And it goes haywire and kills a bunch of people.
As a result, all the core technology in Next Generation was designed to include a human factor that prevents it from going nuts. Which is still a common theme anyway. In Deep Space Nine and later Voyager, more and more automatic technology seems in, finally with the holographic doctor in Voyager. You'll also notice that transporter technology on voyager is much faster and what you see them doing in the transporter room is merely the residual swoop motion telling it to do the transport now. All the rest is automatic, or directed through other means. My question was always more practical. How do the people on the enterprise know which 3 to beam up? I very-much want to see more conversational interfaces. The computer is doing tasks the user doesn't want to do, and in many situations, treating the computer like another person is advantageous in getting your point across. So long as the computer is subservient and polite, it would work for it to ask for help as if it is a person. I can see complicated server software working like this, where it merely alerts the sysadmin to problems, perhaps with a log, and also asks direct questions, and offers up as much helpful information as it can. The sysadmin won't be torn away from their terminal, they will just have a few other valuable screens and an IM-style window to the man on the inside. Natural language processing could be helpful, but isn't explicitly needed. You can present much more complicated information and tools this way, and if done right, the computer can guide the user to where problems most likely are. And as AI advances, be able to solve many problems on its own, perhaps even learning from the user and applying what it learns automatically, or perhaps with a permission step the first few times so it knows it got it right. This also has the wonderful side effect of making the computer seem to work for the user, rather than now, where most software seems to force the user to work for it. Will . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=34500 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
