ePortfolio Chunk 4

Amazon.ca recommends I check out the Columbo Mystery Movie Collection '91-'93.  I am pleased with this recommendation as I adore our dear lieutenant and look forward to adding it to my collection.  A week later, Amazon emails me another recommendation for the book, Nursing Care Plans: Nursing Care and Diagnosis.  This I find less appealing and I wonder why the company would suggest I purchase this text.

In The Design of Future Things, Norman suggests "the new kinds of intelligent machines...are autonomous or semiautonomous: they create their own assessments, make their own decisions.  They no longer need people to authorize their actions."  (p. 36).  I do not view the Amazon recommendation system as intelligent; it is simply based on a personal and collective browsing history and is essentially a monologue imposed through this website.  Amazon allows its users to manually modify recommendations, but it is unable to intuit these modifications on its own.  I do, however, see this type of recommendation system evolving toward a symbiotic relationship between humans and machines.  Norman uses the examples of elevator sensors and automobile stability controls to illustrate a movement toward this type of relationship.

Norman also reminds us of the constraints of deepening the relationship between humans and machines.  He argues that "the lack of common ground is a major cause of our inability to communicate with machines" (p. 50).  How can I communicate with Amazon?  Presently I have a keyboard and mouse as my input devices.  I can manually intervene and determine why Amazon recommends I purchase a nursing text (turns out a friend did some searching and changed the course of my search history).  How could the system determine this search pattern was anomalous without a common ground?  Norman says that humans "can learn from their past experiences and modify their behavior accordingly," however, "machines can barely learn" (p. 53).  Bridging the gap and creating common ground is therefore a considerable design challenge between connecting humans with machines.