There's a (perhaps apocryphal) story about Minsky and Engelbart: Minsky proudly proclaimed, "We're going to make machines intelligent! We're going to make them walk and talk! We're going to make them conscious!" Engelbart shot back, "You're going to do that for computers? Well, what are you going to do for people?"

https://books.google.nl/books?id=uNDW_dQ_dlAC&pg=PA167&lpg=P...

Ben Shneiderman's 1993 IEEE Software article, "Beyond Intelligent Machines: Just do it!" was prompted by discussion between Mark Weiser (father of Ubiquitous Computing) and Bill Hefley, and argues that users want a sense of direct and immediate control over computers that differs from how they interact with people.

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/trs/93-03/93-03.html

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WHY NOT INTELLIGENT? I am opposed to labeling computers as "intelligent" for several reasons. First, such a classification limits the imagination. We should have much greater ambition than to make a computer behave like an intelligent butler or other human agent. Computer-supported cooperative work, hypertext/hypermedia, multimedia, information visualization, and virtual reality are powerful technologies that enable human users to accomplish tasks that no human has ever done. If we describe computers in human terms, we run the risk of limiting our ambition and creativity in the design of future computer capabilities. In the same way that most of us have learned to use terminology not specific to any gender, we should now learn not to limit designers of computers with the tag "intelligent" or "smart."

Second, the qualities of predictability and control are desirable. If machines are intelligent or adaptive, they may have less of these qualities. Usability studies at the University of Maryland show that users want the feelings of mastery, competence, and understanding that come from a predictable and controllable interface. Most users seek a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, not the sense that some intelligent machine magically did their job for them.

Another reason I'm concerned about this label is that it limits or even eliminates human responsibility. I am concerned that if designers are successful in convincing the users that computers are intelligent, then the users will have a reduced sense of responsibility for failures. The tendency to blame the machine is already widespread and I think we will be on dangerous ground if we encourage this trend. As part of my work, I collect newspapers articles about computers, some of which bear the headlines "Victims of Computer Error Go Hungry," "IRS Computers Err on Refund Reports," and "Computers That 'Hear' Taking Jobs" -- all of which seem to absolve human operators by implicating the machine.

Finally, I have a basic philosophical objection to the "intelligent" label. Machines are not people, nor can they ever become so. For me, computers have no more intelligence than a wooden pencil. If you confuse the way you treat machines with the way you treat people, you may end up treating people like machines, which devalues human emotional experiences, creativity, individuality, and relationships of trust. I know that many of my colleagues are quite happy to call machines intelligent and knowledgeable, but I prefer to treat and think about machines in very different ways from the way I treat and think about people.

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+ Natural-language interaction seems clumsy and slow compared to direct manipulation and information-visualization methods that use rapid, high-resolution, color displays with pointing devices. Lotus HAL is gone, Artificial Intelligence Corp.'s Intellect hangs on but is not catching on. Although there are some interesting directions for tools that support human work through natural-language processing (aiding human translators, parsing texts, and generating reports from structured databases) this is different from natural-language interaction.

+ Speech I/O in talking cars and vending machines has not flourished. Voice recognition is fine for handicapped users and special situations, but doesn't seem to be viable for widespread use in office, home, or school settings. Our recent studies suggest that speech I/O has a greater interference with short term and working memory than hand-eye coordination for menu selection by mouse. Voice store and forward, phone-based information retrieval, and voice annotation have great potential but these are not intelligent applications.

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