Computational Limits to Human Thinking in a Society

Computational Limits to Human Thinking in a Society With Too Much Information And Too Little Time Raj Reddy Carnegie Mellon University October 16, 2020 Talk Presented at 2020 Global AI Conference, Hangzhou, China 1

Too Much Information and Too Little Time • Drowning In Too Much Information and Too Little Time • Severely lacking tools to cope with the problem • Not a new problem, but the scale of the data and data rate has changed dramatically • As early as 1969, Simon discussed the problem of “Wealth of Information and Scarcity of Attention” • in Computers, Communications and Public Interest, Martin Greenberger 1971 • Spawned the Field of “Attention Economics” • White House Analogy • Need-to-Know Principle • Re-structure information: Organize, Summarize and Hyperlink • Overview, Zoom, Filter and Details on Demand • Simon on Reading Newspapers: “It is a complete waste of time”

Principles of Information Overload • Bounded Rationality and Satisficing • When Faced with Information Overload, People Settle for Good Enough Solutions in Preference to Optimal Solutions • When human thinking capabilities are overloaded, People use strategies and tactics of “optimal-least-computation” • “Optimal-least-computation” is the study of approximate algorithms to find the best possible solution given limited memory capacity, limited time, or limited bandwidth • Wealth of Information and Scarcity of Attention • When faced with too much information and too little time, Embrace the Need-to-Know-Principle, by creating • Summarization Tools • Information Structuring Tools • Use Techniques of Journalism and Cinematography • Overview, Zoom, Filter and Details on Demand (Hyperlink the Details) • Autocomplete Actions • Non Intrusive Notifications

Enabling Human Strengths • WIMPy to SILKy Interfaces • Speech, Image, Language and Knowledge • Forgiving Interfaces: Tolerate error and ambiguity • “You Bet” --- “Did That Mean Yes? ” • Learning from Experience: Incremental nonintrusive knowledge acquisition • “Darn” --- “Would you Care to Define It? ” • Intelligent Help, Advice and Tutoring • “ Enthusiasm Detected --- Care to View Large Screen? ” • Intelligent Agents: Task Execution • “Get me Sam Gallagher, Try Every Number”

Overcoming Human Limitations • To Err is Human • Lead to Catastrophic loss of data (“I didn’t mean to do that”) and Unanticipated side-effects “What happened? ” • Caused by Sensory, Cognitive and Motor overload • “Like being in a traffic jam” • Current solutions: Partial Undo and ^C • Future Options: Unlimited Undo and Anytime Abort • To Forget is Human • A non-expert occasional user can’t be expected to remember the details • Forgetting is caused by the loss of indexing structure • Current solutions: Recognition vs. recall: Menus and Online manuals • Future Options: Intelligent Help “How do I” and “What if” Multi-media documentation (Why not You. Tube Model? )

Overcoming Human Limitations • To Be Impatient is Human • Waiting time to get the answer in interactive problem solving • Long Start-up and Shutdown Times • Network operations: Unpredictable retrieval and browsing times • Current solutions: Hour glasses, Wheels and Progress Bars • No idea how long it will take • Future Options: Updates in the background, Learn from experience, Look ahead retrieval and computation • To Favor Least Effort is Human • Most people use a minimal subset of functionality in Word, Power. Point, etc. • Most people avoid tasks requiring too much cognitive effort e. g. PGP (too much work) and FTP (too complex) • Causes: Principle of Least Effort • Future Options: Autocomplete and Cognition Amplifiers

Cognition Amplifiers and Guardian Angels • Cognition Amplifiers and Guardian Angels are two families of • intelligent Agents that help with scarcity of attention problem A Cognition Amplifier is a Personal Enduring Autonomic Intelligent Agent that anticipates what you want to do and helps you to do it with less effort • Buying and selling: Transact with multiple providers • Email: Filter spam, understand respond to actionable email • News: Based on topic preferences, novelty, collaborative filtering • Banking: Monitor bank account, Credit Cards, Pay Bills • Travel: Flights, hotel, schedule disruptions, cancellations • A Guardian Angel is a Personal Enduring Autonomic Intelligent Agent that Discovers And Warns You About Unanticipated Events That Could Impact Your Safety, Security, and Happiness • Just-in-Time Warnings: Hurricanes, Tornados, Tsunami, Earthquakes, Flooding, Extreme Weather • Accident Alerts and Rerouting; Transport Strikes • Scarcity of Essential Resources: Food, Energy, Water etc. 7

The Digital Bill of Rights • Every person on the planet with a smart phone (literate and nonliterate alike) will be able to access and benefit from Intelligent Agents called Cognition Amplifiers. • Non-intrusive Cognition Amplifiers learn with experience and minimize the human effort in performing the daily tasks by • Getting the right information • e. g. search engines • To the right people • e. g. categorizing, routing • At the right time • e. g. just-in-time (task modeling, planning) • In the right language • e. g. machine translation • In the right medium • e. g. using speech for language divide and literacy divide • With the right level of detail (granularity) • e. g. summarization 8

Conclusion • In Designing Systems, Pay Attention to Human Strengths, Limitations, Needs, and Egos • NEVER Intrusive • • Ads on the right or bottom, no animation Abolish Dialog Boxes - Replace with Notifications! Replace “Live Tiles” with WIWTBDIWC Glasses and Watches To Invisible Wearables • Scarcity of Attention Tools for Minimization of Human Effort • Use Cogs Autocomplete Tasks, not Just Text • Use Gats to Help with Unpredictable Events • Avoid Redesigns that Require Re-Learning • Ribbons in Word • Win 7 to Win 8 • $10 Rule: Are You Willing to Pay Every Customer $10 Every Time You Radically Change Look And Feel Of Your Software Product? • One Size Fits All Software Personalized Modular Software • Personalize and Mass-customize everything