Computer Human Interaction

Over the weekend I saw Her and Computer chess, very different films about technology that were delivered in very different ways, but there were several similar threads running in them that got me thinking, these similarities were…

They ended up not being about what I was expecting and (more seriously), they were about the interactions of computers with humans, albeit at very different ends of the spectrum.

At one end, the amateur made Computer Chess dealt with the early days of computers interacting with humans (taking place in the 70s), in the film the programers are seen playing out the moves that the computer programs suggested, with the computers effectively playing ‘each other’. The concept of the computer playing a human is still seen as a crazy idea and the computer winning, even crazier. In fact, one of the plot twists is that a particular chess program, actually performs better against an ‘unpredictable’ human instead of a 'predictable' computer.

At the complete other end of this is Her, a film that I equally loved and/or hated depending if it was satirical or not. In Her, most are seen in almost completely subversive relationships with their technology, entrusting just about everything to them. It was a reality that wasn’t too far in the future from our own, but the scariest thing about it was how self absorbed everyone was, even away from their technology, all they did was talk about themselves and their problems. Again, I’m not sure if this was intentional satire or just an americanisation, but it showed just how comfortable people were with having their technology interact with them.

This got me thinking about ‘Computer Human Interaction’ as opposed to the more traditional ‘Human Computer Interaction’. Of course, for as long as we’ve been interacting with computers they’ve been interacting with us,  but as we have more services and products like Siri or Google now that pre-empt us and often are the initiator of an interaction, we need to think about new paradigms for those interactions that are helpful, but not creepy.

Interesting times.