Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age Of the Machine [Paperback]

Much of the research he reviewed was rather old, even at the time of publication, and most of the analysis of them elaborated too much, without really being that trenchant. I found myself skipping ahead about halfway through the book when I knew the point of a chapter after a page or two, and didn't find any surprises along the way.

A good "gee-whiz" book for those new to cognitive psych or human factors, but a bit of a let-down for the specialist.

But a lot of what is covered is not only known but well-known. Who thinks that Big Blue is actually "thinking" in his various chess tournaments? Norman talks endlessly about misconceptions concerning the computer world, beliefs held (he thinks) by a sizeable number of intelligent people. It is because the PC so aptly simulates human behavior that we hold such views in the first place.

And while such subjects as art, music, learning, ritual, satire, and recognition of such subjective qualities as good, bad, beautiful, ugly, and appropriate are today solely human qualities, who knows at what point in the future that humans may program their machines to simulate some or all of the above?
A majority of the book is spent explaining why this cannot happen.

A discussion of the difference in human associative brains and the mechanicsm of machine computation has been noted numerous times before. In fact, it makes perfect sense that the two shall never meet. Human thought is based on sensory perception with the real world - something a machine cannot partake in at the present. We require vision, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling in order to formulate a world view. Until machines can develop a mechanism for simulating these experiences, we will experience only what smartly programmed machines are told to do.

Norman contends that what machines are best at are memorization and calculation, and that part of our fears about them come from comparing ourselves mentally to computers with regard to these dimensions. This is a fundamentally flawed way to think about the relationships between humans and computers.

He encourages us, instead, to optimize the powerful potential of computation in order to liberate ourselves for more important ends, such as the time and capacity for deep reflective thought. In this way, and in other ways, he advocates for a human-centered approach to technology.

Humans make tools and build objects, or artifacts; and the artifacts we build help to make us smart. They remind us of important things and when designed well help us accomplish important things and provide "affordances" for desired behaviors and outcomes.

We need to develop better and keener senses of design. With regard to computers, the more we can unload, the more conceptual knowledge that we can convert into "experiential" knowledge through the use of such things as powerful computer-based data representations, the more we will free ourselves for higher order reflective thought and human judgment.

Norman convincingly argues that rather than locking ourselves in a battle of turf with machines, we should take advantage of the ways machines, like other human-designed objects, can, indeed, help to make us smart.