Intelligent Design?

Listen a this:

"In order to create intelligent user interaction, Tom is working on an intelligent interaction architecture that ensures that aspects of intelligence, such as context determination and interaction management, are understood by component technologies and applications. The goal for this architecture is to create an intelligent use interaction capability so that end users can accomplish their tasks with minimal yet powerful interactions. In Tom's vision, a user can delegate tasks to their computer systems and devices by stating general goals. For example, arranging a meting with a coworker will no longer require users to query the user's calendar and the coworker's calendar, and find an available conference room. Instead, the underlying intelligent interaction program will handle those details and only involve the user when needed."

That first sentence alone is a miracle of technological jargon, yet it's comprehensible, I think because it was written by a Brit. Their minds are clearer than ours. I'll address the reasons for that in another post.

Anyway, re the project referred to in the above pgh, it blows my mind that we're working so hard to save such small, unimportant amounts of time. In fact, it seems to me that arrangements like this don't save time at all -- the computers may choose the time and place for the people, but confirming it will have to be done by people, or rearranging it, and in any case even if "intelligent user interaction" gets so sophisticated that those things are done by the computer too, ultimately, the meeting has to be done by the people.

Which is the biggest shame. Who cares about scheduling? It's those meetings that should be done away with by sophisticated technologies. They're the biggest time wasters, not the moment when you go, 'How about Wednesday?'

This is all symptomatic of a trend to perfect aspects of life that aren't bad at all, while neglecting to address giant problems that are malfunctioning dreadfully, like food supply to poor countries, or the ubiquity of liars in government.

This is neither a funny nor mawkish post, but I wrote a good one yesterday and then hit a key and it disappeared. I was disheartened. I don't mind continuing in the overheated tone I started in but it actually was threatening my health to be that emotionally invested, so I'm scaling back a bit, I'm "bringing it down a notch."