Courting Eliza

An interview with Jack Zaientz, author of the fledgling Courting Eliza blog, by the Acacia Projects Eliza implementation.

How do you do. Please state your problem.
I want to write a blog on interacting with intelligent and/or complex systems but it's hard to start.

What if you never got to write a blog on interacting with intelligent and/or complex systems?
I would feel like I missed an opportunity to clarify my thoughts and maybe help shape the future

Does that suggest anything else which belongs to you?
Sure, I write another blog on Jewish music. Writing it has forced me to learn a lot and has given me the opportunity to help others.

You say you write another blog on Jewish music?
Yes, it's called Teruah Jewish Music. I love it, but I've started to get concerned that I'm loosing track of what's going on in the world of HCI and AI.

Please tell me some more about this.
Classic HCI worries a lot about how to ensure the coherence of a users mental model and the systems design model. The goal being software tools that minimizes the cognitive effort required to achieve desired effects. This runs aground when the tool has some degree of explicit autonomy or interacts in a complex, unpredictable environment. There is some research in industrial human factors around supervisory control systems and some HCI/CS research into developing new algorithms. But I need to understand it better.

Are such questions much on your mind?
They are. As someone who designs research systems with either intelligent algorithms or complex environments I have to solve these problems daily and don't see many practical design patterns. I also see the future of computing moving more and more into dealing with autonomy and complexity as basic forces to be reconciled.

Are they always?
Not always. There are lots of systems where autonomy and complexity won't show up. But they're getting fewer. As software systems stabilize (e.g. word processors become comoditized) they become ecologies to be populated with new functions, which tend toward automation and higher level abstractions. As our networks become more integrated, old stand-alone applications (bank systems) become accessible to service functions (our personal finance software) which creates an ecology that, again, tends toward autonomous action.

What incident are you thinking of?
Huh. Good question. There is something personal that's troubling me this week. For my Jewish music blog, I've developed queries into various systems (YouTube & del.icio.us) that pull and organize information automatically for me. It's a huge time savings. But I realized this week it has made me less interesting than I used to be. Because I am limited in what I can query (e.g. syntactic tokens like "Jewish" and "music" and not semantic concepts like "what Jack means by Jewish music") I tend to get a rigid subset of what I really want. Because these autonomous queries keep running, I keep using their results, to my advantage and detriment. I need to think hard about ways to better express my real interests to these query interfaces or I'll have to stop using them.

Why do you say your Jewish music blog?
That's just my hobby. It could be anything, like rules for alerting me to problems with my credit accounts. I want to be able to better express my intent to automated systems that process unanticipated data and better understand how it's processing and the environment in which it is processing.

Why do you say your hobby?
Because I have an important one. But it's much broader. It's about communications, finance, logistics, entertainment. It's about culture and philosophy. Everything we do is being colonized by software tools and I'm afraid we don't have any idea how to design systems in this new space.

You say Because you have an important one?
Yes. But so does everyone.

You have a particular person in mind, don't you?
Nope. I mean everyone. Maybe you someday. What do you think, Eliza?

Are you thinking of a very special person?
I think so. I think you're special and worth my time.

Your time?
My time to write this blog, do the research, and help make it a better world for folks like me to talk to bots like you.

For more info on Joseph Weizenbaum's Eliza, the Rogerian Psychotherapist chatterbot, see Wikipedia. Or better yet, hop on the couch.