Things That Make Us Smart Defending Human Attributes In The Age Of The Machine Donald A. Norman by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub

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DISTRIBUTED COGNITION

lished by the physical environment, where the structures can often act as a distributed intelligence, taking some of the memory and computational burden off the human. To give one example: Lin- guists are continually worried about the amount of ambiguity that exists within language. A huge amount of scientific research has gone into developing schemes for understanding and trying to mini- mize this ambiguity. But the ambiguity almost always results from the analysis of single, isolated sentences: in real situations, where several interacting people deal with real events, the sentences usu- ally have only one meaningful interpretation. Actually, even when communications are ambiguous, they are usually not perceived as such by either speaker or listener, even though both may have differ- ent interpretations of the meaning. It is this lack of perception of ambiguity that is important, and it derives from the communicative, social nature of language, something that is entirely missed when the language is studied as isolated, "simplified" printed sentences or utterances, completely abstracted from the real, social setting. Information in the world can be thought of as a kind of store- house of data. This has many advantages. The world remembers things for us, just by being there. When we need a particular piece of information, we simply look around, and there it is. Do I need to repair my car? I don't have to remember the exact shape of the part, because when the time comes for me to do the task, the shape is there in front of me. This eases the burden on initial data collection, eases the requirements on learning and memory, and avoids the need for complex indexing or retrieval schemes. Moreover, it guar- antees that the values so obtained will be the most timely available at the moment of need. Of course, it is important to plan ahead, but postponing deci- sions until the point of action can simplify the thought processes: Many alternatives that would have had to be thought of ahead of time will turn out not to be relevant. Moreover, the physical struc- tures available in the world can then guide the selection of relevant choices. Approaches to reasoning and planning that rely heavily upon thought, and therefore internal information, run into fundamental problems:

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