I don't like the GUI interface. Yes it has some advantages and is a big jump over the command line operating systems of many years ago. Yet hardware has advanced and the GUI doesn't handle the new 300GB hard drives very well, there are other apps - documentation search and management, for instance - that are appallingly bad.
What is needed is a complete re-think of microcomputer operations and their human interface(s).
you are the media you consume.
The one area where GUIs could be updated without too much pain is disk and file systems. Both Macs and PCs use file systems based on technology originally developed in the 60s.
Microsoft tried to develop a smart database FS, but failed spectacularly. I'm not sure if Apple has even tried. Time Machine is a brain-damaged version of what a smart database FS might be like, but it's still the same metaphor, not anything really new.
Finder, better known as Loser, and Windows Exploder are equally giant rotating balls of universal suckitude, IMV. It's unbelievable just how little both MS and Apple have developed these essential tools.
Then you're down to portability, robustness and document ownership. Solve that and paper will retreat some more.
The iPhone double-density display is quite nice. The much-rumoured tablet with the same resolution but more screen space would be interesting - although my Apple spies tell me there are cost and weight issues which make it an unlikely item, at least for a while.
The problem I see with the tablet is that if I'm going to carry it I'll bring the MacBook Air, and if I don't want the MBA I'll just bring the iPhone. The tablet would have to be cheap enough to get into my house as a replacement for Sam's iBook for light browsing/e-mail work. We don't strictly need two laptops and a desktop to get the heavier work done. We're not typical though.
Well - there are people who still prefer paper to PDFs ...
And who might THOSE Luddites be? Surely no one around here!
:-þ
:-0
Time Machine isn't an FS. It's a file versioning system with a pretty face on top.
What would the new magic GUI do? What problem would it solve? I still haven't seen one that's worth moving to.
What I want is the Star Trek® computer. From a hardware POV we're there. It's the damn software that's the problem and particularly the "Everything Is a Set" basis of the damn software. The CompSci people STILL haven't groked: any axiomatic, deductive, system capable of arithmetic contains True and False propositions that are unprovable from the axioms of that system. The implication for computers falls out: operations based on an axiomatic, deductive, system - ZF Set Theory - cannot be relied upon as they exist in the Modal Logic of: False - Duh? - True.
Let's look at "Duh?" for a second.
If a system cannot determine Truth or Falsity then it cannot successfully compute or 'decide' Sorities. Thus, things like Tipping Points, Mandelbrot Set escape, disambiguity of Natural Language utterances, bifurcation, and so on are inherently unresolvable, unsolvable. Second, that system cannot look for and apply ad-hoc association pathways (addressing) to new and existing data and Information. Thus, that system cannot Learn and without Learning it has to be taught or told each and every operation it undertakes. A mind-numbing, tedious, task a human has to do every single time and operation lies outside what has been predetermined and pre-programmed. To cap it all, even ordinary tasks inherent in these predetermined and pre-programmed have to be painstakingly initiated.
And it's all done in a way that violates human communication training and expectations.
It's madness.
Your approach won't necessarily be better. Unless teaching is networked and cumulative - in which case you've just invented the Brain that Ate Planet Earth - teaching won't necessarily be any simpler than programming. And if it's supposed to transferrable, reproducible, and capable of multiple instantiations - so that your home smart monster doesn't have to reinvent the world from scratch every time it crashes - it has to be reduced to a mechanical representation, which is tricky to do without some version of set theory.
Natural Language is unsolvable because it's unsolvable. Not even humans can do it. We tend not to notice, because it's fine to ask 'What did you mean by that?' But communication and semantics are inherently ambiguous, and a Different Model™ won't fix that, when humans don't always know what it is they're trying to say.
Actually it is solvable. Come to New Mexico and I'll show you.
It can be limited and solvable, but that's a different problem.
What does your system do with poetry or metaphorical content?
A cybernetic system doesn't have a Limbic System so "doing poetry" as a human would is impossible at the present. There's an intriguing avenue of approach that would combine a computationally weighted response of the word, tokens, and their association pathways to words, tokens, and combinations of words and tokens to words, tokens and combinations of words and tokens as part of the standard Comparative Progession Matrix© operations. Never had the time to explore it.
So I'm going to collapse discussion of "poetry" and "metaphorical" just to keep this comment within reasonable limits.
Metaphorical communication, it turns out, is a sub-group of a larger problem. Essentially processing this mode requires the same general operations as Input Validation. The utterance must be qualified as "Proper" - let me put it - and not an attempt to degrade the Information in the databases, an attempt to breach data security, and on on. Without getting too much into the technical details, we can assign the "Metaphorical" label to an utterance when there is a sufficient number of previous usages of the metaphor, the words and tokens comprising the metaphor as well as the (computationally derived) Semantics of the words and tokens making "sense¹" given the context of the utterance and some other post-input validation processing. Some of this latter can occur in Real Time. The rest has to be down during the 'wait time' between keystrokes or during 'down time' when the system is not being bombarded by user inputs.
The standard techniques for parsing poetry are, as you know, worthless. The Robert Frost couplet:
"And I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep."
has been projected [I can find the cite, if you care] to take well over 2,000 human-years to figure-out the meaning doing it "the old fashioned way." I can show you our system doing it in under two seconds.
But, again, it's not "poetry," for the reasons given above. Rather it is a cognitive representation of the poem. These are two different things, as I'm sure you're aware. Our Metaphor processing is, roughly, the same: it's not the "metaphor" as such, but the computationally derived cognitive representation of the metaphor. The system cannot "do" poetry or metaphor but it provides a damn good mimicry of so doing.
Turns out, this is Good Enough for most practical purposes. Most people don't "do" poetry either and metaphorical usage by humans is highly stereotyped and subject to strict limitations. (OK. Subject to some n-dimensional - where n is 1.585, in most cases - shadowing of the phenomenological as given by the final Interpretant comprising the proper significant effect of the Representamems resulting in a final Interpretant comprising the proper significant effect of a cybernetically derived and validated semantic Representamem OF the utterance." Ta-dah & whoopie.) These "strict limitations" are a necessary feature as well as an emergent property of Language. It's through semiotic, syntactical, and semantic Sorities humans overlap and it is only through these over-lappings that humans can communicate or 'range-in' to communicate. Same with a computer. As a last resort, our system will do what a human does ... ask "WTF are you on about?" (Tho' more politely. ;-) Limited testing indicates a human user accepts this and actually expects it. This fits the interface within the common mode of communication, it also provides a psychological benefit by making the computer seem less Other; makes the system more "human" thus less threatening ... oddly.
The second step, is to determine the where in various hard and virtual association pathways the tokens, words, and final Representamem of the utterance lie. Without getting into details, the result is a human retrievable "emotive sense" of the metaphor as vectored through the association pathways and other final and intermediate tokens, words, and final Representamems it encounters along the way. And their pathways and so, recursively onwards.
Amusingly, since this process is all input based, by allowing the system to input to itself the system can, through the same process, derive its own, novel, metaphors. We've only paper tested this function and the results were ... unique ... enough to place the whole thing in the 'Whenever' file.
¹ This would require a longer exposition than I can get into. Suffice to say, any utterance that "makes sense" eventually cycles around to previously supplied and/or previously inferred, by the system, Cognitive Junction© -- the "narrative semantics" eventually is "validated" by the "message semiotics." That's not quite right, much more to it, does gets the point across?
I operate on a context sensitive, Real Time, Stimulus/Reaction basis
thanks for providing the succinct definition of 'sentient being' i've searched for for quite a while! ~Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems.~ Naomi Klein.
A taxis (plural taxes, pronounced ˈtæksiːz) is an innate behavioral response by an organism to a directional stimulus or gradient of stimulus intensity. A taxis differs from a tropism (turning response, often growth towards or away from a stimulus) in that the organism has motility and demonstrates guided movement towards or away from the stimulus source [1][2]. It is sometimes distinguished from a kinesis, a non-directional change in activity in response to a stimulus that results in the migration toward or away from a stimulus.
as for cabbages being sentient, most of the time i wouldn't know, the rest of the time i'm non-verbal, so if i did know, i couldn't tell you.
i guess i lack the necessary presumption for assumption, this time...
didn't 'the secret life of plants' scientifically show us plants are sentient, anyway?
i happen to dig cabbage, a lot.
(and muddy work it can be, too)
:) ~Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems.~ Naomi Klein.
Another example, from the Dartmouth conference on, CompSci has been firmly based on Set Theory and the advantages, and restrictions, of Set Theory. But that's not how people operate. Thus, that's not the best paradigm for human/computer interfaces. Yet, computer language and operating system development has gone ever further into implementing Set Theory based systems ... under the impression, I suppose, if an ounce of something is harmful a pound is what is needed to really get going.
(LOL)
I can get all techy-tech here talking about stand-alone systems, networked systems, distributed systems, serial versus parallel, "cloud" systems, semantic/actional "web" systems and it all comes down to the same thing: we don't use computers like we did 30 years ago, never mind 55 years ago, and we don't need to be forced into the straitjackets springing from hardware restrictions of 30 years ago.
sigh
Button pushed. I rant react.
What is the problem you're trying to solve?
Computer software has been intimately tied to ZF Set Theory since the Dartmouth conference.
There isn't anybody working on this as their 'job.'
Nonsense. There's lots of research groups playing with this sort of stuff.
A friend worked on Semantic Webs back in the 70s. It didn't work then, either.
I know people doing interesting things with Neural Nets but there are severe problems with upscaling as soon as they run into Huble and Wiesel limitations: no such thing as the "Grandmother neuron."
The CYC Project is a joke. They've been Relationally Databasing for over 20 years now with little to show for it.
Wolfram's "Computation Knowledge Engine" is more interesting but it still requires human to tell it what to think. CAs are too limited a tool to handle n-dimensional referents and ambiguity.
I could go on.
So ... who?
One of the big problems with digital music is the absence of tactile interfaces. Once you add a decent-sized screen with multitouch and perhaps pressure sensitivity, a lot of limitations disappear, and you get a digital instrument you can play, rather than just poke a cursor at.
I'd expect similar changes in other areas.
But a lot of computer-think has been driven by business - spreadsheet, power point, document server, yada yada - and businesses aren't fond of change.
There are two issues - physical interfaces, and mental metaphors - with some synergy between them.
I'm sure better metaphors are possible, but they'll be much more acceptable if you don't have to drive them with a mouse and keyboard.
The digital side of semiconductors is just about tapped out in terms of transistor size and speed, and hardly anyone has needed more than the most basic processor on the market for their needs for the last 10 years. On the software side I think Adobe's model is the trend: break backwards compatibility and force consumers to buy new versions of software that don't do anything new (at best).
or this
with a completely configurable panel, which is potentially context sensitive, or at least switchable, and can be laid out ad lib.
The new paradigm comes from seeing hardware as a tactile interactive object that happens to do some computing, rather than as a computer that happens to have a touch screen.
The iPhone already does some of this, but it's too small to do more than play games on. If you scale up the size, the possibilities get more interesting.
I was working as the Systems Architect for a system not too unlike what you're describing back in '89. Ran into an insurmountable problem and had to round-file the effort. Can't remember what the problem back then was.
The new paradigms exist, have existed for years in mid range and power systems. Problem is that they're proprietory and expensive. keep to the Fen Causeway
