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From: swatt@ittvax.UUCP (Alan S. Watt)
Newsgroups: net.cog-eng
Subject: Re: User-Friendly Re-Defined Access-Efficient
Message-ID: <989@ittvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 2-Sep-83 10:05:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: ittvax.989
Posted: Fri Sep  2 10:05:29 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 2-Sep-83 16:24:51 EDT
References: ittvax.985
Lines: 45

I am glad someone has decided to replace the term "User-Friendly",
although so far I haven't seen anyone speak for my reasons.  I hope the
computer community *ABOLISHES* the term before great violence is done
to our language, and our way of thinking about each other.

'Friendly' is an attribute of *people*, not computers, software, or
automatic coffee makers.  The term *only* has meaning in a context of
two or more people.  Friendliness is a basic capability of people which
cannot necessarily be analyzed into more basic actions (such as "smile
often", etc.), although behaviorists will argue here.  If you don't
know already what friendship and friendliness are, the only way to
find out is by living; you cannot understand them from a dictionary.

It boggles my mind to think what it means for a computer to be
'friendly'.  I have yet to see an instruction set that includes opcodes
like "SMILE", or "BE_HELPFUL", or the like.  How anyone can construct
real friendliness out of "ADD", "MUL", and "XOR" is totally beyond me.

It is now possible to program a computer to speak to you through voice
synthesizers.  Would it make you feel any better if when you logged in
each morning your computer said "Hello Alan, how are you this
morning?".  Perhaps you start each work day with an Eliza session?

I have a similar gripe about the abuse of 'intelligent', but that
battle has long since been lost.  At least the AI people have the
decency to prefix it with 'artificial', which warns you there might be
a difference.  Perhaps the Human Interface folks would accpet the term
'Artificially Friendly User Interface', a clumsy and impersonal term
well suited to the current state of the product.

Now I sympathize with people doing new work on computers who want to
differentiate their stuff from what currently exists.  To this end I
simply grit my teeth and bear it when people speak of "intelligent
terminals".  So if the people working on new user interfaces want to
describe them as "Easy to Use", "Easy to Learn", "Powerful",
"Sophisticated", "Natural", etc., that's all fine with me.

But please, please, PLEASE don't take a word which is so important in
the conduct of human affairs and render it meaningless by application
to machines.  If we as computer users start looking to our creations
for 'friendship', then we as human beings have serious emotional
problems.

	- Alan S. Watt
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