eChunks 8

In many of the classical fields studied by engineering psychologists and human factors engineers, there is a well-known and well-studied problem called overautomation: the equipment is so good that people don’t need to be as attentive. In theory, people are supposed to supervise the automation, always watching over operations, always ready to step in if things go wrong, but this kind of supervision is very difficult when the automation works so well. In the case of some manufacturing or process control plants, there may be very little for the human operators to do for days. As a result, people simply cannot maintain their attention. (Norman, P 107)

When Norman talks about overautomation and human operator’s attention, the first thing comes to my mind would be safety. An overautomation gadget might not have appeared in real life yet, but I’ve seen enough of them in science fiction movies---production system that proceeds and supervised by robots (which we can also refer to robots produce robots); transport facilities that operated only by the machine itself, without any human interference. Yes, these machines work flawlessly in those scenes, because they were in the movies, where things work as humans wanted to. In real world, things just cannot go so smoothly. If something we use in our daily life is automation, it requires human understanding and trust on it because automation, to some extent, is artificial intelligence, which mimics mankind’s mental model. They try to work as a human brain--- with logic, with the ability of emergency management. In some way, when dealing with emergency crisis, machines can do better than humans because they don’t have sentimental emotions, which may impede decision-making. What they have is purely digital calculation. For example, if two people fell in water at the same time (I know it is a corny example but realistic really!), a human will try his best to save them both. It might get three of them kill, but still, there is a chance that he can save them both. I consider this a typical human thinking. However, for the robots, it’s highly possible that it will calculate the chance of survival for both of them and save the one that has the higher chance to live. This is exactly what happened in the movie “I, Robot”: The man commands the robot to save the girl, not him. The robot refuses his command because it calculated that the girl has only 11% chance of survival and the man has 89%. And as a result, the man was safe, but he hates himself that was not able to safe that girl and blames to the robot and ever since he has bias toward robots. I would say this scene is very likely to happen in somewhat 50 years or so.

Nowadays, the most prevail and well-known example of automation would be aviation cockpit. Not surprisingly, most of the airplanes in the world now have autopilot system that helps pilots to navigate the plane. The system is so well design and well functioning that pilot might even fall asleep during a long distance flight. This is where I would like to talk about the trust between human and machine (actually the trust is one-way though, as the machine don’t have a sense for trust at present). The pilots fall asleep during the flight because they know the system well and have faith in them. Although it is not recommended that pilots can take a nap during the flight, in fact, some pilots may do and I’m ok with that. I don’t know why I’m so calm knowing that during my 13-hour flight from Hongkong to Vancouver, one or both (very not likely I believe) of the pilots may fall asleep. I guess I just have faith in the pilots and trust the plane that it would operates well. But one of my group mates was totally freaked out by knowing that the pilot may fall asleep during the flight. She said: “ Well I’m ok if they really trust that plane and know what are they doing. BUT PLEASE DON’T TELL ME THAT!! I DON’T NEED TO KNOW!!!!!”

It is obvious that people have different attitude towards machine being automated or overautomated. Although I believe most of the technology we have at present can perform well, frankly speaking, I don’t want the technology going so fast that in the near future machines or robots would be able to do everything without human operation, at least not so soon that I will live to see them standing in front of me.