Three Minutes With Michael Dertouzos

Director of the MIT computer science lab foresees a proliferation of much friendlier computers in many forms.

Tom Spring, PCWorld.com

Michael Dertouzos doesn't come across a revolutionary, but the director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science is hoping to finish one. In his new book The Unfinished Revolution, Dertouzos has penned a manifesto aimed at challenging the computer world's status quo.

At the heart of Dertouzos's hypothesis are bedrock principles flowing from his lab's five-year, $50 million Oxygen project, intended to make computers adapt to people, instead of the other way around. PCWorld.com caught up with the 64-year-old Greece-born Dertouzos at his Cambridge office on the eve of a whirlwind book tour to ask him how he would like to finish the revolution.

PCW: Please explain the subtitle to your book: "Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do for Us."

Dertouzos: Machines are not only hard to use, they are sometimes impossible to use. They are really not serving us. We are serving them. And we are getting use to it. Human-centered computing is about having computers meet our needs. It's about making machines easier to use and as natural a part of our environment as the air we breathe.

Less than 1 percent of the industrial economy flows over the Internet. And less than 5 percent of the world's people are interconnected. We are in such an infantile state right now it makes me cry.

PCW: Is the best example of human-centric computing beepers, cell phones, and personal digital assistants? Are we getting closer with these devices?

Dertouzos: Those are not examples at all. Those are examples of hardware that we may someday use with human-centric computing. Sure, we are going to have handhelds, but not like today.

PCW: Is there any technology on the commercial market that impresses you today?

Dertouzos: Like everyone else I'm impressed by increased bandwidth. I'm impressed by mobility that I see in computers and cell phones getting bigger screens. I'm impressed by Bluetooth. But those things by themselves aren't enough. It's like we are trying to build a gigantic highway system and you're talking to me about asphalt. I'm impressed by good asphalt, but we need architecture and we need to put things together. And that's where the human-centric computing comes in.

PCW: What are the barriers facing the growth of information technology?

Dertouzos: The biggest barriers are ignorance and lack of good ideas, which plague all of us and hold us back. The inertia of the world is a barrier. Consider the huge investment people have made today in operating systems. We have 300 operating systems out there [on a variety of computing devices]. That represents a lot of money out there. We can't just turn on a dime.

If you've been building operating systems for 30 years, just improving them 10 percent a year it becomes kind of hard to change.

PCW: Do you think governments are failing in any attempts to control or advance information technology?

Dertouzos: In America, the government has done what it can. It has removed the right barriers and made opportunities. I would say the same for European and most Asian governments.

Look at Tim-Berners Lee and the Web. He invented that thing ten years ago in a basement at the CERN laboratory. This was just a single guy and his helpers inventing a piece of software that was to concur the world more than any other operating system ever did. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

PCW: Will desktop PCs someday become dinosaurs, as so many people predict?

Dertouzos: If you mean by PC the temple with a screen and box to which I go and pay my respects several times a day, no. PCs will not vanish, but they will shrink in size and importance. In the future we won't have go to the temple unless we want.

Computers will vanish into walls and ceilings. You'll say something and a microphone will pick it up and a machine will do it. Let me give you an example. Open the drapes. (The drapes in the room open.) Close the drapes. (The drapes in the room close.) My office is part of the experiment we are working on with project Oxygen.

PCW: What will happen to our concept of privacy when everything we do is tracked?

Dertouzos: The assumption that everything we do is tracked and monitored is peculiar. First of all, everything we do today on computers is not tracked and monitored. I have about ten computers at home. I've got three or four here at work. And I've got computers crawling out of my pockets. But everything I do is not tracked and monitored. So I'm careful about the things I care about and I'm not about the things I don't care about.

We have all the technology in the world today to provide as much or as little privacy as we want. The problem is, as a people (in North America), we don't know how much privacy we want.

PCW: Describe the book in broad terms and whom it might appeal to.

Dertouzos: The book is really a call to arms. It's a call for a radical shift in the way that we design and use computers. It's aimed at normal people who could have a lot more if they asked for it. And it's aimed at normal designers who could do a lot more if they focused on human beings. What I'd like for this book to do is to give us enough of a drive to stop this incremental climb on the tree of progress and allow us to get on a rocket and go to the moon.

And human-centricity is the rocket we want. Sure I'm not hitting it square on the head--but I'm hoping I'll awaken people so they can do it better.