Talk to me, babe

[Helio Perroni Filho]

Back at my day job, I am working on a client-server
system implemented over web services. One of the
server applications is an automatic process, and in
theory does not need a client interface; however, over
time I discovered I needed some way to know what the
application was doing and, to an extent, control it.
So I wrote some simple control and log facilities,
which are activated by commands sent through a
browser's address bar.

As a sort of joke, I made the application respond to
these requests with messages written in the first
person. So when I command it to dump its log entries,
it responds "These are the contents of my personal
log", followed by the log entries; when I ask it to
identify itself, it responds "I am the Application
Server <number>", and so on.

The interesting thing is, I discovered it is quite
amusing to communicate with the application this way.
Even though I know how it builds every response out of
its very limited set of sentences, it is still
pleasant to see it "talking" to me, as if it was a
conscient being. I can only guess that, were I unaware
of the application's inner workings, the effect would
be even stronger.

It is widely known that being intelligent, and being
perceived as intelligent, are distinct things, and
that to an extent, the later can be achieved long
before we get even close to the former. I wonder, if
our present-day software applications strived to
communicate a sense of identity, of being self-aware
and conscient of its intercation with the user, how
would this impact in the nature of human-machine
interfaces? Could this have a positive impact on the
acceptance of computers? I know many people are
affraid of computers, because they feel they cannot
understand them; if computers passed the impression
they understand people, could this make things easier?

--
Ja mata ne.
Helio Perroni Filho



       



       
               
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