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To be a better Architect, learn how to talk to computers

Steps 1 and 2

You know what separates IT people from non-IT people? IT people have 2 skills that are actually just them living the future. The first is the wisdom to ask the question “have you turned it off and on again”. A disproportionately large number of computer problems are solved by that. I promise you. It’s step one to being the boss of the machine. The other secret of the IT person (or any techie) is googling it. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? If you’ve ever asked for help from an IT person and they didn’t know the answer, do you know what they probably did next? Used a search engine. Googling it is so important because it is using a machine to augment your own knowledge and skill set.

I’m always saddened when people don’t Google an answer before asking me for help. Not just because it’s easy and would save me time, but because that’s the future. In the near future (now), we will be relying on machines to make us smarter, faster, better, and more capable. Knowing how to use a search engine to solve your own problems is as basic and fundamental as reading or writing. You must be doing it. It’s especially critical now because being able to properly use a search engine is the underlying skill for what arrived while we weren’t paying attention: the machines are listening.

I spoke the initial draft of this blog post to my phone one Summer night in 2015.

When I started blogging in 2010, there was no option to talk to my computer; but now there is-and it’s pretty powerful. The first draft of this article went fast and the resulting text had fewer spelling errors than if I had typed it. I was halfway through brushing my teeth when the idea for this post came to me. A pen and paper were nowhere close. My computer was upstairs. I only had one hand free. My phone was two feet from me. I’m not even sure what app I used. I might have written an e-mail, or used Evernote. It really doesn’t matter. The input capabilities of the phone trumped the inconsequential file type that was created.

Step 3

To improve this skill of talking to computers one needs to learn how to speak in a manner that the computer will understand. Computers are dumb. They don’t understand language like you or I do. You need to speak clearly and use words that it will understand. You need to speak the computer’s language (example 1 and 2). You need to phrase questions in a manner that a search engine would understand it. Learn to speak clearly and precisely. If the computer can understand your question, then you’ll get the answers you need-whether it’s the temperature, a recipe, an answer to a math problem, or something more interesting. And when that happens you’ll learn to ask for more.

Fifteen years ago, we looked up answers in books. Five years ago we used search engines. Now, we press a button on our phones and ask questions. The near future belongs to those who make the fastest transition from typing and poking buttons to speaking to computers. Fortunately the transition is easy. Did you know you can tell your tablet or phone to open an app? You don’t need to waste time finding an icon. Practice now because tomorrow you’ll be able to tell it more things. Each year the machines are getting better. Each year your kids are growing up and conquering the digital realm. What are you doing to stay relevant?

have you turned google on and off yetBecause it’s new; because it’s different; because it’s not how we once did it. These are not acceptable excuses. We need to leave our comfort zone and try new things. We need to experiment. We need to treat our computers and phones like the objects they will become, not the things they no longer are. We need to be creative with technology. We need to treat our digital tools as an artistic medium. We pick up a pencil or a paintbrush and we all creatively doodle. We let our minds wander. We become one with the tool and just create. We need to be that way with more advanced tools. This is not optional. Not in our personal lives. And not in our professional lives. Other people are going to do this. Do you want to be with the people who are mastering new ways of interacting with the digital world, or do you want to be someone who is left behind? Those are your only options.

Think of it this way: every time you hear someone say they don’t want a smart phone, what they are now saying is not “I just need a phone that makes phone calls (and texts).” They are saying “I don’t want to collaborate with intelligent machines.”

It’d be great if you could just say to your computer “Subscribe to Shoegnome” or “e-mail me every time Shoegnome has a new blog post”. But you probably can’t, yet. So follow and subscribe to my blog the old fashioned way: Shoegnome on FacebookTwitter, and the RSS feed. Seriously clicking on stuff is the old fashioned way. Do you know how wild that is?

 

Comments

  • October 8, 2015
    reply

    James Badcock

    When I ask Siri something, if she doesn’t get me or gives me weird results it puts me off from using her/him. I find that setting reminders and timers work almost perfectly so I’m more inclined to use her/him for that. And it’s also much faster, to say “when I get home remind me to do blah” than doing all those settings. I need to start using her/him more to pick music, however I still listen to music far more with iTunes on OSX than through my phone. Still waiting for Siri on OSX!
    Unfortunately she/he still can’t find places here in Hungary, and too often she/he just does a Bing search and I sigh in disappointment, and not really getting context from what I asked 2 seconds ago – but it’s getting better (slowly). It’s those times I want to stop using her/him, and once you get a bad result it puts people off, or they presume it doesn’t and will not work. This is also a risk Apple (or anyone) has by introducing a new feature, if it fails even 5% of the time people will not use it even when it does start to work.
    As for googling, I love the in-place answers that seem to be getting better and better and more wide spread. Like asking about actors and movies for example.
    So it’s all about trust and perceived expectations perhaps? Fool me once, shame on computers! Fool me twice, well the second time probably is less likely to occur because I gave up after the first time already…

      • October 9, 2015
        reply

        James Badcock

        I haven’t used OK Google so much, because well my life is full of Apple devices only. Maybe it’s partly due to what gets sent to Google, more personal data vs apple and their stance on privacy – are we willing to “give up” (I don’t like that term) more of our data for better results? Or maybe that has nothing to do with it, Google just knows WAY more than Siri. Funny that you hear more about the issues or the Siri funny remarks than their usefulness…. it’s like that the internet is only for Cat videos!

        • October 9, 2015
          reply

          Willard Williams

          What questions would you ask? What would you want to know without asking daily?

  • October 8, 2015
    reply

    willard williams

    Actually computers are learning to understand the your intent and able to piece together a few different pieces of artificial intelligence to achieve that. The team that I was on at the AEC Hackathon Seattle a few weeks ago (www.aechackathon.com) actually built a system that allows you to speak naturally into a computer and compare various pieces of data that are highly relevant to architecture, construction, and general project management ( here is a working version of the application http://www.vapir.co). Technically you are now able to do a few things that you mentioned in your article if you built the connection to the various applications that you needed to automate. For instance you could start telling the computer to do things for you like subscribe to this post or open all the emails referencing RFI #2010. Or something like “show me all the photos within quadrant a3-b3 facing north.” It is now possible to do that.

      • October 8, 2015
        reply

        Willard Williams

        Yeah it would have been good to show you and the group the solution. You can try it for yourself now. We are working on expanding it’s capabilities and will be talking about how and what we want it do tonight at the AIA YAF event tonight. All in all once you start to use computers within a solution you immediately apply Moore’s Law to that solution or profession. You can easily see how quickly our profession is increasing in its capability, and changing through data, and parametric technology, just in the last 20 years or the last 1,000 years. We started scratching ideas drawings in the sand, then on paper, no we have digitized it. When you look at the physical tools we use to express ourselves, one of our tools the keyboard, is about to go away. Another tool we use, language is about to evolve with the integration of computers and and natural language interaction between a computer. We are on the precipice within our profession of being able to do many more things, more quickly, more accurately, throughout the design and construction process.

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