I watched the movie ‘Click’ last night. Not so much because I was wanting to see it but, rather, because there wasn’t much else on.  I found it surprisingly relevant to my line of work and was inspired to write this post.  If you haven’t seen it, the premise is this: a stressed out Architect (Adam Sandler) is trying to get ahead at his firm by working hard for his smarmy boss (David Hasselhoff).  He gets frustrated one night due to the stress of balancing work and family.  He then flips out because he can’t find his TV remote so he sets out to buy a universal model. 

The only store open is a Bed, Bath and Beyond where, during his search for said remote controller, he comes across a door marked Beyond (I found this funny in and of itself – never thought about what the ‘beyond’ was).  Behind this door is Morty (Christopher Walken) – the resident ‘scientist’ of the ‘Beyond’ department.  He shows Mike (Adam) this new ‘universal remote’ and Mike soon discovers that the remote can control everything … EVERY thing.  He can turn down the volume of the dog, pause his kids, fast-forward his wife nagging at him.  He soon gets caught up in fast forwarding through all of the hassles of life so he can get his work done and get promoted.

AH, but this isn’t what I wanted to talk about.  After a while, the remote starts to ‘learn’ Mike’s preferences and reacts automatically to life’s situations.  Every time his wife starts yelling – fast forward.  Every time he goes to get ready for work – fast forward.  He can’t stop it.  It’s the way the remote is programmed.  So, Mike’s remote was supposedly programmed to be ‘smart’ … to learn his preferences and react automatically thus making his life easier.  But what happens is that his life becomes a huge mess.  He changes his mind about wanting to fast-forward through things, but the remote can’t unlearn. 

This so-called ‘personalization’ or artificial intelligence has been around in various forms for quite some time.  There was talk in the 70s about AI.  When the internet boomed personalization and customization were the rage.  Now Microsoft is coming out with a search engine feature  that will try to ascertain what you MEAN when you search the internet by comparing it with items on your desk top.  All of this makes the assumption that computers can predict your future behavior by examining your past behavior. 

While this theory holds true in many aspects of life, I don’t find that it does in ‘searching’ behavior.  At any given time, I may change my mind or focus or may be searching for something I may never search for again.  I may have documents on my computer from work that have nothing to do with personal searches.  I balk at the thought of someone – something – trying to second guess what my intentions are.  It’s like the former coworker of mine who insisted to me that we could tell what our users wanted by looking at what they did via our web logs. 

Examining past behavior only tells us what people did, not what they want to do.  I simply don’t understand the constant push to try to get computers to do something that, quite frankly, a lot of humans can’t even do.  Why should we expect a computer to know what we’re thinking and what we’re going to do?  Why would we WANT them to?  I certainly don’t.  Disagree?  Just watch ‘Minority Report’.