The Graham lecture series were established in 1930 through the generosity of UC alumnus Mr. Neil Graham, with the aim of bringing a visitor of international importance to the University of Toronto every year. This year, our very own professor Kim Vicente— author of The Human Factor and Cognitive Work Analysis, E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship recipient, and founding director of the Cognitive Engineering Laboratory—was invited to give his take on our technologically advanced world and to share a view he has appropriately dubbed “Human Tech.”
The educational objective in engineering, according to professor Vicente is “to achieve technical excellence.” Simply put, if you do not design for the real physical world, things do not turn out so well. As an example, consider stove controls and the ingrained human tendency to expect things beside each other to control things near each other. If you have an ‘old-school’ four-burner stove, however, this may not be the case. In fact the very opposite is true: you will find that the two knobs near each other control burners that are diagonally separated. According to professor Vicente, “Once in a while, you may make a mistake.”
Granted, that is intuitive. Yet, as professor Vicente points out, the implications for us progressing deeper into the age of technology are great. In Canada, between 11,500 and 23,500 preventable deaths that stem from medical error owing to a defunct human-technology interface occur annually. In the United States, $10 billion is spent every year on accidents in the petrochemical industry owing to inadequate human-technology integration. At present, human errors lead to inefficiency, frustration, alienation, and a failure to exploit potential of both people and technology—and nobody is immune. The proper functioning of the local petrochemical plant or nuclear reactor, as witnessed by the Chernobyl disaster, is dependent on proper human-tech interaction. Transit system operations and avoidance of accidents depends on the human-tech interaction. Surgical procedures, airline traffic control systems, emergency response systems, and many other things in our day-to-day lives depend on this interaction, as well. Technology now is far more complex than we have seen in the past and the pace of change is groundbreaking. In the most serious situations, “human error leads to threats to safety, accidents, litigation, clean-ups, disasters, injuries, and deaths.”
So where does the problem originate? According to professor Vicente, it comes from humans adopting one of two perspectives: either the humanistic, focusing primarily on people, or the mechanistic, focusing on machines and information technology. And now more than ever, there exists an ingenuity gap between these two perspectives. The ingenuity gap principle was initially introduced by Canadian academic Thomas Homer-Dixon. It is as much a statement as a reflection of the complexity of problems faced by our society and our underachieving abilities to solve them.
Before we try and implement solutions we need to face the questions. Assume that man and machine function as one system. If you are not sure about this assumption, take a moment to realize how technology-dependent we are. What exactly is the role of technology in the system? And what is the role of people in this same system? Does technology extend or replace human capabilities?
There is no easy answer to these questions. What we do know is that technological progress is rapidly ongoing and will continue to do so. With that fact in mind, professor Vicente extends the engineering perspective from achieving technical excellence to doing so with the human factor in mind: engineering to help solve social problems. After all, says Vicente, “if technology doesn’t work for people, then it doesn’t work.”
