User, goes here.

A	User-friendliness is a word that never should have been invented.
Q	What word should have been invented to connotate the idea?
A	The idea is wrong! It is a long story about the user, which I will try to condense. The point is that the computer user, as functioning in the development of computer products is not a real person of flesh and blood but a literary figure, the creation of literature, rather poor literature. 15 years ago I Inoticed that Dutch computer scientists developing products, when talking of the needs of the user would use—in the middle of a Dutch sentence—the American word user, which of course is perfectly translatable, as you and I both know. Our cigarette packages have english on them as well.........; but then I discovered that in spite of their anglophobia, the word user is perfect French. Then I discovered that it is also perfect Russian and the two of us also know more Japanese than you think. Well the mere fact that that little word is not translated, but it is taken over as a foreign body, in Dutch, French, Russian and Japanese discussions, means that it has lost its original meaning. Now, if you start to analyze the many character traits of that literary figure, you discover that he is most uninspiring. He is stupid, education resistant if not education proof, and he hates any form of intellectual demand made on him, he cannot be delighted by something beautiful, because he lacks the education to appreciate beauty. Large sections of computer science are paralyzed by accepting this moron as their typical customer. Rare are the computer companies that are prepared to make a Mercedes, the analog the high quality product for the discerning customer. As it turns out, particularly in the USA mathematics is the pinnacle of user unfriendliness, if you read the catalogs of text book publishers, then it is quite clear that the major recommendation that they give a book is that it is a-mathematical, that it does not require mathematical knowledge, etc. So, user friendliness is, among other things the cause of a frantic effort to hide the fact that eo ipso computers are mathematical machines.

--

Q

Speaking of programming bottlenecks—what will the impact of the research in artificial intelligence be?

A

Can you research something that is not science? I feel that the effort to use machines to try to mimic human reasoning is both foolish and dangerous. It is foolish because if you look at human reasoning as is, it is pretty lousy; even the most trained mathematicians are amateur thinkers. Instead of trying to imitate what we are good at, I think it is much more fascinating to investigate what we are poor at. It is foolish to use machines to imitate human beings, while machines are very good at being machines, and that is precisely something that human beings are very poor at. Any successful AI project by its very nature would castrate the machine.

~ Dijkstra