To a species that seeks to communicate, offering instantaneous global connectivity is like wiring the pleasure center of a rat’s brain to a bar that the rat then presses over and over until it drops from exhaustion. I hit bottom when I found myself in Corsica, at the beach, in a pay phone booth, connecting my laptop with an acoustic modem coupler to take care of some perfectly mundane e-mail. That’s when I threw away my pager that delivered e-mail to me as I traveled, disconnected my cell phone that let my laptop download e-mail anywhere, and began answering e­mail just once a day. These technologies were like the rat’s pleasure bar, just capable enough to provide instant communication gratification, but not intelligent enough to help me manage that communication.… read more

Originally published by Henry Holt and Company 1999. Published on KurzweilAI.net May 15, 2003.

A group from a major computer company once came to the Media Lab to learn about our current research. The day started with their explaining that they wanted to see agent technology. Agents are a fashionable kind of computer program designed to learn users’ preferences and help anticipate and act on their needs. Throughout the day the visitors saw many relevant things, including software to assist with collaboration among groups of people, environments for describing how programs can adapt, and mathematical techniques for finding patterns in user data. I almost fell out of my chair at the wrap-up at the end of the day when they asked when they were going to see agent technology. They had clearly been tasked to acquire some agents, but wouldn’t recognize one if it bit them.

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