Institute For The Future

The end of cyberspace and the future of AI?

Is there some deep way in which ideas about cyberspace and artificial intelligence are linked together? Or perhaps, to take a small step back, do developments in each realm reflect some deeper common set of forces?

Just thinking aloud here. Let me try to pull on the thread a little....

It seems to me that one of the big themes that unifies several different kinds of work I've been looking at recently-- ranging from social software, to aging in place systems, to smart home stuff, to open source-- has been a shift from trying to make things smarter, to trying to build systems that may include smart things, but which aim to make people smarter. (This came to me during my recent trip to Denmark.)

I was recently struck by Pattie Maes' description of her research interests in a 1998 Edge interview, for she's describing precisely this shift in miniature:

 

I started out doing artificial intelligence, basically trying to study intelligence and intelligent behavior by synthesizing intelligent machines, I realized that what I've been doing in the last seven years could better be referred to as intelligence augmentation, so it's IA as opposed to AI. I'm not trying to understand intelligence and build this stand-alone intelligent machine that is as intelligent as a human and that hopefully teaches us something about how intelligence in humans may work, but instead what I'm doing is building integrated forms of man and machine, and even multiple men and multiple machines, that have as a result that one individual can be super-intelligent, so it's more about making people more intelligent and allowing people to be able to deal with more stuff, more problems, more tasks, more information. Rather than copying ourselves, I'm building machines that can do that.

 

My intuition is that there's some parallel between the collapse of the difference between bits and atoms-- i.e., the breakdown of cyberspace as an organizing metaphor for human-computer interaction-- and the shift away from trying to create autonomous intelligent machines to creating "intelligence augmentation." (Note also the resonance with Doug Engelbart's concept of augmentation. Will we know that we've reached a new stage in human evolution when his work no longer matters?) The question is, is the parallel just coincidence? Do the two trends have common roots? Or are they joined together more profoundly?