To Pattie Maes, machines will not replace humans. Instead, they will help make up for human foibles.
In the near future, computers will remind you to pick up groceries at the store, help you place names and faces, and find companions who share your interests. In short, they will help connect the dots in our seemingly disjointed lives.
"In the next 50 years, artificial intelligence [will really become] intelligence augmentation," said Maes, the associate professor of MIT's Media Lab, speaking at "The Next 50 Years of Computing," the Association of Computing Machinery conference in San Jose, California, on Monday.
"We'll have the combined forces of humans and machines - prosthetics for the mind," she said.
Although AI is nearly 50 years old, Maes says researchers have little to show for their half-century of work. "We have no real insight [into how the brain works] and no practical applications."
By contrast, Maes peppered her remarks with real-life examples of projects in development at MIT, some of which will soon see the light of day.
The spectrum of the projects Maes discussed illustrate how the line between the real and virtual worlds is fading. The two are knitted together with software.
For example, Maes said, people will have "remembrance agents" that will have some GPS capability to track where a person goes, remember to whom he or she talks, and keep a record of email received.
All of this is designed to provide "just in time" information that will not only jog a person's memory for names, but also supply a user with the most recent correspondence and information about that person, allowing them to appear interested and informed.
"These will be our extra eyes and ears on the world," said Maes.
Maes' vision is one of intelligent Web browsers that will filter the Web for our interests, and services like MIT's yet-to-be-opened Kasbah, where agents will buy or sell goods on our behalf in a virtual marketplace. It's a world driven by cheap sensing, computing, and communications devices that people will wear - though Maes foresees such devices being implanted someday.
But for this world of never-forgotten appointments, and remembered acquaintances, session moderator James Burke wondered if we might forfeit an essential quality that makes a human life - the sum of our individual memories.
Moments after listing trust and privacy as two elements that need to be solved before this evolution can take place, Maes replied, "Ronald Reagan couldn't say he didn't remember. We could subpoena these extra memories."
Apparently, the audience, which included some of today's top technological minds, agreed. In an audience survey, nearly 88 percent thought computers will become more of a threat to privacy in the next 50 years.
