WIRED 2.06 - Less Is More: Interface Agents as Digital Butlers
N E G R O P O N T E<br>Message: 12
Date: 6.1.94
From: nicholas@media.mit.edu>
To: lr@wired.com>
Subject:<br>Less Is More: Interface Agents as Digital Butlers
Al Gore need not be right or wrong in his conception of details. It<br>almost doesn't matter whether he calls it an information superhighway, an<br>infobahn, or a National Information Infrastructure. What matters is his<br>personal and sincere interest in computers and communications and the fact<br>that his enthusiasm has raised our popular consciousness of<br>telecommunications. The media cacophony over phenomena like the Internet<br>fosters an open architecture and emphasizes access by all Americans.
The clamor, however, has perpetuated a tacit assumption that more<br>bandwidth is an innate, a priori, and (almost) constitutional good. The<br>right to 1,000 channels of TV! Continental Cable, the local cable company<br>in Cambridge, Massachusetts, now offers Internet access at 500,000 bits per<br>second. With that service, The Wall Street Journal takes sixteen seconds to<br>transmit in its entirety (as structured data mostly, not fax,<br>please!). When fiber reaches the home, by some estimates, we will have<br>access to as much as 100 billion bits per second. Hmmm. Most people<br>generally make a false assumption that more bits are better. More is more.
In truth, we want fewer bits, not more. Our needs fall along a<br>spectrum. Consider a newspaper: Our requirements are very different on<br>Monday morning from what they were on Sunday afternoon. At 7 a.m. on a<br>workday, you are less likely to be interested in browsing<br>stories. Serendipity just does not play a key role then. In fact, you would<br>most likely be willing to pay The New York Times US$10 for ten pages vs. $1<br>for 100 pages. If you could, you would opt for a heavy dose of personalized<br>news.
It's simple: Just because bandwidth exists, don't squirt more bits at<br>me. What I really need is intelligence in the network and in my receiver to<br>filter and extract relevant information from a body of information that is<br>orders of magnitude larger than anything I can digest. To achieve this we<br>use a technique known as "interface agents." Imagine a future where your<br>interface agent can read every newspaper and catch every broadcast on the<br>planet, and then, from this, construct a personalized summary. Wouldn't<br>that be more interesting than pumping more and more bits into your home?
Guides
Why do people pay 85 cents to find out whether their one daily lottery<br>ticket won? TV Guide has been known to make larger profits than all four<br>networks combined. What do these things tell you? It says that the value of<br>information about information can be greater than the value of the<br>information itself. From that and other similar observations (American<br>Airlines makes more from its reservation system than from carrying<br>passengers) I am willing to project an enormous new industry based on a<br>service that helps navigate through massive amounts of data.
When we think of new information delivery, we tend to cramp our thoughts<br>with concepts like "info grazing" and "channel surfing." These concepts<br>just do not scale. With 1,000 channels, if you surf from station to<br>station, dwelling only three seconds per channel, it will take almost an<br>hour to scan them all. A program would be over long before you could decide<br>whether it is the most interesting.
I am fond of asking people how they select a theatrical, box-office<br>movie. Some pretend they read reviews. I hasten to interject my own<br>solution - which is to ask my sister-in-law - and people quickly admit that<br>they have an equivalent. What we want to build into these systems is a<br>sister-in-law, an interface agent which is both an expert on movies and an<br>expert on you.
Your Model of Its Model of Your Model of It
The key to agent-based systems is learning. It is not a matter of a<br>questionnaire or a fixed profile. Agents must learn and develop over time,<br>like human friends and assistants. It is not only the acquisition of a<br>model of you; it is using it in context. Timing alone is an example of how<br>human agents distinguish themselves. But it is all too easy to wave your<br>hand and say "learning." What constitutes learning?
The only clue I have found goes back two decades to the work of the<br>English cybernetician Gordon Pask, who taught me to look at the second- and<br>third-order models. In human-to-computer interaction, your model of the<br>computer is less telling than its model of your model of it. By extension,<br>your model of its model of your model of it is even more critical. When<br>this third-order model matches the first (your model of it), we can say<br>that you know each other.
Swiss Banking of Network-Based Agents
All of us are quite comfortable with the idea that an all-knowing agent<br>might live in our television set, pocket, or automobile. We are rightly<br>less sanguine about the possibility of such agents living in the greater<br>network. All we need is a bunch of...