I attended a lecture by professor Pattie Maes of MIT Media Lab. She founded and directs the Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces research group. Some of her main talking points:
– The next phase in computing is about intelligence augmentation, by sensors, Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence.
– AR will “edit” our world in a smart way. For instance it will nudge us away from sugar if that is what we want. It will predict our behavior so that we can rectify it.
– One of the systems she discussed remembers who you shook hands with.
– She sees great future for health (mental and physical) applications – VR and AR. We’ll have tag along therapists.
– Pattie Maes is a big believer in glasses and lenses for later phase Augmented Reality. Apple will probably release a smartphone specially equipped for AR, but finally we’ll wear devices which will keep our hands free.
– People tend to be too optimistic about what exists now. In reality a lot of improvement is possible. Accept the future, we already carry digital augmentation with us but it can be made much better and more natural.
– Many concerns regarding smart glasses and AR can be solved with the right design choices. Which are those concerns? Privacy erosion, dependency, lack of understanding, lack of control, unequal access.
Will we be overtaken by our robotic AI Overlords? Pattie Maes says it was an error to talk about Artificial Intelligence while it’s more correct to talk about Artificial Pattern Recognition. This pattern recognition works increasingly well, but only for very specific activities. This so-called AI can not broaden its scope, generalize or be inspired by very different domains.
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