The prediction, in brief:

Agents learn through receiving feedback on their performance. In some Maes programs, agents evolve … Maes believes that user trust is built up most quickly when agents can communicate the basis for their decisions … In the case of mail-sort agents, Maes says that users “gradually build up a trust relationship with agents,” much as one would with a new human personal assistant. Maes’s agents may be given a human face.

Predictor: Maes, Pattie

Prediction, in context:

In her 1995 book “Life on the Screen,” Sherry Turkle – an accomplished social psychologist, sociologist and anthropologist from MIT whose studies centered around people and computers for decades – talks about the AI research by Pattie Maes. Turkle writes:”Maes thinks of [her AI creations] as organisms made up of computer code … Maes’s cyberspace robots, known as agents, construct their identities on the Internet … In a project to build agents that can sort electronic mail, an agent keeps track of what mail one throws out … what mail one looks at first … and what mail one refiles for future reference … After a training period during which the agent ‘looks over the user’s shoulder,’ it comes to demonstrate a reasonable degree of competence. Maes’s agents learn through receiving feedback on their performance. In some Maes programs, agents evolve … Maes believes that user trust is built up most quickly when agents can communicate the basis for their decisions … In the case of mail-sort agents, Maes says that users ‘gradually build up a trust relationship with agents,’ much as one would with a new human personal assistant. Maes’s agents may be given a human face. Simple cartoon characters represent the agent and communicate its state of mind. The user can watch the agent ‘thinking,’ ‘working,’ ‘making a suggestion,’ or ‘admitting’ that it doesn’t have enough information. The user can set a personal threshold of certainty that the agent requires before making a suggestion.”

Biography:

Pattie Maes , a researcher at MIT’s Media Lab, was a founder and board member of Firefly Network, Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. Ð one of the first companies to commercialize personalization and profiling technology (Firefly was acquired by Microsoft in 1998). She was also a founder and a board member of Open Ratings, Inc., a provider of performance data on businesses for B2B ecommerce. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)

Date of prediction: January 1, 1995

Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information

Subtopic: Intelligent Agents/AI

Name of publication: Life on the Screen (book)

Title, headline, chapter name: Chapter 3: Making a Pass at a Robot

Quote Type: Paraphrase

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
Pages 98-100

This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney