My software surrogates can potentially do much more than provide origins and destinations for messages: when appropriately programmed, they can serve as my semiautonomous agents by tirelessly performing standard tasks that I have delegated to them and even by making simple decisions on my behalf … A more maliciously conceived one might be programmed to roam the digital highways and byways, looking for trouble – for opportunities to corrupt the files of my enemies, to plunder valuable information, to eliminate rival agents, or to replicate itself endlessly and choke the system. Fritz Lang got it wrong: the robots in our future are not metallic Madonnas clanking around “Metropolis,” but soft cyborgs slinking silently through the Net. The neuromans of William Gibson are a lot closer to the mark.
Predictor: Mitchell, William J.
Prediction, in context:In his 1994 book “City of Bits,” MIT computer scientist William J. Mitchell writes:”My software surrogates can potentially do much more than provide origins and destinations for messages: when appropriately programmed, they can serve as my semiautonomous agents by tirelessly performing standard tasks that I have delegated to them and even by making simple decisions on my behalf … A more maliciously conceived one might be programmed to roam the digital highways and byways, looking for trouble – for opportunities to corrupt the files of my enemies, to plunder valuable information, to eliminate rival agents, or to replicate itself endlessly and choke the system. Fritz Lang got it wrong: the robots in our future are not metallic Madonnas clanking around ‘Metropolis,’ but soft cyborgs slinking silently through the Net. The neuromans of William Gibson are a lot closer to the mark.”
Biography:William J. Mitchell was a professor and dean of architecture at MIT and the author of the predictive book “City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn” (1994). He also taught at Harvard, Yale, Carnegie-Mellon and Cambridge Universities. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Intelligent Agents/AI
Name of publication: City of Bits
Title, headline, chapter name: Chapter 2: Electronic Agoras
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/index.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney