The prediction, in brief:

We never will get 100 percent accuracy – [intelligent] agents will always make mistakes.

Predictor: Maes, Pattie

Prediction, in context:

In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Scott Berkun, a SI/Usability specialist at Microsoft, interviews artificial intelligence expert Pattie Maes, a leader in intelligent-agent research. Berkun quotes Maes saying:”We never will get 100 percent accuracy – [intelligent] agents will always make mistakes. But whenever you delegate to someone – be it human or program – you give up some accuracy. If you give a task to someone else, it will never be done quite the way you want. Delegation is the only way to cope with how much work you have. If you had an infinite amount of time, you wouldn’t need to delegate. But the problem is, no one has that kind of time. For example, I’ve never had time to read newsgroups or find the ones I wanted, but with the newsreader agent we built, I have news articles suggested to me, and it gives me the time to read them. Also, you have to be careful which tasks you delegate – if the cost of a mistake is high, don’t let someone else do it. But many tasks are low-risk. If my newsreader agent gives me an article I don’t want, or forgets to give me one I do want, it has already done more than I could do without it. I think you just have to be aware of the cost of a mistake for a particular task and adjust the agent’s autonomy accordingly. We think the learning time is not necessarily a negative feature.” 

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: Wired

Title, headline, chapter name: Agent of Change: Pattie Maes Believes Software Agents Are Ready for Prime Time

Quote Type: Direct quote

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.04/maes_pr.html

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