Will we one day have robots running around who used to carry our groceries but are now hurling paving stones at us? I doubt it. I don’t foresee a time when we are treated like pets by a culture of super computers that have us on invisible leashes while we are house training ourselves walking on the grass. Hans Moravec thinks that once computers are smarter than humans, we’ll retire, and computers will become even smarter. I think the issue has more to do with consciousness and volition than being smart. Machines will be smarter than people, but I don’t believe in artificial consciousness.
Predictor: Negroponte, Nicholas
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Thomas A. Bass interviews MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte on the 10th anniversary of the Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he heads up an effort that spends $25 million a year “engineering the merger of newspapers, television, learning and computers.” Bass quotes Negroponte commenting: ”One of the best ways to inject common sense into machines is to have them learn. You get a mind-body problem very quickly, and consciousness becomes a big question. Will we one day have robots running around who used to carry our groceries but are now hurling paving stones at us? I doubt it. I don’t foresee a time when we are treated like pets by a culture of super computers that have us on invisible leashes while we are house training ourselves walking on the grass. Hans Moravec thinks that once computers are smarter than humans, we’ll retire, and computers will become even smarter. I think the issue has more to do with consciousness and volition than being smart. Machines will be smarter than people, but I don’t believe in artificial consciousness.”
Biography:Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of MIT’s Media Lab and a popular speaker and writer about technologies of the future, wrote one of the 1990s’ best-selling books about the new future of communications, “Being Digital.” (Pioneer/Originator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Community/Culture
Subtopic: Human-Machine Interaction
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Being Nicholas: Nicholas Negroponte is the Most Wired Man We Know (and That’s Saying Something)
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.11/nicholas_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney