Do not, I repeat, do not ask Albert Edwards this question.*
From MIT's Technology Review, August 15:
An intelligent digital agent could be a companion for life—and other predictions for the next 125 years.
Happy birthday, baby.
You have been born into an era of intelligent machines. They have watched over you almost since your conception. They let your parents listen in on your tiny heartbeat, track your gestation on an app, and post your sonogram on social media. Well before you were born, you were known to the algorithm.
Your arrival coincided with the 125th anniversary of this magazine. With a bit of luck and the right genes, you might see the next 125 years. How will you and the next generation of machines grow up together? We asked more than a dozen experts to imagine your joint future. We explained that this would be a thought experiment. What I mean is: We asked them to get weird.
Just about all of them agreed on how to frame the past: Computing shrank from giant shared industrial mainframes to personal desktop devices to electronic shrapnel so small it’s ambient in the environment. Previously controlled at arm’s length through punch card, keyboard, or mouse, computing became wearable, moving onto—and very recently into—the body. In our time, eye or brain implants are only for medical aid; in your time, who knows?
In the future, everyone thinks, computers will get smaller and more plentiful still. But the biggest change in your lifetime will be the rise of intelligent agents. Computing will be more responsive, more intimate, less confined to any one platform. It will be less like a tool, and more like a companion. It will learn from you and also be your guide.
What they mean, baby, is that it’s going to be your friend.
Present day to 2034
Age 0 to 10When you were born, your family surrounded you with “smart” things: rockers, monitors, lamps that play lullabies.
But not a single expert name-checked those as your first exposure to technology. Instead, they mentioned your parents’ phone or smart watch. And why not? As your loved ones cradle you, that deliciously blinky thing is right there. Babies learn by trial and error, by touching objects to see what happens. You tap it; it lights up or makes noise. Fascinating!
Cognitively, you won’t get much out of that interaction between birth and age two, says Jason Yip, an associate professor of digital youth at the University of Washington. But it helps introduce you to a world of animate objects, says Sean Follmer, director of the SHAPE Lab in Stanford’s mechanical engineering department, which explores haptics in robotics and computing. If you touch something, how does it respond?
You are the child of millennials and Gen Z—digital natives, the first influencers. So as you grow, cameras are ubiquitous. You see yourself onscreen and learn to smile or wave to the people on the other side. Your grandparents read to you on FaceTime; you photobomb Zoom meetings. As you get older, you’ll realize that images of yourself are a kind of social currency.
Your primary school will certainly have computers, though we’re not sure how educators will balance real-world and onscreen instruction, a pedagogical debate today. But baby, school is where our experts think you will meet your first intelligent agent, in the form of a tutor or coach. Your AI tutor might guide you through activities that combine physical tasks with augmented-reality instruction—a sort of middle ground.
Some school libraries are becoming more like makerspaces, teaching critical thinking along with building skills, says Nesra Yannier, a faculty member in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She is developing NoRILLA, an educational system that uses mixed reality—a combination of physical and virtual reality—to teach science and engineering concepts. For example, kids build wood-block structures and predict, with feedback from a cartoon AI gorilla, how they will fall.
Learning will be increasingly self-directed, says Liz Gerber, co-director of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction and Design at Northwestern University. The future classroom is “going to be hyper-personalized.” AI tutors could help with one-on-one instruction or repetitive sports drills.
All of this is pretty novel, so our experts had to guess at future form factors. Maybe while you’re learning, an unobtrusive bracelet or smart watch tracks your performance and then syncs data with a tablet, so your tutor can help you practice.
What will that agent be like? Follmer, who has worked with blind and low-vision students, thinks it might just be a voice. Yannier is partial to an animated character. Gerber thinks a digital avatar could be paired with a physical version, like a stuffed animal—in whatever guise you like. “It’s an imaginary friend,” says Gerber. “You get to decide who it is.”
Not everybody is sold on the AI tutor. In Yip’s research, kids often tell him AI-enabled technologies are … creepy. They feel unpredictable or scary or like they seem to be watching.
Kids learn through social interactions, so he’s also worried about technologies that isolate. And while he thinks AI can handle the cognitive aspects of tutoring, he’s not sure about its social side. Good teachers know how to motivate, how to deal with human moods and biology. Can a machine tell when a child is being sarcastic, or redirect a kid who is goofing off in the bathroom? When confronted with a meltdown, he asks, “is the AI going to know this kid is hungry and needs a snack?”
2040
Age 16By the time you turn 16, you’ll likely still live in a world shaped by cars: highways, suburbs, climate change. But some parts of car culture may be changing. Electric chargers might be supplanting gas stations. And just as an intelligent agent assisted in your schooling, now one will drive with you—and probably for you.
Paola Meraz, a creative director of interaction design at BMW’s Designworks, describes that agent as “your friend on the road.” William Chergosky, chief designer at Calty Design Research, Toyota’s North American design studio, calls it “exactly like a friend in the car.”
While you are young, Chergosky says, it’s your chaperone, restricting your speed or routing you home at curfew. It tells you when you’re near In-N-Out, knowing your penchant for their animal fries. And because you want to keep up with your friends online and in the real world, the agent can comb your social media feeds to see where they are and suggest a meetup.
Cars have long been spots for teen hangouts, but as driving becomes more autonomous, their interiors can become more like living rooms. (You’ll no longer need to face the road and an instrument panel full of knobs.) Meraz anticipates seats that reposition so passengers can talk face to face, or game. “Imagine playing a game that interacts with the world that you are driving through,” she says, or “a movie that was designed where speed, time of day, and geographical elements could influence the storyline.”
Without an instrument panel, how do you control the car? Today’s minimalist interiors feature a dash-mounted tablet, but digging through endless onscreen menus is not terribly intuitive. The next step is probably gestural or voice control—ideally, through natural language. The tipping point, says Chergosky, will come when instead of giving detailed commands, you can just say: “Man, it is hot in here. Can you make it cooler?”
An agent that listens in and tracks your every move raises some strange questions. Will it change personalities for each driver? (Sure.) Can it keep a secret? (“Dad said he went to Taco Bell, but did he?” jokes Chergosky.) Does it even have to stay in the car?
Our experts say nope. Meraz imagines it being integrated with other kinds of agents—the future versions of Alexa or Google Home. “It’s all connected,” she says. And when your car dies, Chergosky says, the agent does not. “You can actually take the soul of it from vehicle to vehicle. So as you upgrade, it’s not like you cut off that relationship,” he says. “It moves with you. Because it’s grown with you.”
2049
Age 25....
....MUCH MORE
Expect the New Year to bring nothing but disappointment....
Etc.
