The media lab. - book reviews

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1987 by Kevin Kelly

As we speak, the once-separate galaxies of computers, publishing, and broadcasting are melding into each other with a great deal of muttering, armwaving, and hustling of new hardware. At the confluence is MIT's radical technology department, the Media Lob, which is betting multimillions that it can steer the collision into a cohesive whole: perhaps a mego-combo of telephone/video/audio/ simulation/newspoper that is uniquely tailored to eoch individual. The goal, as the Media Lab sees it, is to let the audience take over. At stake is the major source of wealth in the future - entertainment/news.

Sounds like an exciting place to visit. Trouble is, the Media Lab's work is spread vexingly thin since its range is so wide. When I was there I came away with unfocused glimmers of vague, half-understood somethings. Stewart Brand, publisher emeritus of WER, spent o year hanging out there, writing the ultimate tour of the Lob that everyone would like, but con never get. As you might expect from Stewart, there is a meta-level to the book: the media laboratory that our world has become. He envisions supremely individualized connections with appliances that would "know the user so intimately that the dialogue between machine and human would bring about ideas unrealizable by either partner alone." Stewart's astute and rigorously researched insights are the only aerial view of this uncertain landscape so far I view the book as philosophical documentation for the practical examples paraded in this issue.

Students and professors at the Media Laboratory write papers and books and publish them, but the byword in this grove of academe is not "Publish or Perish." In Lab parlance it's "Demo or Die" - make the case for your idea with an unfaked performance of it working at least once, or let somebody else at the equipment.

Want to know where the action in a culture is? Watch where new language is turning up and where the lawyers collect, usually in that sequence.

Me: "Do you have a standard timeline for when machine intelligence catches up with human intelligence and goes rolling on past?"

Minsky: "Yeah. Between 100 and 300 years. Intelligent evolution is unprecedented. Nobody's ever seen one. So in a few hundred rs it could do trillions of years of ordinary slow evolution." Me: "And make enormous mistakes." Minsky: "That's the trouble. There's no time to iron out the bugs. It might fill up the universe with styrofoam or something because it had some wrong theory about how the cosmos needs a shock absorber." Suddenly I saw a Vivarium as a swell place to work out some of those problems, rather than in the world.

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If, as alleged, the only real freedom of the press is to own one, the fullest realization of the First Amendment is being accomplished by technology, not politics.

While computers probe and imitate the "society of mind," they are also shaping the mind of society. Computer and communications have already blended so far that they are one activity, still without a verb to express what it does. We don't even have a word for the nervous activity in the body - it's not "thinking," "sensing," or "talking." All the chemical and energy activities in a body (or a society) have a word for their sum action "metabolism" - but there's no equivalent word for the sum of communications in a system. The lack of a word signals a deeper ignorance. We don't know what constitutes healthy communications.

When I mentioned to Jerome Wiesner that I was shifting my work environment from one kind of personal computer to another, he commiserated, "I think that nobody should have to learn a new machine after the age of twenty-seven." It's not just what you have to learn, it's what you have to teach the machine. More powerful machines require more teaching. That's something the Media Lab would like to reverse: more powerful machines should be able to learn from you on their own. The Media Lab (Inventing the Future at MIT) Stewart Brand 1987; 285 pp. $20 ($22 postpaid) from: Viking Penguin Books, Inc. 299 Murray Hill Parkway E. Rutherford, NJ 07073 800/631-3577 or Whole Earth Access