Archives: Expert Predictions

There is a whole new business in confiding our profiles to a third party, which will behave like a Swiss bank … What we should be looking for is an entity which is able and willing to keep our identities confidential while at the same time passing along newsworthy advertising and information. Such services will only work with a high degree of machine learning. While it is important to postulate such learning, how does this relate to human learning?

All of us are quite comfortable with the idea that an all-knowing agent might live in our television set, pocket, or automobile. We are rightly less sanguine about the possibility of such agents living in the greater network. All we need is a bunch of tattletale or culpable computer agents. Enough butlers and maids have testified against former employers for us to realize that our most trusted agents, by definition, know the most about us.

Most people generally make a false assumption that more bits are better. More is more. In truth, we want fewer bits, not more … Just because bandwidth exists, don’t squirt more bits at me. What I really need is intelligence in the network and in my receiver to filter and extract relevant information from a body of information that is orders of magnitude larger than anything I can digest. To achieve this we use a technique known as “interface agents.” Imagine a future where your interface agent can read every newspaper and catch every broadcast on the planet, and then, from this, construct a personalized summary. Wouldn’t that be more interesting than pumping more and more bits into your home?