10 x : Human - machine symbiosis

An overview by D Roy 10x is a new initiative at the MIT Media Laboratory with the goal of magnifying human abilities by an order of magnitude ('10x'), or more, along various cognitive and physical dimensions. Based on an understanding of human abilities and limitations, technologies can be shaped to extend human reach. By setting our sights on 10x gains, we deliberatively seek human abilities which can be dramatically improved with appropriate technology-based catalysts. We view the underlying challenges of developing assistive technologies for individuals with impairments and bionic technologies for unimpaired individuals as fundamentally similar in nature. Across this spectrum, our aim is to develop technologies that complement rather than replace human abilities. Consider our ability to visually search. There are many mysteries regarding the mechanisms underlying human vision and memory, but we can nonetheless make some simple observation about how we search. When searching for our keys, why do we often look repeatedly in the same places? We might be far more efficient in search if we could keep ourselves from looping to places we have already looked. Imagine a lightweight device, perhaps woven into a pair of eyeglasses, that keeps track of where people have looked and steers them away from looking there again. This search aid would not need to know where the target object is — it would simply augment the person's visual search routine with a form of extended memory. With the appropriate interface for steering ongoing search, such a technology may lead to human-machine superperformance — more efficient search than either the human or the machine could have achieved on their own. This is an illustrative example of the kind of technology under development at the Media Lab [1] that has the potential to '10x' human performance. In this overview, I provide some historical context for the notion of human-machine symbiosis, identify a few basic research areas that are most relevant to the advancement of the 10x agenda, and finally sketch some of the active 10x research themes at the MIT Media Laboratory. Human-machine systems have a long history at MIT. In 1960, J C R Licklider formulated a vision of human-computer symbiosis in which computers and humans would become fluidly interdependent, each providing complementary abilities towards some shared goal that neither could achieve alone. Licklider considered the mismatch between human thought and computer abilities along several dimensions — flexible versus logical analysis, …