Beyond the technology it has imagined,the thinkers it has encouraged, the students it has attracted and seeded, the greatest achievement of the MIT Media Laboratory may be the invention of - itself.
For a few years after it officially opened in 1985, the MIT Media Laboratory may have been the most celebrated research institute in the country, at least as measured by inches of newsprint or minutes of air time. Perhaps it still is. Most major periodicals and TV science series have done a spread or segment on the organization, taking the reader or viewer through a carnival ride of speech-driven task managers, holograms, lip readers, eye trackers, gesture recognizers, virtual reality modelers, and more. A book called The Media Lab, in which writer Stewart Brand did the same (though at a slower pace), became one of the major pop-tech sellers of recent times.
The argument used to rationalize all this attention was that the Media Lab was "inventing the future," a phrase used by Brand in the subtitle of his book and by The New York Times in its August 1987 profile of the facility. Inventing the future is by definition the agenda of any technical research institute, but in this case the expression referred to a more ambitious claim: that the Media Lab was defining the next keystone technology, the theme around which the other technologies of the time would orbit, like steel production in the 1800s or electric-power generation in the first half of the 1900s. The candidate being primed for this role for the late 20th century was human-machine interactivity.
"Imagine," wrote the lab's founder and director, MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte, in his 1968 book The Architecture Machine (The MIT Press), "a machine that can ... discern and assimilate your conversational idiosyncrasies ... [that can] build a predictive model of your conversational performance." OK. And what would be the point of that? The point, Negroponte said, is that dialog with such a machine "would be so intimate - even exclusive - that ... [it would] bring about ideas ... unrealizable by either conversant alone."
When Negroponte wrote those words, he had in mind a house - he began his career as an architect - a building that would act as a consultant on the question of its own redesign, engaging its owners in an ongoing dialog on such issues as ventilation, illumination, and drainage. When both parties pronounced themselves content with said redesign, the owners would go off for a few days, perhaps on vacation, and the house would reconstruct itself autonomously, metamorphosing into the desired form.
As a concept, this "Architecture Machine" may have been a great example of interactivity, but it obviously faced a few short-term fabrication constraints. So, through the 1970s, Negroponte pushed his ideas into more fiexible and plastic contexts, specifically the media: broadcast, publishing, movies, and telecommunications. He liked to talk about asking the TV to summarize or expand on a point, or have the set watch a show and then tell you if you'd like it and why. Your newspaper could track what you skipped and reread and where you paused, then use those cues to evolve into a composite "Daily Me" that would carry only the news you cared about most. Advertisements would watch people watching them and continuously adapt to their responses.