Agentive Technology, the next stage of AI

A few days ago I published a post about “Calm Technology”, a concept by Amber Case, and a good friend, Rafa Torres, quoted the publication on Twitter, adding that he was going to read the book “Calm Technology: Principles and Patterns for Non-Intrusive Design” and mentioned a new concept: Agentive Technology.

This concept invented by Chris Noessel is so interesting. It talks about the next state of Artificial Intelligence, one in which we go from using tools to simply managing them.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the TED Talk of Maurice Conti, Chief Innovation Officer at Telefónica Alpha, where he speaks about “Calm Technology” and “Agentive Technology” without explicit naming them.

Welcome to the Augmented Age. In this new era, your natural human capabilities are going to be augmented by computational systems that help you think, robotic systems that help you make, and a digital nervous system that connects you to the world far beyond your natural senses. Let’s start with cognitive augmentation. How many of you are augmented cyborgs?

I would actually argue that we’re already augmented. Imagine you’re at a party, and somebody asks you a question that you don’t know the answer to. If you have one of these, in a few seconds, you can know the answer. But this is just a primitive beginning. Even Siri is just a passive tool. In fact, for the last three-and-a-half million years, the tools that we’ve had have been completely passive. They do exactly what we tell them and nothing more. Our very first tool only cut where we struck it. The chisel only carves where the artist points it. And even our most advanced tools do nothing without our explicit direction. In fact, to date, and this is something that frustrates me, we’ve always been limited by this need to manually push our wills into our tools — like, manual, literally using our hands, even with computers. But I’m more like Scotty in “Star Trek.”

I want to have a conversation with a computer. I want to say, “Computer, let’s design a car,” and the computer shows me a car. And I say, “No, more fast-looking, and less German,” and bang, the computer shows me an option.

# 365daysof #futurism #innovation #agentivetechnology # day6