To earn my daily crust, I write about technology and related areas. I particularly enjoy writing about research and researchers. I’ve done a few pieces now on Media Lab/Media Lab Europe, and certainly supported the Irish decision to bring in MLE. Why?

Well, I’ve heard all the arguments about ‘what do companies get out of it’ and have also heard plenty about the resentments and peeves. 1) companies wouldn;t endlessly throw money away, year after year, if they felt they were getting NO value in return. For companies, I think they value the creative jolt they get. 2) Success breeds resentments, especially when the success gets lots of publicity. And interdisciplinary collaborations –especially spanning areas like arts/sciences, really get up some people’s noses.

Bottom line: There are plenty of ‘regular’, product or concept research labs out there, across universities and industry. There’s only one Media Lab, where tech overlaps in highly unusual ways into other disciplines such as literature and music and other arts. Just allowing that kind of creative turbulence is an important end in itself. One could argue (and I would) that public interest and understanding of technology has been spurred and shaped by the kind of coverage ML has had. They have shaped the culture of technology in some profound ways. Do they do some silly things? Sure. And so do Carnegie-Mellon, Bell Labs, IBM and PARC. But you don’t tend to see their sillinesses.

As for a lab and lab founder/director that produces science fiction — an awful lot of what we take for granted in technology today would have been seen as scifi 20 years ago; and in some cases, was actually sparked by writerly imaginations that have shaped our sense of what technology should be. So I think such crossings-over should be encouraged, not scoffed at. One key example: I talked to three of the world’s pioneering researchers into voice recognition from the 60s.early 70s a few years back. I asked all three what got them thinking that one should be able to communicate with a computer through speech. All three cited two key influences: 1) HAL, the talking computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey; 2) the talking computers in Star Trek. Heh!!

I hope ML rethinks itself into a viable future, as it has already done in the past.

Brilliant to point out the innovation in the academia game. That structure explains why academia is mostly out of focus with reality & why the media lab was so interesting… it could somehow relate to reality without falling into academic gobbledygook-speak that fill 30 pages of better-than-valium research reports no one ever bothers to read.

Totally stupid & out of place to position your politics in the argument. Re: the fries.

One of the best things to come out of the Media Lab was the LEGO Mindstorms system. The early work on programmable bricks and open ended play by Seymour Papert and Mitch Resnick was groundbreaking. LEGO helped to fund the research and eventually released a fantastic product – Mindstorms.

Too bad that the open ended play required close supervision by the researchers. In my own work with kids and Mindstorms, I found that computing was too abstract for many kids and required a lot of one-on-one time.

I guess my lasting impression of the Media Lab after the Mindfest gathering was “Who pays for all this stuff – and what are they getting back?”

Cheers, Ralph

I had no idea about the Media Lab’s radical structure for doing research. Professional fundraisers and PR people — it explains so much, particularly the resentment often directed towards them from people in many mainstream CS/AI departments. The feeling among many people I’ve met is that what they do is more flash than substance.

I had a tour of the lab last summer while attending ICDL’02, and remember thinking that it seemed like a really nice place to work. As for the research, it’s tough to tell from demos, since they can often be mostly smoke and mirrors, but I thought Deb Roy’s work seemed very good. On the other hand, in another part of the lab there was this weird video game thing with wolves. It was very flashy and they obviously had put tons of money into equipment for displaying it (e.g. a plasma display on the wall). I played it, and we all stood around scratching our heads wondering what its scientific contribution was. I never did figure it out.

It’s interesting that the lab’s demise is reported/predicted by Wired, since they were a major conduit for Media Lab PR for much of the last 10 years.

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I hope the lab continues. The book “Being Digital” by Nicholas Negroponte had an influence on me. Some of the ideas were far fetched, but I believe the underlying theory was sound. Digital technology has exploded into everyday use over the past 8-9 years.

The book, however, did not predict abuse of monopoly power in the PC marketplace, terrorist attacks on the US, Big Business corruption, and widespread reactionary politics. Those things definitely caused a bump in the road on the way to the future. The rest of the future however, remains unwritten, and Information Theory will continue to affect us in profound ways. I wasn’t even a blogger a year ago! ;o)

Well, if the industry has money to spend, it can give a little to Media Lab. The ceo’s wont cut their salaries and give the money to Media Lab.

Future students of architectural and military history are likely to remember the Media Lab as an inexplicable PR phenomenon notable mostly for its proximate role in the demolition of MIT’s notorious and legendary Building 20, home of MIT’s Radiation Laboratory, where the most vital, relevant, and innovative electronics research of the 20th century was conducted between 1940 and 1945.

-Motts

The Media Lab is likely to be rememberd for promising more than it delivered, for promising too much, and for being out of touch with innovations of a practical sort. One of it’s best known mouthpieces wrote a book describing a future in which our clothing will itself be a computer that can double as a cell phone. While I admire any organization that can stay on the cutting edge of the new, I don’t think publishing science fiction should count – that would be too easy, I could write a story right now, in the next 10 minutes, full of wild technologies, and declare myself on the cutting edge of the new. But would I be adding anything of real benefit to the world?

A friend AIMed me: “Media Lab probably had issues with having a academic culture of the product-type management where each professor gets to do what they want clashing with the functional departmentalization. ie – the functional departments probably didn’t have the authority they needed to do the job right.”