POLLACK: What's happening inexorably is that even though supposedly the world is smaller, our social relationship networks are forming wider and wider nets. I have people in Atlanta, Washington, California and New York — all over the world in fact — who I communicate with, and I become more mobile and I travel more, and at the same time the number of email messages a day that I process has moved up from ten a day to a hundred a day. And in a couple of years it's going to be 300 a day! We see an opportunity for intelligence here, as the email message count and the cell phone message count rise.

For example, I've designed an adaptive e-mail filter. I can tell it that I only want to see 50 messages a day of these 300, but the other 250 I want to know about still. I don't want any machine to throw stuff away unless I've already said I don't want any more mail from this vendor. But I do want the top 50 in order of my priorities. And those are adaptive and change on a daily basis. Who did I recently send an e-mail to? Well that's somebody whose response I want to see. If I get e-mail from the President of the United States, he might not be on my "in list", but I don't want to miss that mail.

These are fairly simple AI techniques that can essentially take those 300 messages a day and dynamically pick out the ones you're most likely to be interested in, while not throwing away anything that you might even have a relevant chance of being interested in.

We are inexorably getting more mail, we are more mobile, and the demand for a wearable communication device that can essentially intelligently deal with all your communication becomes more and more relevant. That's why the Blackberry is so popular now, — it's really the first popular wearable computer — since it fairly seamlessly replicates the Microsoft Outlook view on your desktop into something that an executive can carry around. In a few years we'll have eye pieces that'll give you full color view of your desktop and a little wireless computer device that you'll wear. That's really where it's going, and I'm excited to be involved in it.

EDGE: The work that you're most famous for on self-replicating robots was recently reported on the front page of The New York Times. This naturally will attract all those people concerned with the human condition. You must have thought about this. In what way is the development of your technology changing our ideas of ourselves?

POLLACK: We can look at the problem of robotics from an industrial point of view, from an economic point of view. Say that we could build you a vacuum cleaner robot and it would cost five million dollars to develop, and each vacuum would cost $5,000. But you can just buy a plain old vacuum for a hundred dollars and push it yourself, or have someone who works for eight dollars an hour push it. There's no money to be made in robots; there's no mass market that would justify the kind of development necessary to have a robot. Until you actually get a general purpose humanoid robot that's cheap enough to hire instead of a human, there's a huge chasm to cross.

Everyone keeps thinking that the robots of science fiction are the robots they want. I say the real robots are ATMs and ink jet printers. They're really robots and they're really here now. And asking them to obey Asimov's laws does not compute. They have a mass distribution, and they justify their own existence. We have an ice cream vending machine at my university. That robot probably costs several thousand dollars, but it earns its own living selling ice cream pops! Humanoid robots might meet our expectations of Science Fiction and ancient dreams of ethical slavery, but it is still several hundred years off.

What my lab is doing — to answer your actual question about the human condition — is we're saying the thing that we need to do is to take the human engineers, the expensive human fixed-cost talent, out of the process of designing robots, so that we can make robots which are economical in small quantity. A robot design may only be needed in once, or three times, or in five copies. A robot helping in a manufacturing production run may last only 6 months, not enough time to amortize a big investment in engineering.