MIT's Brave New World.

Byline: Patrick White

Twenty-one years ago, Nicholas Negroponte had a vision of a brave new world of digital video, wireless computing and robotic toys. So he and his counterparts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab set about creating it. Last month Frank Moss, a veteran of both IBM and Tivoli systems, took the helm from Negroponte. As head

of the so-called Toybox for Technology, Moss will guide the lab into an age of bionic seniors and computers for the brain. NEWSWEEK's Patrick White spoke with Moss last week. Excerpts:

WHITE: What are the main problems in the world that the Media Lab will be confronting in coming years? MOSS: We'll be dealing with both the physical problems of old age and the mental effects of aging. We are looking at neural prostheses that will amplify and repair our memories. Wouldn't you like to have a device that, if you met someone you recognized at a cocktail party, would whisper that person's name?

What's the most exciting project you're working on right now? One of our most amazing projects is the smart car. It's part of the Smart Cities program that has been a very important part of the lab's thinking--what can we do to solve the problems of education, energy and so forth? Well, the smart car comes down to a single idea, and that is [to] get rid of the engine and get rid of the transmission and put all that functionality in the wheels themselves. We've actually created prototypes of two-wheeled vehicles and three-wheeled vehicles where the engine and transmission are in the wheels. When you do that, you can create a vehicle which is very lightweight and very compact. You can stack [them] like shopping carts outside of a supermarket.

What else? Biomechatronics. Biomechatronics are intelligent or smart prostheses. They augment your physical and your sensory capabilities. In a practical case, a leg prosthesis will interact mechanically and through smart interfaces with your peripheral nervous system. You get feedback into the system that enables you to adapt to an environment. For instance, someone wearing these will be able to walk with a very normal gait because a normal gait is not only a function of mechanics but also how you sense and how you feel. [We are also working on] robots that are sociable. We're trying to understand and model, as a computational process, the ideas of emotion. If you can model emotions, then you can create robots that can ...