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Perfect Disruption
The Paradigm Shift from Mental Agents to ORGs
Carl Hewitt MIT EECS (emeritus)
The mental agent paradigm has had some success in modeling and simulating human-like behavior. However, computing has changed dramatically since its invention, and were now in the midst of a perfect disruption brought on by changes to hardware, software, and applications.
The hardware transformation is driven by the many-core architecture, which will soon support thousands of threads in processes for widely used software applications using semantic integration (described later). On the software front, look forward to changes from client cloud computing,1,2 in which information
is permanently stored in servers on the Internet and cached temporarily on clients that range from single chip sensors, handhelds, notebooks, desktops, and entertainment centers to huge data centers. (Even data centers are clients that often cache their information to guard against geographical disaster.) Client cloud computing will provide much-needed new capabilities such as maintaining client privacy by storing information on servers encrypted so that it can be decrypted using only the clients private key; providing greater integration of user information obtained from competing vendors servers without requiring the vendors to interact with each other; and providing better advertising relevance and targeting without exposing client privacy. In terms of applications, scalable semantic integration is poised to bring together information from calendars and to-do lists; email archives; physical, psychological, and social presence information; documents of all sorts; contacts (including social graphs); and search results.
This column examines how this perfect disruption is causing a paradigm shift from mental agents to organizations of restricted general-
ity (ORGs) as the foundation for implementing large-scale Internet applications.
How ORGs Address the Perfect Disruption
ORGs is a name for the paradigm in which people are tightly integrated with information technology that enables them to function organizationally.13 ORGs formalize existing practices to provide a framework for addressing issues of authority, accountability, scalability, and robustness using methods that are analogous to human organizations. (Of course, as any reader of Dilbert comics knows, such organizational practices are imperfect.) Functional specialization within ORGs aids scalability by dividing up the workload and aids robustness by requiring specialized suborganizations to negotiate agreements according to their differing viewpoints and responsibilities.
ORGs are...