Mission

Our mission in brief:

The mission of Utilika Foundation is to contribute to the theory and practice of universal interactivity. In a world of universal interactivity, any two or more persons on Earth could converse, work, and play together at will, and human beings could express their aspirations to, and be understood by, intelligent machines, which could join with other machines and human beings to pursue goals. We aim to make our contribution through activities--pure and applied research, publication, conferences, education, and commercialization--that advance the philosophy, science, and technology of communication and collaboration among diverse human and artificial agents.

A bit more detail:

Our vision: Fantasies of universal human and human-machine interactivity have become more realistic with the development of world-scale and informatic institutions, technologies, and activities. Hundreds of standards have been emerging for aspects of interaction such as communication protocols, device interoperability, software interfaces, user interfaces, query encoding, text formats, knowledge representation, algorithm representation, and agent coordination. These help to overcome arbitrary obstacles to human and human-machine cooperation. As a result, organizational design has new aims. Organizations (teams, firms, schools, libraries, markets, political communities, etc.) need not be human-only; they can include artificial agents. Organizations need not be place-bound; they can be ubiquitous. Among the emerging ubiquitous human-machine organizations is a Semantic Web, a platform for social activities of many kinds, including knowledge exchange, teaching, research, invention, collaboration, commerce, governance, and civic engagement.

Our challenge: Notwithstanding this progress, we understand universal interactivity as an intrinsically problematic goal that will indefinitely resist attempts to achieve it. This is because the obstacles to interaction are not all arbitrary and thus not all amenable to technical solutions. Human and artificial agents are diverse, not merely different. Diverse preferences, interests, commitments, claims, beliefs, norms, legitimacies, customs, knowledge, presuppositions, concepts, intelligences, and languages make it difficult to define interactivity as a set of objectives. Thus, those who design systems for universal interactivity are designing systems that will process cooperation, negotiation, competition, and conflict (recursively, of course--negotiation over competition, etc.). (Cf. Terry Winograd, "From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design", 1997; Clay Shirky, "The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview", 2003.)

Our response: For this reason, we have included not only the technology but also the science and philosophy of universal interactivity in our mission. We believe that it will serve the public interest to develop the world's capacity for universal interactivity, and that this capacity is a mixture of scientific and technological knowledge and social and humanistic thinking. How can this work be truly interdisciplinary, rather than merely multidisciplinary? Our bias is toward rigorous theory and evaluation as boundary-transcending modes of inquiry.

To pursue this mission effectively, we intend to concentrate most of our resources on particular interests.