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Intelligent Software Agents - Are We Ready?
Anti-Luddite writes In an article on the Internet Evolution site, analyst Tom Nolle discusses the potential of 'Intelligent Software Agent (ISA)' technology. He points to specific types such as 'search assistant ISAs,' which will inevitably flop before their potential is realized. He speaks favorably of the 'mobile ISA' which he says, 'involves dispatching mobile agents from one computer and delivering them to a remote computer for execution.' While hailing the potential of this new generation of agent technology, Nolle seems skeptical about our ability to prepare for and handle its emergence, particularly because of flaws in the agent research community."
Yes, software making desicions i'm capable of making myself, what could go wrong!
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
From the article:
> A truly relevant shared agent would filter out all ads and click-through trap sites,
> and totally mess up the dynamic of the ad-supported Internet.
Sounds like the Firefox plugin "adblock", which works wonders. Blocking ads is apparently also considered stealing by some... huh. That's a tough sell.
The Army reading list
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Apparently no MBAs around. But Intelligent Agents are, not surprisingly, Artificial Intelligence. Strong A.I. is a term that A.I. researchers can't even agree on. I think it will happen after Duke Nukem Forever.
The article says that soon you will send out an agent from your mobile phone and it will find your coworkers who are wandering around the city. Then they will all get a text with directions to a meetup location. And the article has nothing to say about how you will react when you get a random text from HAL-9000 saying "Turn left and park at Starbucks for a mandatory meeting."
The article is fluff: nonexistent technology is being proposed to solve imaginary problems. Unless it is a sci-fi story, the rule of thumb should be: stop reading as soon as "A.I." is mentioned, for whatever follows is invariably a result of someone's thoroughly clueless but overactive imagination. Not only we are not close to building a "thinking" machine, we have no idea in which direction to concentrate our efforts.
Computer hardware and software become increasingly more sophisticated. Sometimes a system is complex enough to momentarily appear intelligent from a layman's point of view. Any attempt at serious interaction, however, quickly clears the smoke screen. Creating AI - in the pure sense of this term, as being an artificial equivalent to our own intelligence - at the very minimum is like discovering an extraterrestrial civilization.
Can one achieve this with "if...then" statements and "for" loops? Call me crazy, but somehow I don't think so.
The roleplaying game Trinity [formerly Aeon Trinity] had different agents that could perform all kinds of actions for you. Intelligent Agents that are basically mobile agents - moving from one computing system to the next gathering the information you required. It wasn't an instantaneous way to get information (depending on how you played the game of course). Having said that, I think this kind of technology could be really cool. Especially in terms of Research - Imagine where you could simply tell your intelligent agent "I want information on [insert subject field here]" and after a couple of hours of searching online, it comes back with the results. It need not require an advanced AI (although it would surely need some form of intelligence), but the options are limitless. Especially when you start looking at technologies like XML and the semantic-web.
The main problem with traditional AI research has been an overstating of the possibilities. Natural language processing isn't as far off as most people think it is, but when it hits, people are going to criticize it by saying "why doesn't it understand me when I say 'lol, r u 4 reals?'?".
Most AI talk is marketing hype, but the main idea to keep in mind when discussing AI is, as one of my lecturers said "AI, after it has been developed, is no longer AI". Think the minimax algorithm, when it was first used in chess, it was groundbreaking AI. Now it is considered a boring and obvious mathematical process.
Another problem is that most scenarios people think "need" AI can be solved using standard processes. I don't need an agent to "(an ISA) making sure you don't get fast food restaurant references when you need a poet's name" (from TFA), I just type in "Poet" as another search query.
I am a little biased, as I plan to move into smart computing after Uni, but there is a lot of good people doing good research into AI. It is a pity that most only see the marketing fluff and past overestimates by a few vocal researchers, rather then the good work being done by most in the field.