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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."
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That has got to be the stupidest "yep, it's gonna happen" post I've ever read in my entire life. So I wanna process something but can't do it on my comp so the app sends out the executable data to a server, executes it, and sends back the result faster than my PC could have done it. Well here's a little question I ask to the person saying this is gonna take off. What happens when I send some modified data to the your server farm to process and it's actually a replicating virus. I say thanks for the DOS headquarters, guys. And don't anyone dare say "oh, well they'll 100% protect it so only their code can run" cuz that's not gonna happen. Plus besides the obvious security nightmare, I can only imagine the cost for this type of software when you're basically renting a server. Either that or you can only use the app for a certain amount of time or they'll charge you more? Nobody's gonna put up with that kinda of business model. Oh and I don't think companies would feel comfortable sending their customer data and credit card transactions off to be processed somewhere else and just hope nobody records the data. Let's say MS Office 2010 lets you process your huge customer excel sheet mail merges and someone at the server place decides hmmm I'm gonna record everyone's data and sell it to spammers! I can think of like 10 other ideas why this is the stupidest software idea on Earth but I'm sick of typing.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
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....
I once had a long discussion at a computer science conference with a guy who had just delivered a long and overly positive presentation on the future of agent computing. By the end of our discussion he admitted that it's basically a lot of bullshit with no foreseeable practical applications and a wealth of security problems. Just a convenient, buzzwordy way of getting research grants.
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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Just look around at the state of software and tell me with a straight face that intelligent software agent is not an oxymoron.
File this under what could possibly go wrong.
Absolute statements are never true
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."
You sign your posts as part of your post, and I fucking hate you for it. There's a goddamn SIGNATURE field on your damned profile. It's nothing personal, you just picked the wrong number.
Fuck all you idiots who do that crap.
you get a random text from HAL-9000 saying "Turn left and park at Starbucks for a mandatory meeting." ...and then HAL will refuse to open the door to the said Starbucks---ruining the caffeine fix!
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
I thought PCI replaced ISA ten years ago!
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
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 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.
Some years ago, talk of software agents was all the rage. The theory was that they could be despatched to search web sites, and find and return the relevant data to you. It was going to be "the next Big Thing"
At the time, it seemed promising - the nascent Web was very hard to search (and the serious option was to have a paper "web directory").
And then, in 1995, Altavista came along - a search engine that:
1) worked
2) was fast enough for those on dial-up
and the whole notion died a death; direct typing in a search box beat nebulous user-programmable "agents" every time.
So, it looks like it's "Welcome to 1994" all over again.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
It's not the agents that are going out away from me, it's me who's going out away from my usual computer and data. When I think of agents, I think of MY programs and desktop following me around and running on whatever is closest to me. That means my agents will inevitably be hosted as a guest on all sorts of computers, from the places I work to where I shop. I'd want my agents to watch my credit cards and challenge any charge that doesn't come from whatever my current location is. They should get some cache space on the bus computer while I'm riding to work, and be able to display my personal desktop on any handy display I want it on. When I go to a friend's house my stuff should "follow" me (actually just setup communication to my home/work boxen transparently.) If there's enuf local resources, I'd want a local VM running my entire workstation setup, minus whatever sensitive data I want to keep in a vault.
I don't want to "send out" agents on the net without me - I want a "cloud" of agents dragging my corner of the net along with ME as I go out in the real world.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth