Slashdot Mirror
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."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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."
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.
That's a feature, not a bug. We're working on the problem. So are others.
"Adblock" is just the beginning. There's Customize Google, which will remove Google text ads. It's a Firefox extension. Also removes Google ad tracking.
We have SiteTruth, which is a form of "intelligent agent" that rates sites for legitimacy, digging in various data sources and reading through the site for business addresses to find out who's behind the site. (No clear business location on a commercial site yields a bad rating.) We mostly use Yahoo search, but we also have a front end for Google which leaves the ads in, then rates both the organic search results and the ads for legitimacy.
As a general rule, advertised sites rate lower than organic search results. We see that with our system, and systems that rate by other criteria (user ratings, hostile code scanning, etc.) see similar results. This makes sense; if you're getting good positioning in organic search results, why run ads in the search engine? There's a clear "bottom-feeder effect" in search engine ads.
shameless, misleading and annoying ads have ruined the internet. Because make no mistake, it's those assholes that insist on popping shit all over my screen who are ruining it for themselfs. unobtrusive ads such as adsense show no sign of having these ad blocking problems, google pumps money into mozilla/firefox so they can't be too upset.
my only regret is not being able to give all the people responsible for beeping flashing flash ads a punch in the eye. oh well maybe i can do it when they serv me my drive through in the near future.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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
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