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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."
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
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.
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"