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."

Agents are BS

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:holy shit!

[phantomcircuit]

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

Credit card transactions are processed by credit card processing companies, exactly what you say won't happen is already standard practice.

Re:The "ad-supported Internet"

[Animats]

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 [customizegoogle.com], which will remove Google text ads. It's a Firefox extension. Also removes Google ad tracking.

We have SiteTruth [sitetruth.com], 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 [sitetruth.com] 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.

What goes around, comes around

[BeerCat]

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.

Everybody's missing the point

[spaceman375]

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.