Douglas Rushkoff: ONLINE
Of all the cool and creepy pieces of vapourware to have emerged since the Web went mainstream, the coolest and creepiest have got to be intelligent agents. And, according to the press releases jamming my e-mail server, they’re here: autonomous pieces of programming trained to race around cyberspace doing our (largely consumerist) bidding while we’re out watching football, making love or doing whatever else we’ve decided not to let our software do for us.
The idea is simple. Intelligent agents trek through cyberspace and fetch stuff. Unlike Web search engines that scan existing data bases, agents are free-roaming pieces of code that roam out across the Internet, searching for information that satisfies your stated need.
An agent learns new things and alters its own commands based on its growing knowledge of its controller. You provide the initial instructions, but once it leaves your control it’s on its own.
Conventional wisdom – as conjured by MIT’s Medialab, Autonomy’s Agentware website and a new book by IBM programmers called Constructing Intelligent Agents with Java – holds that agents will prove to be the Internet’s deadliest killer applications.
By allowing us to set our desires on auto-pilot, agented online commerce and entertainment could yield profits unimagined outside the pages of Wired or the promotional literature of Silicon Valley’s venture capital firms.
In this case, however, I suspect that such “conventional wisdom” may perhaps give way to wisdom that’s a lot older and even more fundamentally conventional.
Back in 1967, Marshall McLuhan, the father of all media theorists, explained to a bewildered Barbara Walters that the discomfort associated with electronic media stems from the fact that it transports the people who use it.
“On the telephone,” he said, “it is you who gets sent, not the message. That’s why the medium is the message. It’s because it sends you, and not just what you’re saying.”
With intelligent agents that rule appears to have been broken, or at least bent. Are we being sent somewhere, or not? In this new context, McLuhan’s sentiment hearkens back to the Native American belief that photographing a man steals his soul – that somehow, in the transmutation of physical matter to a two-dimensional silver nitrate image, some essence is transferred forever beyond its bearer’s control.
Similarly, the age of electronic media steadily facilitates humanity’s ever- deepening immersion in inorganic cyberspace.
I’ve always argued that each new device or network through which we express our essence, however electronic, serves as an extension of our will, even our spirit. But agents may extend us a bit further than we’ll find we like.
If a visit to a Web page literally sends us somewhere, then what does an autonomous agent do? Is it an extension of who we are, or some sort of offspring representing our interests as best it knows how?
When we’re on the phone or in a chat room, we are in direct interaction with another person.
When we send an agent to do our bidding, we are perhaps many steps removed from the effects of our actions. Something is transported beyond our sight and command. Like McLuhan said, it’s a piece of us out there.
Agents’ very power derives from their programming’s ability to alter its own nature based on increasing familiarity with our desires. Even first-generation agents like the movie guides of Firefly amply illustrate this potentially unsettling principle. The program asks you to rate a series of movies. Thereafter, your agent will spit out only the titles of movies it thinks you’ll like. Over time, as it watches you rate more films, the software learns your tastes so well it anticipates your own aesthetics better then you’d be able to yourself.
This software’s potential is, frankly, staggering. An academic agent will do months’ worth of research in a matter of minutes. A news-gathering agent will provide a distillation of information precisely tailored to your needs.
The engines of capitalism, exerting themselves through technology, pull us in whatever direction offers the fattest bottom line. But we’re also spiritual mammals caught in the thrall of ancestral memory and the desire to move towards greater levels of awareness and connection to one another.
I suspect that, for many of us, confronted by software whose raison d’tre is to absorb and embody our mental essence while leaving us behind, the cautious tribesman will win out over the rapacious venture capitalist.
After all, what shall it profit a man to gain the world if he should lose his soul? c Douglas Rushkoff
Douglas Rushkoff can be reached at