Intelligent agents stink. Agents are those programs that are supposed to get to know you and act autonomously on the Net on your behalf, finding you music you'd like to listen to, for instance. Proponents say agents will make everyone more effective by giving them a virtual support staff. I'm concerned that agents will be to the Web what commercials were to television: something that seemed like a practical idea but instead made the whole enterprise ugly and stupid. Proponents maintain that agents are the next stage in interface design. My experience is that "autonomy" tends to make programmers lazy and user interfaces worse. It is easier for a programmer to say a program is autonomous because then it has the right to be quirky.
Supporters say that traditional concerns about user interface will be less important because agents will be smart enough to figure out what we want them to do. This is where I really get scared. I am concerned that people will gradually, and perhaps not even consciously, adjust their lives to make agents appear to be smart. If an agent seems smart, it might really mean that people have dumbed themselves down to make their lives more easily representable by their agents' simple database design.
This is a serious problem because it could sneak up on us. People are so much more flexible and prone to suggestion than computers. Novices already tend to defer to computers, blaming themselves when they're hard to use. Agents would present users with a path of least resistance, reflecting the life pattern and category topology built into the agent's data-base. Many of us already lead lives designed to be favourably assessed by the crude databases that calculate credit ratings. Imagine if our tastes in literature, surgeons and blind dates were influenced in the same way. Agents would be like the TV commercial - a simple device that causes a grand decrease in the beauty and intelligence of our society.
The argument has been made that agents will give the disadvantaged access to the tools and staff formerly available only to the rich. Truly disadvantaged people are those who need food and shelter, of course, not more Net tools, but to play along, can a middle-class person really be empowered by a software agent?
For an agent to seem autonomous, you have to choose to not look at or understand its guts. If you tweak its guts directly, you're back in the stone ages of "direct manipulation". Instead of consciously composing a query - in AltaVista, say - for the kind of music you want to find, you let the query get constructed automatically by a program that assesses the music you've been listening to.
What if this were happening with something more serious than your choice in singers? What if agents were shopping for your medicine and your kid's education? Then they would open you up to a new category of abuse. Agents wouldn't be innocent little servant programs. Today's advertising agencies will become tomorrow's counter-agent agencies. This might involve fancy hacking, but softer approaches might also be possible - counter-agencies could gain information about agent innards to attract them, like flowers wooing bees.
In answer to the above objections, proponents suggest that agents will evolve to become better and that we need to put up with them in the meantime. Supporters have so much faith that agents will one day be bearers of authentic wisdom that they are willing to ask us all to endure an indefinite intermediate period.
It's bad enough when we are made into suckers by books, TV and other old media. With agents we would be building inadequate ideas about ourselves into the functional fabric of our actions.
The whole point of the Net is the empowerment of people, not computers. But people can only be empowered if they choose to be. Let's not blow this chance for more human autonomy because we're caught up in the fantasy of machine intelligence.
Jaron Lanier is a composer and computer scientist. He also coined the term "virtual reality."