True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (15 page)

Conclusion

This chapter has described the outlines of a pervasive practice of control, the panoptic sort. This practice is not a conspiracy of any person or group; rather, it is a tragedy of the information commons where each actor works in his own best interest and the result is something undesirable for all of us. The panoptic sort works to control us by shaping our behaviors, our expectations, as well as our reactions to society and to each other.

The goal of this control is optimum efficiency, expressed in terms of maximizing business profitability. The techniques of the sort are not particularly new, but the technology of the network era allows unprecedented extensions of control into every aspect of our lives. This very extension is itself undesirable, as it conflicts with our modern notions of privacy.

Two possible outcomes have been described, providing endpoints on a spectrum of possibilities. In one extreme case, nothing changes and we sink slowly into an information panopticon. In the other, everything changes and we establish technological barriers to protect ourselves. In reality, the future probably lies somewhere in between these two extremes. Governments may take some steps to protect individuals' privacy as might the people themselves. Corporations may realize that it is not in their best interest to continually intrude and could exercise some measure of self-restraint.

Fundamentally, though, the most important question is what we think our society is good for. If we allow the panoptic sort to continue we are resigning ourselves to a world in which corporate efficiency is the highest goal we can aspire to. Somehow, there seems to be something wrong with that idea.

Thanks

Special thanks to the members of the MIT Media Lab's Narrative Intelligence reading group for helpful discussions of material from the Gandy book. Brad Rhodes provided helpful comments on a draft.

Intelligent Software

Pattie Maes

Most of the articles in this book are about the Internet insofar as it can be used by humans wishing to interact in certain ways. But there are other entities that “live” on the Internet and off, and in her article, Pattie Maes describes ways in which software can act as intelligent agents on the Internet. The development of intelligent agents is one of the most startling and potentially important developments in cybernetics, with the potential to affect virtually all aspects of Internet interactions within a relatively short period of time.

Pattie Maes has been an innovative, productive contributor to the MIT Media Lab for nearly two decades, and was a founder of Firefly Networks, Inc. She has done groundbreaking research into intelligent agents and artificial intelligence, working both with other researchers and independently.

In the following article she shows in a comprehensible way how such agents function now and might function in the future. If this sounds like science fiction, guess again, and welcome to the future! This article was first published in
Scientific American
in 1995.

 

 

 

Computers are as ubiquitous as automobiles and toasters, but exploiting their capabilities still seems to require the training of a supersonic test pilot. VCR displays blinking a constant 12 noon around the world testify to this conundrum. As interactive television, palmtop diaries and “smart” credit cards proliferate, the gap between millions of untrained users and an equal number of sophisticated microprocessors will become even more sharply apparent. With people spending a growing proportion of their lives in front of computer screens—informing and entertaining one another, exchanging correspondence, working, shopping, and falling in love—some accommodation must be found between limited human attention spans and increasingly complex collections of software and data.

Computers currently respond only to what interface designers call direct manipulation. Nothing happens unless a person gives commands from a keyboard, mouse, or touch screen. The computer is merely a passive entity waiting to execute specific, highly detailed instructions; it provides little help for complex tasks or for carrying out actions (such as searches for information) that may take an indefinite time.

If untrained consumers are to employ future computers and networks effectively, direct manipulation will have to give way to some form of delegation. Researchers and software companies have set high hopes on so-called software agents, which “know” users' interests and can act autonomously on their behalf. Instead of exercising complete control (and taking responsibility for every move the computer makes), people will be engaged in a cooperative process in which both human and computer agents initiate communication, monitor events, and perform tasks to meet a user's goals.

The average person will have many alter egos—in effect, digital proxies—operating simultaneously in different places. Some of these proxies will simply make the digital world less overwhelming by hiding technical details of tasks, guiding users through complex online spaces or even teaching them about certain subjects. Others will actively search for information their owners may be interested in or monitor specified topics for critical changes. Yet other agents may have the authority to perform transactions (such as online shopping) or to represent people in their absence. As the proliferation of paper and electronic pocket diaries has already foreshadowed, software agents will have a particularly helpful role to play as personal secretaries—extended memories that remind their bearers where they have put things, whom they have talked to, what tasks they have already accomplished and which remain to be finished.

This change in functionality will most likely go hand in hand with a change in the physical ways people interact with computers. Rather than manipulating a keyboard and mouse, people will speak to agents or gesture at things that need doing. In response, agents will appear as “living” entities on the screen, conveying their current state and behavior with animated facial expressions or body language rather than windows with text, graphs, and figures.

A Formidable Goal

Although the tasks we would like software agents to carry out are fairly easy to visualize, the construction of the agents themselves is somewhat more problematic. Agent programs differ from regular software mainly by what can best be described as a sense of themselves as independent entities. An ideal agent knows what its goal is and will strive to achieve it. An agent should also be robust and adaptive, capable of learning from experience and responding to unforeseen situations with a repertoire of different methods. Finally, it should be autonomous, so that it can sense the current state of its environment and act independently to make progress toward its goal.

Programmers have difficulty crafting even conventional software; how will they create agents? Indeed, current commercially available agents barely justify the name. They are not very intelligent; typically, they just follow a set of rules that a user specifies. Some e-mail packages, for example, allow a user to create an agent that will sort incoming messages according to sender, subject, or contents. An executive might write a rule that forwards copies of all messages containing the word “meeting” to an administrative assistant. The value of such a minimal agent relies entirely on the initiative and programming ability of its owner.

Artificial-intelligence researchers have long pursued a vastly more complex approach to building agents. Knowledge engineers endow programs with information about the tasks to be performed in a specific domain, and the programs infer the proper response to a given situation. An artificially intelligent e-mail agent, for example, might know that people may have administrative assistants, that a particular user has an assistant named, say, George, that an assistant should know the boss's meeting schedule, and that a message containing the word “meeting” may contain scheduling information. With this knowledge, the agent would deduce that it should forward a copy of the message.

People have been trying to build such knowledge-based agents for forty years. Unfortunately, this approach has not yet resulted in any commercially available agents. Although knowledge engineers have been able to codify many narrow domains, they have been unable to build a base of all the commonsense information that an agent might need to operate in the world at large. At present, the only effort to systematize that knowledge is at the CYC project at Cycorp in Austin, Tex. It is too early to tell whether a CYC-based agent would have all the knowledge it needs to make appropriate decisions and especially whether it would be able to acquire idiosyncratic knowledge for a particular user. Even if CYC is successful, it may prove hard for people to trust an agent instructed by someone else.

Both the limited agents now distributed commercially and the artificial-intelligence versions under development rely on programming in one form or another. A third and possibly most promising approach employs techniques developed in the relatively young field of artificial life, whose practitioners study mechanisms by which organisms organize themselves and adapt in response to their environment. Although they are still primitive, artificial-life agents are truly autonomous: in effect, they program themselves. Their software is designed to change its behavior based on experience and on interactions with other agents. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we have built software agents that continuously watch a person's actions and automate any regular patterns they detect. An e-mail agent could learn by observation that the user always forwards a copy of a message containing the word “meeting” to an administrative assistant and might then offer to do so automatically.

Agents can also learn from agents that perform the same task. An e-mail agent faced with an unknown message might query its counterparts to find out, for example, that people typically read e-mail messages addressed to them personally before they read messages addressed to a mailing list. Such collaboration can make it possible for collections of agents to act in sophisticated, apparently intelligent ways even though any single agent is quite simple.

Turing Meets Darwin

Over time, “artificial evolution” can codify and combine the behaviors of the most effective agents in a system (as rated by their owners) to breed an even fitter population. My colleagues and I have built such a system to develop agents to search a database and retrieve articles that might interest their users. Each succeeding generation matches its owners' interests better.

In time, this approach could result in a complete electronic ecosystem housed in the next century's computer networks. Agents that are of service to users or to other agents will run more often, survive and reproduce; those that are not will eventually be purged. Over time, these digital life-forms will fill different ecological niches. Some agents could evolve to be good indexers of databases, whereas others would use their indices to find articles of interest to a particular user. There will be examples of parasitism, symbiosis, and many other phenomena familiar from the biological world. As external demands for information change, the software ecosystem will continually renew itself.

Obviously the widespread dissemination of agents will have enormous social, economic, and political impact. Agents will bring about a social revolution: almost anyone will have access to the kind of support staff that today is the mark of a few privileged people. As a result, they will be able to digest large amounts of information and engage in several different activities at once. The ultimate ramifications of this change are impossible to predict.

The shape of the changes that agents bring will, of course, depend on how they are employed; many questions have yet to be answered, others even to be asked. For example, should users be held responsible for the actions of their agents? How can we insure that an agent keeps private all the very personal information it accumulates about its owner?

Should agents automate the bad habits of their owners or try to teach them better ones (and if so, who defines “better”)? As the electronic ecosystem grows in complexity and sophistication, will it be possible to insure that there is still enough computing power and communications bandwidth left over for the myriad tasks that human beings want to get accomplished? The limited experiments that researchers have performed thus far only hint at the possibilities now opening up.

The Right to Read

Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman, recipient of the 1990 ACM Grace Murray Hopper award for developing GNU Emacs, founded in 1983 the project to develop the free/libre GNU operating system (see
http://gnu.org/gnu
). He is one of the most important advocates of free/libre software and that users deserve control over their own computing.

Mr. Stallman has chosen not to allow his article to be included in this e-book edition of the anthology, for the reasons he states below. We respect his views on both the right to read and also on the right to privacy. Therefore we're pleased to include his statement below. We live in a world that is filled with surveillance cameras, digital footprints and other means of monitoring the movements and activities of virtually everyone in the world. The only people who might escape the relentless omniscience of our surveillance society are those living in remote areas that do not have any connection to the many means, physical and virtual, by which human activity can be tracked.

And one can argue that even in such remote areas, eyes in the sky-drones, satellites-can find you. The development of the technology to identify and keep track of people does not give governments and other organizations the right to invade our privacy.

Sociopolitical change always lags behind technological change, so it is not terribly surprising that we have been wrestling with these developments. It is now incumbent on our society to deal with surveillance technology in all its forms, to find ways to protect the privacy that humans are entitled to as one of the most basic rights. That effort is happening right now, and will continue until we have managed to rein in the currently unbridled and irresponsible use of this technology, to restore the balance of the need to communicate and regulate and the right of people to mind their own business without government or other organizations poking their noses into it.