Pattie Maes...Interacting with Virtual Pets...Doors2

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Some of you may have noticed that I've recently become interested in building real or naturally intelligent agents (points proudly at heavily pregnant belly). My talk is about something that I've been doing for a much longer time, namely, building artificially intelligent agents and artificial creatures.

S o f t w a r e   A g e n t s

By now, I'm sure most of you are convinced that the home of the future will have a physical or real component as well as digital, virtual components. But a point that hasn't been stressed very much is that this virtual half of our home will be inhabited by agents or creatures. So the virtual half of our home won't just be a passive data landscape waiting to be explored by us. There will be active entities there that can sense the environment--the digital world--and perform actions in the digital world and interact with us. We call these entities software agents. A software agent has a very broad definition. It's a process that lives in the world of computers and computer networks and can operate autonomously to fulfil one or more tasks.

 
 

I've portrayed the software agents in this environment as little creatures like ants and ticks and so on. I chose this metaphor deliberately because a software agent actually has a lot in common with real creatures. A software agent also senses its environment (the digital world, in this case) and can act upon it and make changes.

 
 

A software agent is also semi-intelligent. It's not as intelligent as a human being, but it may have the intelligence of an ant or a tick and, hopefully, later, of more complex kinds of animals. Another parallel is that these agents are mobile. Most of these software agents can move around in the world that they live in. A lot of them will have a home where they reside most of the time: one of the notes in the network, one of the client's computers or one of the end consumers' computers, for example. Just like real creatures, some agents will act as pets and others will be more like free agents. Some agents will belong to a user, will be maintained by a user and will live mostly in that user's computer. Others will be free agents that don't really belong to anyone.

 
 

And just like real creatures, the agents will be born, die and reproduce. They will also form complete ecologies and may discover certain niches they can occupy while they perform useful tasks. So why do we need these software agents in the digital world or in cyberspace? I'm convinced that we need them because the digital world is too overwhelming for people to deal with, no matter how good the interfaces we design. There is just too much information. Too many different things are going on, to many new services are being offered, etc. etc. etc. I believe we need some intelligent processes to help us with all of these computer-based tasks. Once we have this notion of autonomous processes that live in computer networks, we can also implement a whole range of new functionalities or functions. We won't just be helping people with existing tasks -- we'll also be able to do some new things.

 
 

Basically, we're trying to change the nature of human computer interaction. The current dominant metaphor is that of direct manipulation. The user manipulates representations of data and information to make things happen. I believe that that metaphor will have to be unmantled by a very different one which Allen Kay has termed indirect management. Users will not only be manipulating things personally, but will also manage some agents that work on their behalf.

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Last Updated: 23 feb 1995