Chapter 11

The enigmatic world of bots and personal agents

 

A hybrid solution needed

The main message of the last two chapters is that there are some very important areas of knowledge that cannot be handled by database solutions. These are the information areas where there is so much volatility and change that the costs of maintaining up-to-date, accurate and complete records is prohibitively expensive. Without appropriate databases, the only practical way such knowledge can be shared is through personal contact between people.

Unfortunately, dealing with people is far more complex than accessing information from a database. People are not machines, so, they aren't amenable to being simply information sources. It takes time to get to know someone well enough to be able to ask them questions. It takes time to know if they have sufficient knowledge to provide the answers. It takes time to transfer information. It takes time to explain a problem to someone else and it takes time for them to understand the problem and provide an answer. It takes time to check out if the information given is correct. This is not a very efficient form of information transfer.

Somewhere, in between a database and a person to person exchange of information, there needs to be a hybrid solution that combines the advantages of person to person contact with the ease of accessing a database. Such a hybrid solution is possible by combining the concept of a living database with the concept of bots and personal agents. This solution may not be suitable for every kind of situation, but, where bots and personal agents can be used, the efficiency of human interaction can be substantially improved.

This chapter is about using bots and personal agents in this hybrid role, but first, it is necessary to have a more abstract view of a people space, so as not to confuse this concept with the rigidity of conventional database thinking.

 

Summarising the last two chapters

To try to get away from a people space being a conventional database structure, let's consider what a people space actually does. This has been very well expressed by one of the readers in the virtual cafe of reviewers, Vic Harper, who sent in his summary of the current position as it stood at the end of the last chapter:

 

I already know there is....

too much information out there to gather or sort

too little time to read all that you want to

too little energy to absorb all that is useful

too much technology to master

too much useless dribble masking the useful

too much redundant efforts

too much lost stuff

 

I have just learned of a solution that provides .....

a choice of many useful meeting places to meet others that are the 'right' ones for whatever my reason/need

a way to organize the location (addressability) of these places

a nice easy way to create a new space if the need arises (Bottom up and object oriented, sweet)

a way to facilitate me when I'm in that neat little space

a way to put a virtual me into that virtual space

a way to have my clone in many places at once

a way to sort out what is actually useful to me without a lot of energy

a way to save time

Vic Harper isn't visualising a database structure, he is seeing a mental picture of a space that can help him to meet people who might be of value to him.

 

Visualising a people space

From the comments of the various people who read the last two chapters there seemed to be a sharp polarisation of views as to what a people space represents. Those who saw it in terms of a database thought the concept highly impractical and fraught with problems associated with the choosing of categories and the freedom given to users to construct it in a random way.

Others saw it quite differently. They didn't think of the people space in terms of categorised compartments, but, as a valuable conceptual model from which to think about meeting people who could help them obtain hard-to-find knowledge or assist them with e-business problems. Seeing a people space in this more abstract form, requires a considerable paradigm shift that is not easy to make– and is even more difficult to explain.

In writing the book "Magical A-Life Avatars", I had a similar problem when explaining the concept of object oriented programming. Some programmers could think only in terms of the syntax and structure of the programming and couldn't catch on to the idea of object oriented design strategy at all. Others saw beyond the code and thought about the memory space in the computer that the code would fit into. They realised they could divide that area up into self contained areas into which they could place little code modules that could function completely independently of any of the other code in the memory space.

Having this higher level view of the programming environment, allowed the programmers to think in terms of small code modules that interacted with each other. They could then rise above the level of the detail of the coding to concentrate upon the functions themselves. In this way they could construct high level systems that called upon functions, without having their thinking cluttered up with how the functions were performing their tasks.

To explain this idea of thinking about a formatted space in memory, I used the following dialogue which appears in chapter 4 of the book "Magical A-Life avatars":

 

Presenting a new concept:

Time: Early 1970's

Place: The president's office in a large electronics company in California

"The president will see you now."

The young man was ushered into the president's sumptuous office and shown to a seat in front of the huge desk dominating the room. He waited nervously for the president to finish reading through the pile of papers on his desk. The president looked up at him.

"You the guy with the killer app for these new-fangled computer things?"

"I think so", replied the young man nervously.

"What is it, then?"

"Well, it's sort of difficult to describe", began the young man hesitantly. "It consists of a grid of rectangles covering a computer screen".

"What's in the rectangles?"

"Nothing".

"Nothing?"

"Well, not until the user puts something into them."

"What sort of things?"

"Text and figures, but figures mostly, because the rectangles are used to do mathematical operations on the figures".

"So each rectangle is programmed to act like a calculator?"

"Well, they could be. It depends how the user programs them."

"You mean these empty rectangles have to be programmed by the user?"

"Yes, that's right. The rectangles are connected to each other by some kind of formula."

"What¹s the formula you use to connect up these rectangles?"

"I don't provide the formula."

"Who does?"

"The user."

"How are these rectangles connected to each other, then?"

"They aren't connected until the user supplies the connections."

"So, this killer app of yours consists of a grid of empty, unrelated rectangles that the user has to fill up with figures and connect together with their own programming and formulae."

"That's right."

"What are you going to call this killer app of yours?"

"I thought of calling it a spreadsheet."

"Nice name. Thank you for coming along."

"Thank you for seeing me."

"Good-bye."

"Good-bye."

The above scene seems humorous to us now because we know what a spreadsheet is and we can see how easy it would have been for somebody without previous knowledge to miss the point of having empty rectangles in a spreadsheet. The idea that you can model a business or a manufacturing process on a spreadsheet consisting of nothing but empty cells isn't instantly obvious. However, as the Taoists say, "The usefulness of a bowl comes exactly from its emptiness."

The dialogue illustrates the conceptual hurdle that has to be overcome before a living database, or a people space, can be usefully employed in the creation of an e-business. It isn't about planning the meeting areas, or, classifying them. It's about creating a structure where useful meeting places can appear spontaneously in a formatted space. In this way, any details of the structure are irrelevant – only the benefits that manifest within this space are important.

The example used in the last two chapters – of a people space being used by cancer patients to find available treatments – illustrates how the space can be used without the need for any rules or algorithms. Users just click their way to a meeting place where they have an opportunity to meet others who have a special interest in the same particular narrow area of knowledge as themselves.

There were reservations from some readers about the success of some of these meeting places. Would they attract a viable number of people? The answer is: nobody knows. The outcome is statistical. Some will work, others will fail.

This can be compared to many night clubs opening at the same time in the centre of a large city. Each night club owner would have planned to make their establishment successful and popular, but, it is unlikely that they would all succeed. Probably, nobody would be able to predict in advance which would be successful and which would fail, but, to the people who go to night clubs this is irrelevant, they will be visiting only those that succeed.

A people space with designated meeting places should be looked at is this same way. To view any particular meeting place in isolation would see all kinds of reasons why it could fail, but, from a statistical stand point, it is unlikely that they would all fail (conditional of course on there being a real need for the kind of information that the people space can provide).

For instance, a people space designed to create meeting places for people with various types of cancer could not be expected to succeed in every category. Some categories might not click at all, while others, for no accountable reason, might be a roaring success. The fact that there might be failures in amongst the successes does not invalidate the overall concept.

 

Focus of attention

Another interesting view point came out of a correspondence I had with Richard Ross, a Brit working in San Francisco. I'd met Richard some three years previously when I'd given a talk at the Hub Club in London about using agents that could represent people on the Web. When Richard heard that I would be visiting San Francisco to present a paper at BOT2001 (the annual event for all people interested in bots and intelligent agents) he suggested we met up for a chat.

To explain what I'd be talking about at BOT2001, I sent him a copy of the paper, which included a description of a living database as described in the previous two chapter. He wrote back:

I have just read the paper. What I like about it is that is suggests an approach for that old problem so rarely recognized in DP of dealing with qualitative as opposed to quantitative information and recognizes the expertise of the individual perspective in this domain.

I must say though, I'd rather see a description of the data domain less hierarchically structured. Instead of describing the data field as a tree with fixed hierarchies as implied by the address system you describe for "navigating" it (this sounds suspiciously hypertextual), I'd rather see a metaphor of the address description being a non-hierarchical one that configures the data field around me, i.e. it just offers me a particular perspective.

I could plug in things like location, language, volume etc. and I would find myself at the same cafe table as before but with having imposed rather less assumptions about the nature of the information in this domain. I suppose it's more like data visualization than navigation. It's ultimately about how I can reconfigure the way I might see the world so that it allows me to do some useful work.

Interesting stuff though, and yes, I have always thought the real power of the web was people.

Richard Ross

What I had failed to do was to provide Richard with any of the details of the personal virtual cafe. He could only visualise one half of the story: the moving around in the space, to meeting places where he could make contact with people. This view sees all the person to person interaction as happening only at meeting places on the server side of the Web.

The full story however sees the meetings as happening not only in a shared space but in a personal and private space: within the confines of a cafe created in the memory of every users own computer. These meetings will then be under individual control, where additional contacts can be brought in from anywhere in the formatted space.

This effectively reconfigures the people space individually, for every person using it, making them the centre of a non hierarchical information network that allows them to include only the people and contacts relevant to their interests.

In other words, a people space isn't set up to be the sole infra structure for interpersonal communication and interaction: it's main purpose is to allow people to find appropriate others who they can then bring into their own private information network. This is organised through their personal virtual cafe where the interactions are outside of and apart from the formal structure of the people space (see figure 11.1).

Figure 11.1

Showing diagrammatically how a formatted people space is used primarily as a source of acquiring personal contacts for a private communication network

With this visualisation of the concept, the user of a people space is not restricted at all by its formatting. The formatting has only the same significance in a people space as lines of latitude and longitude have on a map of the world: they provide a grid reference.

This can be appreciated once you realise that the route to any meeting place need not be through the hierarchies of categories. A meeting place may be recommended by somebody. This recommendation would simply provide a reference of the form "BHEAC", which would allow anyone to navigate straight to a meeting place without even being aware of the hierarchical nature of the formatting.

 

The necessary paradigm shift

Richard Ross wasn't the only person I sent a copy f my BOT2001 paper to: I also sent it to many of the reviewers of my book in the virtual cafe. I asked them to have a read through it to see if they could anticipate any awkward questions I might receive when I explained the concept of a living database to the audience in San Francisco.

I was quite alarmed when I received their responses. It seemed that no two of them were seeing the same picture. Many of them were suggesting problems with the model that shouldn't be relevant. It was a puzzle. Why should so many people not be seeing the living database as I'd been visualising it?

As I went through the various comments, it suddenly clicked what was going wrong. Most of the readers were viewing the living database from a server side perspective and not looking at it from the client side. From the server side, the meeting places might seem to be clearly defined topic areas, where the interaction of the people meeting at these places would communicate with each other only around that narrow area of interest.

However, from a client side perspective, the meeting places represent only a place of contact. The topic of interest at any particular meeting place is not a restraint upon the range of communication, but, simply serves as an indicator that those present share a single common interest. It doesn't necessarily mean that their whole range of interests are in alignment.

This can be likened to an antique dealer going to a meeting where the subject matter is snuff boxes. The antique dealer goes there to broaden her knowledge and isn't there to develop a major interest in snuff boxes. In the course of mixing with the people at the meeting she might meet somebody else who is another antique dealer who tells her about another meeting that is taking place where the discussion is old fountain pens that are becoming a popular collector's item.

This illustrates how from the organiser's perspective (the server side view) the meeting is supposed to be about snuff boxes, but, to the antique dealers who attends the meeting, it is about old fountain pens and, for one, the discovery of a new area of interest.

This is the difference between server side and client side perspectives. From the server side the categories that divide up a people space would appear to be rigid. From the client side, there is no rigidity at all – as the categories can unpredictably merge with each other. The topics are not seen as communication restraints, but, as small points of common interest that unexpectedly link people together: providing a catalyst for what might turn out to be a useful association.

One of the readers of the BOT2001 paper – William Ethridge, an Internet payment systems consultant from San Diego County in Southern California – had grasped this client side perspective of the living database, writing:

Might you be familiar with the writings of Robert Fritz? His books include "The Path of Least Resistance" and "Creating". I believe his core ideas are relevant to your work. (And how I wish I had more time to elaborate!) He makes a meticulous argument that the way to successfully achieve the desired end result is to "follow the path of least resistance" and discusses how to create the structures that make it easier – in motivation and in action – to follow those paths.

Fritz outlines the psychological patterns, and how to develop them consciously, that tend to satisfy an initially inchoate desire. No cheesy motivational writer, Fritz is an acute observer of people who successful achieve satisfaction in their lives.

Much of what he says, I believe, has application in gathering information of which one is initially unaware exists. For example, a person seeking information about a specific type of disease (to pick up on an example you used) has a specific set of motivations – however inchoate or disorganized – to gather information about that disease.

S/he may discover that the most important or useful piece of information is about how to emotionally manage the disease and treatment process, even though that was not a conscious goal. In the process of learning from others – how best to manage the disease and its treatment process – the person learns about treatment methodologies, physical effects, etc. So, the information which the person originally saw as being the desired end result becomes simply a step towards more valuable information.

Of course, all sorts of variable results can be had, depending upon the person and the myriad specifics of the situation. The point is that the goal sought is often of lesser importance than the goal actually reached – however little this fact is initially recognized.

Thus, intrinsically, the process is open-ended. Any search that is non-trivial – speaks to the most vital human concerns – cannot have a predetermined aim. Fritz writes with great insight about the "structure" (a word he often uses in a specific manner) of the process of creating, not attaining, our goals.

William Ethridge

William Ethridge's comments illustrate the kind of paradigm shift needed in order to appreciate the value of a people space. It isn't about seeing a formatted space that is designed and categorised by others. It is simply a valuable construct that allows people to make contact and, if these contacts are of special interest, bring them into their own private communication space. This private information space will be individually different for every person who uses the people space.

A people space might be imagined as a city with a large number of places where different interests groups meet for specific reasons. Instead of going to these places to join in the discussions, you might simply go there to observe and find a few people you can invite back to your own home for a private party: a party where there are only people you like and can get along with - talking always about the things you are interested in. The magic of this concept is that this ideal situation can exist for everybody simultaneously: for everybody who is using the people space to make contact with others.

 

Structure of a meeting place

At the end of the last chapter, the reader might have formed some kind of an idea as to what form a meeting place in a people space might take. It would probably be imagined as an area on a Web site where there are various options allowing the visitors to join an e-mail discussion forum, a news group or a chat room. Certainly a meeting place can be structured in this way, but, this would be a conventional server side view where all these facilities were laid on. This is illustrated in figure 11.2 which shows the meeting place as it was depicted in the last chapter.

Figure 11.2

A meeting place in a people space as it might be viewed with a server side perspective

However, this idea of a meeting place doesn't accord with the notion of every individual having their own private meeting place within their own computer, where they have complete control of the topics of discussion. This is where another sharp paradigm shift is needed.

Return now to the vision of meeting places in a large city where you go just to observe and find people you like the look of. You then invite these selected people back to your place for a party. At this party, you find out what their interests are and what interesting places they frequent. If the places they go to sound interesting you might arrange to meet them at these places. You might get their telephone number in order to have private conversations with them. You might invite them to a small dinner party you arrange for a selected few, like minded people. This is the way social contacts are created and cultivated in the social world of bricks and mortar.

This scenario can easily be emulated in the virtual world of the Internet. If the meeting places in the people space are treated as contact areas where people with a particular common interest establish a presence, everyone has an opportunity to invite any of the people who are there back to their place to maybe develop further contact and associations.

In this way, it isn't essential for the server side to arrange discussion forums, news groups or chat rooms. People could just tell each other of the e-mail forums, news groups or chat rooms they frequent. In other words, the people themselves could provide links to existing facilities for communication that are already in existence outside of the people space – established anywhere in the vast landscape of the Internet environment.

The people can swap e-mail addresses for one to one correspondence. They can arrange to be on each others lists for peer to peer instant messaging. They can form small groups for discussions in the way tables in a virtual cafe are designed to operate. Seen in this way, the people at the meeting places are capable of combining to create their own communication environments, which would be far richer and more extensive than any that could be organised on the server side.

It takes quite a radical paradigm shift to see what is happening here, as the idea of a publicly shared meeting place is transformed into a variety of individual meeting places in the virtual cafes in people's own computers.

Consider: every person at a meeting place is likely to have their own personal communication environment. When people are invited into a private cafe environment outside of the people space, their individual communication environments would have to move with them because it is part of them. Thus by bringing several contacts into a personal virtual cafe, you are effectively creating a rich communication environment which includes all of the personal communication environments of all the people invited.

This is illustrated in figure 11.3, where the contacts brought into a personal client side cafe can provide the client with a far richer environment of possible meeting places and facilities to communicate than would be available at the meeting places provided by the organisers of the people space.

Figure 11.3

A client side meeting place that is filled with contacts obtained from various meeting places in a people space. The client now has a far richer environment and choice of communication facilities available

 

Having a conventional, bricks and mortar world perspective, makes it very difficult to appreciate the full significance of this arrangement. The media of the Internet allows a phenomenon to take place that would be impossible in the real word: people can have multiple presences such that they can be at a meeting place in their own computer and at the same time be at meeting places in the computers of lots of other people. The magic of the net allows people to be at many places at the same time.

Not only this, everyone can create their own individual communication environment according to who they invite into there personal cafe of contacts. This is because a contact represents not only themselves, but, all the people they know, the newsgroups they belong to and the discussion forums they take part in.

This ties up with the ideas that were introduced at the beginning of the book – in chapters one and two – where, by having a suitable group of people in a personal cafe of contacts, an ordinary individual can become a "super individual". Not so much through direct communication with the contacts themselves but by having indirect access to all of their communication environments.

 

Meeting people on-line

The above scenario of creating client side meeting places must involve some kind of interaction between the owner of a client side cafe and the contacts that are brought in from a public meeting place. This presents a major problem because quite obviously, people can't just be yanked out of a people space and compelled to cooperate with the cafe owner's wishes, they would have to have a strong reason or motivation for wanting to communicate and cooperate with the cafe owner.

The key to any cooperation is the shared common interest. This can be both the ice breaker and the glue that holds any mutually beneficial communications together. If communication is beneficial to both parties then communication can take place. If either party does not benefit, then cooperation will not be possible. This make the success of finding suitable contacts in a people space a statistical exercise because only an unknown proportion of the other people at a meeting place will be suitably compatible with each other.

Let's say that a people space has been created for the purpose of bringing people together for the purpose of helping each other create Web sites. There are many possible categories that might include all manner of technical aspects of Web site solutions. Say one of these categories was designated for interest in payment solutions. This would attract people who provided solutions and those who needed them.

The people who needed them would be a little wary of dealing with any particular payment solution provider and might want to discuss with some of the others the relative values of the solutions on offer. By striking up private dialogues with each other the people who need the solutions can compare notes and experiences and help each other out in deciding who might be the best of the payment solution providers to get into conversation with. Such collaborative discussions would take place outside of the people space and in the private cafes of the people involved. The trick is to find somebody suitable to talk to and then persuade them to enter into personal dialogue.

However, as anyone who has engaged in this kind of Internet activity knows, it isn't a simple matter to get to really know people in Internet environments. It's something like going to a conference where you know there must be lots of interesting people who would be valuable to know but you don't actually get to talk to them. The only people who you get to know about are the speakers and this is a one way dialogue with no interaction.

There is a similar problem with large cocktail parties. There might be interesting people present but there never seems to be enough time to speak to everybody to find out who they are and what it is exactly they do. What you'd like to be able to do is is have a list of pertinent questions that you can quickly ask everyone present so you can decide who best to spend your time talking with. Unfortunately, society frowns upon this kind of behaviour.

From time to time, some of the e-mail discussion forums I belong to arrange real life meeting; usually in a wine bar or a convenient English pub, where we get together for a drink and informal chat. Invariably, these meetings fragment into small groups who engage in specific discussion concerning particular topics. There are always very interesting people at these meetings, but, it is extremely difficult to wander around to find out who everybody is, what skill sets they have and and what type of projects they are involved in. The same society norms prevail, preventing people asking each other direct and personal questions and then moving on to ask the same questions to everyone else.

These meetings are not held on a regular basis. They occur when somebody declares it is time for another meeting, others agree and then somebody takes the initiative to name a time, date and place for the meeting to be held. One time, in a forum of Web design freelancers I belong to, somebody called for a meeting to be held in London. Nobody came forward to organise the meetings so I called up a friend of mine who organises meetings for another on-line forum, who uses the premises of a private club he belongs to in London, suggesting we might organise a joint meeting between the two groups.

As the people from one group wouldn't know anything at all about the people in the other group, I asked all those who would be going to the meeting to send me a short bio, which I then put on a Web site. This worked extremely well as people could then knew beforehand who everybody was, their interests and work experiences. This allowed people to seek out those who might be of specific interest to them and led to several useful collaborative project sharing arrangements.

It is not difficult to see how such a similar arrangement might be beneficial to people who meet at virtual meeting places in a people space. This might be a key element in bringing people together.

 

Knowing who everyone else is

If we now consider a people space, where there might be hundreds of meeting places. The idea of everyone having a bio posted up on a Web site for everyone else to view isn't very practical. It would require organising. Some people wouldn't be bothered to describe themselves. In any case, it would be a daunting task to read through everybody's bio every time you entered a meeting place, to find out what kind of people were there and who would be interesting to communicate with.

What would be convenient though, would be to be able to send some kind of intelligent agent into a meeting place: to find out about everyone there and then report back to you with a list of who might be of particular interest.

Such a possibility might seem to be in the realms of science fiction, but, it is perfectly feasible in the world of bots and personal electronic agents.

 

What is a bot or personal electronic agent?

Sitting in the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, the evening before the BOT2001 seminar, with Brian Proffitt – Managing Editor of BotSpot, the bi-weekly e-magazine on bots – and Dr. Stephen Thaler, one of the other speakers whose speciality was neural nets and bot intelligence, the question arose as to what exactly was the definition of a bot. None of us could provide a definitive answer.

The speakers at the seminar were interpreting bots in a number of different ways. Some saw bots as Web crawlers or spiders, that traveled around Web sites picking up selected information. Others saw them as search engines that identified locations on the Web where information, described by key words or phrases, could be found. There were those who thought of bots as on-line avatars, who had a pictorial representation as a real person or cartoon character on a Web site, who could answer questions in an animated way; some responding in text, other speaking with voices, even some with animated emotional expressions.

There were several varieties of intelligent bots that could search through posts sent in to list serves and news groups, searching for rude words and phrases, or, detecting the spread of rumours and spam messages. Dr. Thaler was introducing learning capabilities into bots, to give them an ability to deal with vague instructions and fuzzy logic.

With all the huge variety of different forms that bots could take, it was very hard to come up with a description that fitted all categories of bots and electronic agents. It then occurred to me that this problem of bot definition was the same frustrating difficulty I'd encountered when trying to explain what an object was in object oriented programming. It's not that the concept is at all complex to understand, it's just that it requires a paradigm shift.

In the book "Lingo Sorcery - the magic of lists objects and intelligent agents", I'd explained the experience of understanding objects in an object oriented world as being similar to that of learning to ride a bicycle. When you begin learning to ride a bike, it seems impossible to be able to cycle along on two wheels because, every time you start off, you fall to one side or the other. Then suddenly, for some unaccountable reason, you find yourself cycling along and not being able to understand how you had every thought it was so very difficult.

The problem with cycling, objects and bots is that they are impossible to explain because of their simplicity rather than their difficulty. In cycling, it is momentum that keeps you upright, which cannot be appreciated until you are actually moving. With objects, the understanding comes not through looking at the complex ways in which objects can be used, but, by realising that they can be anything you want them to be. This can be as simple as giving a space in memory a name, put a program that performs a function into that space and arrange for that function to be performed when a particular message is sent to the named space. Whatever name you give that space then becomes the object that can perform a function when you (or another object) tells it to.

For example, you can give a space in memory a name like "greenFrog". You can then put into that memory space a little program that will put a picture of a little green frog on the screen when a message is sent to that memory space: "greenFrog showYourself". You could do things like putting a program in that "greenFrog" memory space that will turn off the computer when you send it the message: "greenFrog turnComputerOff".

By adding all kinds of little functional programs into this "greenFrog" memory space you can make this "green Frog" perform all kinds of useful functions on your computer. Then, when a neighbour pops into your house and sees you working at your computer and tells you they wish they could learn how to use a computer, you can tell them that you don't know yourself, but, you've got a little green frog in there that does everything for you.

This is the conceptual breakthrough that has to be made with objects and bots. They are an illusion that is used to obscure underlying complexity. Once you fill your computer memory space with green frogs, pink elephants, alien life forms or any other object you care to imagine, then you can think about what they do rather than how they do it.

Bots and personal agents are like the objects that can be created in the memory space of a computer. They are simple images that can be used to get away from the underlying complexity to be able to think about the functions they perform.

In my talk at BOT2001, I tried to convey this concept by telling a joke that was going around in the 1970's when computing was largely confined to main frames:

A man is at an airport waiting for his flight to be called when he notices a woman opposite him fiddling around with her wrist watch. The wrist watch looks unusual and instead of a clock face it has a little screen.

Curiosity gets the better of him and he goes over to the woman and asked her about this strange looking watch she is fiddling with. She then explains it is not a watch but a computer. She asks him to give her a difficult mathematical calculation to solve. The man does this and after a few taps on her wrist watch she shows him the screen and it gives the right answer.

The man is astounded (it is at a time before micro chips). "What else can it do", he asks. She then tells him to ask her a few general knowledge questions. He does this and every time she taps around on her wrist watch and up come the answer on the little screen.

"I must have this wrist watch", he tells the woman." I'm a very rich man and I'll give you any price you name". She names a price and he writes her a cheque on the spot and puts the wrist watch on his wrist.

At that moment, the man's flight is called. "Sorry", he says to the woman. "I have to go now" and starts toward the boarding gates. She calls out to him, "you've forgotten to take these" and points to two large suitcases on the floor. "They are not mine", he calls back. "Yes they are" she tells him. "You've just bought them. You need to connect the wrist watch to the electronic equipment in these cases to be able to get the computer to perform its functions".

Nobody laughed at my joke. I then explained that this wrist watch was an analogy for a bot. It was the visible interface to a complex programming environment – from which it is not possible to be separated. For bots, the equivalent of the two heavy suitcases is always some kind of database or information source, together with sophisticated algorithms to search, sort and process data.

As was discussed in the last chapter, databases are very inefficient and expensive to maintain when dealing with volatile information. This is the wrist watch equivalent of having suitcases that are too heavy to carry. Thus when thinking about bots, you have to look beyond the neat little image they convey and think about what has to go into the suitcases that allow them to function properly.

Think now of a little green frog on your wrist, that is connected up to a set of algorithms, a large database and the Web. In theory you could ask the little green frog on your wrist to find all kinds of information for you on the Web, but, in most areas of technical knowledge, where the knowledge base is continuously evolving and expanding, the little green frog will give you unsatisfactory information no matter how big the suitcases are that it is connected to.

It is this limitation of bots only being able to deal with information that has some kind of order and permanence that greatly limits what can be done with them. Sure, you can use artificial intelligence techniques, rule based systems, fuzzy logic, neural nets and genetic algorithms, but, nobody has succeeded yet in giving bots or electronic agents any real intelligence: at least, not of the kind that can deal with conflicting data, uncertainty or ambiguity.

This gives rise to a paradox – because you can let bots or intelligent agents be anything you want them to be, you can use bots to help solve problems that bots are not very good at solving. To resolve this paradox, we need another paradigm shift that would see a database record as a personal agent that can represent a person on the Web.

 

The missing link

As discussed above, all bots and personal agents are illusions. They don't wander around the Web searching for targeted information or executing intelligent decisions. Mostly, they are simply a contrived means of inputting a request into a search engine or relational database. Even the animated agents that appear as personal assistants or customer service avatars are simply novel interfaces to database files.

Unfortunately, most of the information on the Internet is disorganised, not categorised and extremely volatile in nature. It is soon outdated and there are far too many changes happening and too much information to keep track of. Even the most sophisticated of search engines or databases are not efficient when it comes to dealing with this kind of volatility. As bots and electronic agents are totally reliant upon search engines or database type algorithms, his same limitation must apply to them also – because it isn't possible to incorporate into their design enough intelligence to handle uncertainty, ambiguity and excessive volatility. Only humans can do this.

Databases and bots can provide pockets of order, but, are inherently incapable of dealing with the chaotic confusion of vast quantities of changing information. What is needed is a totally new paradigm – a different way of looking at databases, search engines, bots and personal electronic agents – a way in which these problems might be overcome.

It's time now to step back and take an overview of the Internet. It's a vast conglomeration of information and knowledge of gargantuan proportions; quite beyond the capability of the human mind to comprehend in its entirety. Alone, the task of dealing with all the knowledge available is too daunting, even to contemplate, but, by people taking different areas a knowledge and collaborating together, the task of making use of an unimaginably large knowledge base can become a practical reality.

The proposal here is that we forget about using databases for dealing with information and instead use them to create an environment for people to meet each other to exchange information. We also give up on the idea of bots and personal electronic agents as having any inherent intelligence and view them simply as message carriers – with humans providing any intelligence that might be needed. In this way, we can contemplate a living database – where all the information is held in the heads of people – where the human brain can be used strategically, to do all the clever sorting stuff.

What this paradigm shift implies is that instead of developing programs and systems that do our thinking for us, we think in terms of programs and systems that are personal to individuals: systems that act as if they were extensions to the human brain. In this way, we shouldn't be thinking about creating universal fountains of knowledge but of people, with extended powers to communicate and assist each other to take individual advantage of the knowledge that is available.

From this view point, it doesn't make sense to have bots or intelligent agent go out into the Internet environment to mine knowledge or select appropriate information for us to use. They aren't up to the job. It would make more sense to have bots or personal agents go out onto the Internet to find people, who an individual might be able to have useful collaborative communication with.

As we have seen, there are two basic structures that can help us to do this. Firstly a server side formatted space that can provide areas of contact. On the client side, we have the personal cafe which can be used to filter out the most appropriate contacts and provide an organised way of communicating with them. What we are looking for now is the link between the two.

It is here we shall go in the next chapter

 

 

### End of chapter 11 ###

Back to index Note: This book lead to the creation of the stigmergicsystems.com website

Copyright 2001 - Peter Small

E-mail: peter@petersmall.net

All rights reserved by Pearson Education (Longman, Addison-Wesley,Prentice Hall, Financial Times for FT.COM imprint