Читать книгу Designing Agentive Technology - Christopher Noessel - Страница 16

It’s when someone takes these two things—information awareness and machines doing physical work—and connects the two that you begin to see some magic happen. That’s when the tools become agentive.

Drebbel’s incubator was the first tool to do this. It took in information about the temperature to open and close the damper. As brilliant as it was for its time, it was still something of a dumb temperature monitor. It only paid attention to a single variable, and only acted when that variable went above an amount. It couldn’t help if the eggs were getting close to freezing. It didn’t help the alchemist know when fuel was running low. You can consider this an agent, but just barely.

The Nest Thermostat is a much more complicated actor, able to track and manage many variables at once. It even learns over time, refining its model of what good behavior means in its particular household, on this particular day, and for the people it knows are currently present. It is a very powerful tool for managing temperature, and much more exemplary of what you can think of as an agent today.

The thing is, you can examine the history of technology solutions around a human need and find similar patterns. Tools will start out manual. Some evolve to reduce physical effort and become powered. Others evolve to help with the information work and become metrical for measuring or assistive for staying within known rules. And of late, you can see a few dozen examples of systems combining the information and the physical work to do work on behalf of its users, becoming agentive. That these patterns repeat across history is a big claim, but let’s use three examples to illustrate: writing, music, and search.