Читать книгу Designing Agentive Technology - Christopher Noessel - Страница 22

Similar to intelligence, agency can be thought of as a spectrum. Some things are more agentive than others. Is a hammer agentive? No. I mean if you want to be indulgently philosophical, you could propose that the metal head is acting on the nail per request by the rich gestural command the user provides to the handle. But the fact that it’s always available to the user’s hand during the task means it’s a tool—that is, part of the user’s attention and ongoing effort.

Less philosophically, is an internet search an example of an agent? Certainly the user states a need, and the software rummages through its internal model of the internet to retrieve likely matches. This direct cause-and-effect means that it’s more like the hammer with its practically instantaneous cause-and-effect. Still a tool.

But as you saw before, when Google lets you save that search, such that it sits out there, letting you pay attention to other things, and lets you know when new results come in, now you’re talking about something that is much more clearly acting on behalf of its user in a way that is distinct from a tool. It handles tasks so that you can use your limited attention on something else. So this part of “acting on your behalf”—that it does its thing while out of sight and out of mind—is foundational to the notion of what an agent is, why it’s new, and why it’s valuable. It can help you track something you would find tedious, like a particular moment in time, or a special kind of activity on the internet, or security events on a computer network.

To do any of that, an agent must monitor some stream of data. It could be something as simple as the date and time, or a temperature reading from a thermometer, or it could be something unbelievably complicated, like watching for changes in the contents of the internet. It could be data that is continuous, like wind speed, or irregular, like incoming photos. As it watches this data stream, it looks for triggers and then runs over some rules and exceptions to determine if and how it should act. Most agents work indefinitely, although they could be set to run for a particular length of time or when any other condition is met. Some agents like a spam filter will just keep doing their job quietly in the background. Others will keep going until they need your attention, and some will need to tell you right away. Nearly all will let you monitor them and the data stream, so you can check up on how they’re doing and see if you need to adjust your instructions.

So those are the basics. Agentive technology watches a data stream for triggers and then responds with narrow artificial intelligence to help its user accomplish some goal. In a phrase, it’s a persistent, background assistant.

If those are the basics, there are a few advanced features that a sophisticated agent might have. It might infer what you want without your having to tell it explicitly. It might adapt machine learning methods to refine its predictive models. It might gently fade away in smart ways such that the user gains competence. You’ll learn about these in Part II, “Doing,” of this book, but for now it’s enough to know that agents can be much smarter than the basic definition we’ve established here.