Should I set up a personal AI agent to help me with my daily tasks?
-looking for help
As a general rule, I think relying on any kind of automation in your daily life is dangerous when taken to extremes and potentially alienating even when used sparingly. Is, especially regarding personal conversations. One AI Agent One that organizes my to-do list and collects online links for further reading? amazing. An AI agent that automatically messages my parents with quick life updates every week? Horrible.
However, this is the strongest argument for not incorporating more generic AI tools into your daily routine. environmental impact These continue during model training and output generation. With all this in mind, I researched WIRED's archiveTo find more historical context for your question, published during the glorious beginning of this mess we call the Internet. After doing a little searching, I came back convinced that you're probably already using AI agents every day.
The idea of AI agents, or God forbid “agent AI”, is the current buzzword for every tech leader trying to publicize their recent investments. but the concept of a automatic assistant Software being dedicated to completing tasks is far from a new idea. Much of the discussion around “software agents” in the 1990s mirrors current conversations in Silicon Valley, where leaders of tech companies now promise a coming flood of generative AI-powered agents trained to work online on our behalf. Are.
“One problem I see is that people will question who is responsible for the agent's actions,” one reads. wired interview With MIT Professor Patty Mace, originally published in 1995. “Especially things like agents taking too much time on a machine or buying something you don't want on your end. The agents will raise a lot of interesting issues, but I'm sure we wouldn't be able to live without them.”
I called Mace in early January to find out how his view of AI agents has changed over the years. He is as optimistic as ever about the potential of personal automation, but he is convinced that “extremely inexperienced” engineers are not spending enough time addressing the complexities of human-computer interaction. In fact, she says, their carelessness could inspire another AI winter.
“The way these systems are built right now, they are optimized from a technical standpoint, from an engineering standpoint,” she says. “But, they are not at all optimized for human-design issues.” She focuses on how AI agents are still can be easily deceived or resort to biased assumptions despite improvements in the underlying models. And a false confidence leads users to trust answers generated by AI tools when they should not.
To better understand other potential threats to individual AI agents, let's break down the fuzzy word into two distinct categories: those that feed you and those that represent you.
Feeding agents are algorithms with data about your habits and tastes that search through reams of information to find what's relevant to you. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Any social media Recommendation engines fill a timeline with tailored posts or a persistent ad tracker that shows me those mushroom gummies for the thousandth time Instagram Can be considered a personal AI agent. As another example from a 90s interview, Mays mentioned a news gathering agent who was willing to bring back any articles he wanted. This looks like my Google News landing page.