Re: Humans or agents (was RE: A plea for peace. was [...])

Peter Crowther <Peter.Crowther@melandra.com> wrote:

>> Of course! But, to my knowledge, these SOFTWARE AGENTS are all programmed and
>> run by HUMAN BEINGS (or at least, there is always a human at the top of the
>> chain of command).
> Yes, at the top of the chain of command; but no, that human may have no
> involvement in the detail.  Check out some of the work at Southampton
> University (http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk) on agents that are capable of
> negotiating autonomously.  Also the Scientific American article by Tim
> Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila at
> http://www.scientificamerican.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html (kudos
> goes to all three authors; we're asking the magazine for reprints :-).

Of course! (I think the SciAm article was great by the way.) However, the
point was that humans would be the only ones creating new URIs with new
novel conceptual mappings to resources. I do not know of any work aimed
towards having software agents create and define new concepts. If they have,
then I suspect that the computer provides all the definition needed for such
a term.

-- 
[ Aaron Swartz | me@aaronsw.com | http://www.aaronsw.com ]

Received on Monday, 16 April 2001 23:08:43 UTC