It may seem like a tangent from web design, but Science Fiction – sometimes called Speculative Fiction – can be a valuable medium for visualizing future trends in technology. To that effect, I want to discuss the idea of Software Agents in sci-fi.
Note: By Software Agent, I am refering to adaptive, autonomous software that acts on behalf of an individual human user. Self-aware AI, robots, adaptive software, and other automata are not in question.
Administrative Agents
Spiderman 2099 (comic book) - Peter David
Peter David's short-lived comic book series for Marvel posited a fantastical future universe based on a fantastical present-day universe. The prolific sci-fi scribe did introduce some thought-provoking ideas for the series through its life.
One of his concepts, is a software administrative assistant. This agent behaves like a suped-up answering machine/news crawler/unsolicited advisor. There were humourous results when Miguel, the eponymous protagonist, went browsing through its personality profiles. Who was to appear but a holographic Aunt May!
Mr.David envisioned a believable technology, but, adding a face and voice to current technology is only a step towards the ideal form of Software Agent.
SA Rating: B+
News Agents
Earth (novel) - David Brin
Written in 1990, Earth pretty much summed up the present day trends of the Web. No disrespect to the actual progenitors of the WWW, or influential cyberpunk authors such as Gibson, or Stephenson, but Mr.Brin hit it on the nail with this one.
Beyond his prescient musings on privacy, wearable computing and catastrophic climate change, Brin's vision of news aggregation hit home. He predicted subscription-based news feeds such as news groups, RSS or, uncannily, GoogleNews before the technology ever existed. The news-pulling technology that plays a large part in Earth exudes a palpable intelligence.
It may seem like splitting hairs, but Brin's "World Net News" articles are connected by relevance rather than keyword. This necessitates some intelligent intervention, artificial or otherwise. And don't try to argue that keyword matching is intelligent: it's math!
SA Rating: A-
More Examples
I have more to talk about, but that'll have to wait for another day.
Also: The sources I refer to are hardly bleeding-edge, so I'd appreciate any comments or examples I may have overlooked.
Disclaimer: I am not a computer scientist, and nothing I say here should be contrived of as fact... just blogging!