Aoir

The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use Alexander Serenko & Mihail Cocosila McMaster University, Canada AoIR, Toronto 2003

The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

Agenda 1. The Purpose of the Study 2. What are Intelligent Agents? 3. Why Intelligent Agents? 4. Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use a) first-level impacts b) second-level impacts - user privacy - economic impacts - user confidence and trust - online habits and behavior - Web performance - online social interactions - online service providers 5. Conclusions and Directions for Future Research 6. Q&A 2

The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

Introduction •

The purpose of the study o To present a non-technical overview of intelligent agents technologies o To identify and classify several possible domains of the social impacts of intelligent agents Internet use o To briefly show the reasons why intelligent agents should  (or should not ) exist o To suggest directions of future research o It is the first attempt to discuss social implications of intelligent agent technologies on Internet use 3

The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

What are Intelligent Agents? •

Metaphor of intelligent agents o o o o

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non-human electronic assistants a newer form of software possible to implement since the end of the past century new dimensions in the Internet era

History of the concept o o o o o

introduced by John McCarthy in the ’50s coined by Oliver Selfridge at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory agent visionaries in the ’80s classic works in the ’90s human-agent cooperation metaphor after 2000

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The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

What are Intelligent Agents? •

Intelligent agents as an ascription o characterized in terms of what users ascribe, attribute, or assign agents to be o agent exists only in the minds of people – if individuals believe that they are delegating tasks to a particular software entity, this application is considered an agent

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This paper follows a description approach An intelligent agent is a software entity which is: o continuous (long-lived) o autonomous (independent) o reactive (adapts its behavior under the changes in the external environment), and o collaborative (collaborates with other agents or electronic processes) 5

The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

What are Intelligent Agents? •

General types of intelligent agents: o user agents • assist human users by interacting with them directly, knowing their preferences and interests, and acting on their behalf • Examples: personal assistants, news editors, electronic shoppers, and Web guides

o service agents • collaborate with different parts of a complicated computer system and perform more general tasks in the background being invisible for human users • Examples: Web indexing, information retrieval, and phone network load balancing agents 6

The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

Why Intelligent Agents? •

Intelligent agents allow software users to utilize the indirect management approach rather than the previous less efficient direct manipulation method o

Direct manipulation approach: people explicitly indicate all tasks the application should perform, monitor the process, observe results, and intervene when necessary

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Indirect management concept: users are able to indirectly manage agents rather than directly manipulate objects; agents, in turn, operate objects on users’ behalf and report back only final results thereby hiding tasks complexity

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Important while dealing with complex, heterogeneous systems, and unpredictable systems such as the Internet 7

The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents Every technological invention has dual effects on an individual, society, organization, group, or other social entity: o First level effects • presumably positive outcomes • always anticipated by technology inventors • usually considered justifications of investments Examples: dramatic cost reduction, improved quality, or the introduction of new products and services

o Second level effects • can never be totally envisioned by researchers, innovators, and entrepreneurs • natural consequence of altering people’s behavior, creating new values, expectations, and norms 8

The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents Web User Privacy •

Extremely important for proper functioning of modern society characterized by skyrocketing information exchange rates and availability of information collection tools and techniques

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Two basic ways intelligent agents obtain information about people: o Individuals may voluntarily express their private information when they first start using agents o Intelligent agents work in the background by monitoring constantly all users’ activities such as surfing pattern, purchasing behavior, and search engine results

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The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents Web User Privacy •

Your digital Mini Me

Example: Shopping bots (product assistants, shopping guides, intelligent portals, consumer oriented price comparison engines, auction watchers, book finders, intelligent online catalogues, and bargain finders) Improper use of people personal information may seriously undermine trust to intelligent agents, the Web, and online shopping 10

The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents Economic Impacts on Online Businesses • •

Transform the existing online markets into “the condition of perfect competition” eventually predominantly price oriented The economic value of online information becomes one of the most valuable intangible assets Example: Shopping bots (or shopbots)-“price comparison shopping agents” o Increase “the bargaining power of customers” who may efficiently locate the best item price on the Web o Transform the whole online shopping industry: markets will move closer to the perfect competition model where the long-run cumulative profit of all sellers is a zero o Drive sellers, in turn, to rely on intelligent agent real-time pricing technologies, or pricebots o In conjunction with pricebots can theoretically engage virtual business in lose-lose price wars 11

The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents User Confidence and Trust •

The degree of user confidence in the quality of agent’s performance: o Does the agent present relevant information? o Can it potentially find the best deal? and, o Is the user able to exploit the full capabilities of the intelligent agent in order to obtain the desired results?

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The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents User Confidence and Trust (continued) •

The level of user trust to an agent, which some people may associate with trust to many online services o Does the agent search for the best deals on the whole Internet or only visits the sites of those online vendors who paid a subscription fee to a respective shopping bot designer? o Can the agent avoid “traps” of the vendors trying to attract such type of intelligent agents? o Would the intelligent agent be able to discriminate between serious online vendors and fake vendors or fake best offers? o Would the intelligent agent be able to find the best deal from a more complex view rather than a pure price-only perspective?

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Website owners’ concern over various intelligent agent activities 13

The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents Online Habits and Behavior •

In an effort to save time, people will tend to reduce their efforts for information searching o people will risk missing important information otherwise acquired by do-it yourself experience o software entities can not always make the necessary associations to follow other branches of information retrieval because intelligent agents lack common sense

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Having intelligent agents perform an Internet search and selection on behalf of a human user may encourage substitutes of culture o people will tend to have the intelligent agents do the entire job and receive ‘ready to be digested and consumed’ information o this may result in losing rather than acquiring knowledge if agents become too excessively exploited on the Web 14

The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents People’s Web Performance •

The presence of intelligent agents in the form of personal assistants will make websites more accessible and even friendlier for those people who may be very good specialists but, on the other hand, have lower computer and Internet skills

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Intelligent agents may expand the usage of various capabilities offered by many Web sites o Example: Intelligent agents would be able to educate users on portal resources usage and offer real-time navigational help 15

The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents Online Social Interaction •

Modern work environment is becoming associated with the idea of knowledge portals embedding intelligent agents

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Present tendency of creating virtual and networking organizations where individuals work remotely from home and communicate with each other electronically

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Immediate consequences: extra costs savings (commuting expenses and office space), more convenient work pattern

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Unpredictable consequence: people may replace direct social interaction with mediated interaction which contradicts social work habits people have been developing for millennia

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Massive and indiscriminate use of software agents to facilitate work processes through the Internet may have significant social drawbacks in the long run 16

The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents Online Service Providers’ Activities The use of intelligent agents will change some people’s job tasks and activities, which will affect their job and life patterns: o People will have to comply with new job requirements Example: Intelligent agents, in context of a library portal would perform most of the repetitive and tedious tasks of librarians; librarians will be able to do more qualitative work requiring human innovative thinking o Intelligent agents may potentially restructure the current online IT labor market and facilitate the creation of new jobs Example: The boom in agent technologies will increase demand on information technology (IT) personnel, agent researchers, and agent oriented programmers (AOP) 17

The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

Conclusions and Directions for Future Research The authors’ view •

Two extremist views on the usefulness of agent-based computing o intelligent agents should not be included into Webenabled applications o agent potential should be fully realized, and people should be totally eliminated and replaced by machines and software

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The authors, however, suggest the third approach where intelligent agents should be included into online systems only under appropriate business and technical conditions and after thorough considerations of both the projected benefits and the unexpected social impacts of agent on Internet usage 18

The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

Conclusions and Directions for Future Research Future research o present investigation touches upon only a few unforeseen social effects o each identified social effect provides a fruitful research field which may be further explored in the form of empirical investigations and conceptual discussions o the existing social theories may be used to build a framework of social impacts of agents on Web usage

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The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

Conclusions and Directions for Future Research Final thoughts •

The intrusion of innovation into all aspects of people’s lives is especially difficult to predict in the early stages of technology development

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It is impossible to say whether intelligent agents will be able to fully perform the tasks that visionary researchers have predicted

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Future researchers should be ready to recognize those unanticipated effects 20

The Social Impacts of Intelligent Agents on Internet Use

Questions? Contact •

Alexander Serenko o Ph.D. candidate (MS/S) at the Michael G. DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Hamilton, CANADA o [email protected]

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Mihail Cocosila o Ph.D. candidate (MS/S) at the Michael G. DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Hamilton, CANADA o [email protected] 21