Soon, Mobile Phones Will Spend Money On Your Behalf

from the disaster-waiting-to-happen dept

When the internet first started to really take off a decade or so ago there were plenty of stories about people working on so-called "autonomous agents" that would sit on the network and learn from what you do - to the point where they would be able to do stuff for you. The idea was they would create true "virtual assistants" that would, for example, see that you wanted to fly to New York City, and would automatically go out, buy you the best plane ticket and arrange for a hotel as well - probably while communicating with the opposite agent from the airlines and hotels. This vision died a pretty quick death for two big reasons: (1) the technology never worked very well (the best that came out of it was used for collaborative filtering networks to recommend what books you might like to read) and (2) people did not want these little agents doing things for them. They were scared that the agent would spend their money in bad ways, or make bad decisions. When it comes to your own money, most people want to have a pretty all-encompassing say in how it's spent. So, I'm somewhat surprised to hear that a new group of researchers is trying to resurrect this sort of research with the ever popular twenty-first century twist of putting it on the "wireless network". Some researchers think they've come up with the brilliant idea to create virtual agents that sit on your mobile phone, learn what you do, and learn to anticipate what you want, to the point where they may go out and buy stuff for you. This sounds exactly like the autonomous online agents from a decade ago, and I doubt very much has changed with regards to human nature when it comes to letting a computer spend your money.