The Human Node
Social networking with autonomous agents
Signal Analysis
Relinquishing control
The digital world is propelling us toward a reality that will see autonomous agents with increasing levels of responsibility. Not only prompting us with information and insights, but acting with authority. The development of human knowledge through education and work experience will diminish in value, and yet when we hand over complex systems or high levels of responsibility to autonomous agents, their decisions will affect our societies in profound ways. How will we share and exchange information across a multiplex of humans and machines?; “What am I being told?”; “Who, or what is telling me?”; “What is the source?”
As our positions of control diminish, we will require increasing levels of technical assistance for predicting and interacting with the behaviors of autonomous agents, realizing an entirely new potential for cooperation and symbiotic creativity.
A symbiotic relationship
The scope of autonomous agents is set to increase significantly in the near future, already we see their use in financial markets, vehicle control, human support, drone delivery, inventory management and assembly in dangerous environments or explorations. In everyday consumer electronics, the abilities of agents like Alexa, Siri, Cortana, Google Now, or our social media ‘robot followers’, to access and retrieve information from cloud and sensor-based environments will greatly surpass human capability in continuous analysis and routine decisioning. The ambitions of agents like Watson, however, have shown that the application of perception and critical thinking in expert systems remains, at least for now, dependent on human-based information processing.
Notwithstanding, much of what we do our lives, is really a function of information processing. Discovery, invention, design, control, education, work, socializing, entertainment, care, security and commerce are all shifting to new zones, offering re-imagined forms of cooperative life. Interaction is increasingly moving off-device, while architectural space moves toward interaction. Subtle implementations of autonomous agency, powered by machine learning, steadily becoming ubiquitous, recasting our position in the world as historically intelligent beings in our own right, to co-processors of information at phenomenal scale.
In the emergence of a co-habitat, inter-agent society, systemic auto-generative programming is shaping an environment of continuous information production, operating at the intersection of biological and electronic life. Super-scale projects will be choreographed by swarm intelligence, while human response will increasingly adapt to the discrete operations of hyper-evolved algorithms. The human node is increasingly orchestrated within multi-agent cloud environments composed of myriad signal sources, sensing capabilities and autonomous applications
Taxonomy of Autonomous Agents (source: S Franklin)
A deeper connection
Who are these autonomous agents and how do they work? The term agent can range from simple programs composed of a few rules to large models and complex systems. These can be programs responding to environmental events without direct user instructions and, generally speaking, acting in the interest of the owner. More recent approaches in distributed AI have emerged that have revolutionized the design of intelligent systems. Diversifying from higher-order cognitive, organizational activity, toward the embodied sensing capabilities of lower forms of biological life, such as reactive behavior systems, reinforcement learning, optic flow and task-oriented perception. A ‘complete agent’ combines these lower and higher order capabilities for intricate categorization, navigation and decisioning, ultimately behaving autonomously within an environment, without any human intermediary.
These agents, partial, complete, hybrid and beyond, thrive in virtual space, where the intrinsic nature of the agent integrates seamlessly with the digital nature of the environment. As entire industrial centers are structurally transformed, absorbed in the cloud and reduced to applications we carry and wear, our cities of yesterday have increasingly little economic value and even purpose. While the web de-materialized many industries, it paid back more than two-fold in new opportunity. Our new digital cities, however, are developed and operated by a new group of automaton entrepreneurs, who are on a path to become evermore like us, as we become more like them.
Author: Ivan Sean, c. 2022 | USA
© 10 Sensor Foresight
Period: 1996-2022 | Language: English
Core Concepts: Human Node; Autonomous Agents
AI-Usage: Non-generative digital platforms, output validation
Conflict of Interest: None
References: Taxonomy of Autonomous Agents S. Franklin, 1996 | 'Bio-Inspired Robotics', MIT, 2018 | 'Towards Multi-Agent Systems', Watson Research Center, IBM, 2018