For now, creating electronic shopping assistants isn’t a top priority. What’s needed first is software to keep people from drowning as they sift through a sea of information to find exactly what they want. Every day, that sea grows deeper.
Predictor: Cortese, Amy
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for BusinessWeek magazine, Amy Cortese writes:”A software language for creating applications on a network, Telescript, includes a new technology called software agents. Agents can act on their own to get something done for you. So, for example, an agent could be programmed to automatically scour the Net for the best deal on, say, a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage – and order up an application form. The first Telescript application will be PersonaLink, an ‘intelligent’ messaging service being launched by General Magic backer AT&T. While AT&T says the system will eventually handle such tasks as doing your online shopping, at first the agents will do simpler chores, such as routing e-mail messages. For now, creating electronic shopping assistants isn’t a top priority. What’s needed first is software to keep people from drowning as they sift through a sea of information to find exactly what they want. Every day, that sea grows deeper: There are now some 5 million documents stored on Web servers, estimates Michael Mauldin, a research computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University. That figure is doubling every six months to a year, he figures. At Carnegie Mellon, Mauldin and his team have created what he calls a software ‘robot.’ Running simultaneously across four powerful workstations, the system is called Lycos, after the Lycosidae spider, known for pursuing its prey relentlessly. Lycos goes out onto the Web and catalogs the continuously expanding number of documents posted there by scanning them and creating an abstract containing the title, first 20 lines of text, and the 100 most important words. Since beginning its mission last June, Lycos has catalogued 270,000 documents – a mere 5 percent of what’s on the Net. Mauldin says it will take 12 computers running Lycos to keep pace with the growth of Internet information.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Intelligent Agents/AI
Name of publication: BusinessWeek
Title, headline, chapter name: Crafting Software That Will Let You Build a Business Out There
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
Page 34
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney