An agent working for a rival corporation could be programmed to give you very good advice for a time, until your agent came to rely on him. Then, just at a critical moment, after you had delegated a lot of responsibility to your agent who was depending on the double agent, the unfriendly agent would be able to hurt you badly. So the Internet will be the site for intelligence and counterintelligence operations.
Predictor: Student
Prediction, in context:In her 1995 book “Life on the Screen,” Sherry Turkle – an accomplished social psychologist, sociologist and anthropologist from MIT whose studies centered around people and computers for decades – talks about the AI research by Pattie Maes. Turkle writes about how people reacted to a presentation by Maes on how intelligent agents can be used to gather personal information for people: ”For a business school student, the images of espionage, suggested by the word ‘agent’ itself, took over: ‘Well, the different agents will be in communication and will come to advise each other. But an agent working for a rival corporation could be programmed to give you very good advice for a time, until your agent came to rely on him. Then, just at a critical moment, after you had delegated a lot of responsibility to your agent who was depending on the double agent, the unfriendly agent would be able to hurt you badly. So the Internet will be the site for intelligence and counterintelligence operations.’ This student is not anxious about an abstract notion of machine intelligence. For him, the ‘intelligence’ threat posed by agent systems is the concrete threat of industrial espionage.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Intelligent Agents/AI
Name of publication: Life on the Screen (book)
Title, headline, chapter name: Chapter 3: Making a Pass at a Robot
Quote Type: Paraphrase
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
Page 100
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney