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"We're about 20 minutes away from the point where Clarke's law kicks in and technology becomes indistinguishable from magic."
- Peter Watts
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| Data-Retrieval Programs | ||
| Programs that searched the Net for specific information. |
This seems like an early use of the idea of "intelligent agents."
| The visible portion of the flow was only a sliver, a fragment distilled and sent back to this nexus by her electronic servants - her ferrets and foxes, her badgers and hounds - data-retrieval programs euphemistically named after bests, some now extinct but known in earlier times for their tenacity, hunger and unwillingness to take "no" for an answer. All over the world, Daisy's electronic emissaries searched and probed at her bidding, prying loose secrets, correlating, combining, devouring.
... A few words to her autosecretary would send a ferret program forth to fetch the truth in milliseconds. |
| Technovelgy from Earth,
by David Brin. Published by Bantam in 1990 Additional resources -
|
The earliest speculations on the idea of an intelligent agent date to the early nineteen-seventies. Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop, and Richard Steiger published a paper in 1973 on the Actor model. An "actor" is an entity that can make local decisions, create more actors, determine responses and send messages.
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I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
'...it was all composed of tiny, identical cubes, carefully laid to form a tilelike surface.'
'He carried on his person a triggering mechanism sensitive to his heartbeat.'
'...Anything was possible in my imaginary environment.'
'Somewhere in space, a chrome and blue automobile raced the green light of Earth.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair...'
