Of intelligent agents and the forward march of technology

[lethargic_man]

I can't seem to find a register wants facility at eBay. I would have thought it an obvious thing to have, but evidently not; so I sat down to write one myself, to be run as a cron job. As I did so, I found it had shared functionality with the script I had written to post my writers groups schedule and email diary reminders to me, and the script I use to monitor threads on LJ I'm interested in; so I refactored these pieces of code into common Perl modules.

It struck me afterwards that what I've done with these scripts is taken the first steps towards writing myself an Image^*. I was quite boggled at realising this: Here's a concept I first encountered in an SF novel and now, just seven years later, am myself implementing a RL version of.

* In Daniel Keys Moran's Tales of the Continuing Time, written in the eighties, an Image is an intelligent software agent that goes out and interacts with the Infonet on your behalf, filtering down the flood of information to human-capable levels. (By the mid twenty-first century, Images are complex enough to have personalities of their own.)