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Unplanned effects of intelligent agents on Internet use: a social informatics approach

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Abstract

This paper instigates a discourse on the unplanned effects of intelligent agents in the context of their use on the Internet. By utilizing a social informatics framework as a lens of analysis, the study identifies several unanticipated consequences of using intelligent agents for information- and commerce-based tasks on the Internet. The effects include those that transpire over time at the organizational level, such as e-commerce transformation, operational encumbrance and security overload, as well as those that emerge on a cultural level, such as trust affliction, skills erosion, privacy attrition and social detachment. Furthermore, three types of impacts are identified: economic, policy, and social. The discussion contends that economic impacts occur on the organizational level, social effects transpire on a cultural level, and policy impacts take place on both levels. These effects of the use of intelligent agents have seldom been predicted and discussed by visionaries, researchers, and practitioners in the field. The knowledge of these unplanned outcomes can improve our understanding of the overall impacts that innovative agent technologies may potentially have on organizations and individuals. Subsequently, this may help us develop better agent applications, facilitate the formulation of appropriate contingencies, and provide impetus for future research.

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Notes

  1. In terms of this paper, a description approach is believed to be followed since an agent is described in terms of the characteristics that it does or does not possess, such as long-lived (i.e., it works in the background without constant user intervention), independent (i.e., may act on a user’s behalf without asking his or her permission every time), adaptive, and collaborative. At the same time, the authors agree that there is some degree of subjectivity in assigning these attributes to a software entity, and one may argue that each characteristic may be simply ascribed to an agent. Indeed, since the agent research community has not agreed on a uniform definition of an agent, there is plenty of room for the interpretation of the methods employed to define an agent. For example, some people may notice that this paper’s definition is a hybrid between description and ascription since each individual characteristic of an agent may be ascribed rather than described.

  2. Available online at the Copernic website at http://www.copernic.com.

  3. For a list of shopping bots, visit the BotSpot website at http://www.botspot.com.

  4. Available at http://www.addall.com.

  5. In this experiment performed by the authors, the item price provided by the shopping bot ranged from US $104 (max) to $62 (min), with the average price of $79, and standard deviation of $12.6.

  6. Aria stands for Annotation and Retrieval Integration Agent.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Business Administration, Lakehead University, 955 Oliver Road, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada, P7B 5E1

    Alexander Serenko

  2. DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, 1280 Main St. W., Hamilton, ON, Canada, L8S 4M4

    Umar Ruhi & Mihail Cocosila

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  3. Mihail Cocosila
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Correspondence to Alexander Serenko.

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Serenko, A., Ruhi, U. & Cocosila, M. Unplanned effects of intelligent agents on Internet use: a social informatics approach. AI & Soc 21, 141–166 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-006-0051-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-006-0051-8

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