People will question who is responsible for the actions of an agent. Especially things like agents taking up too much time on a machine or purchasing something you don’t want on your behalf. Agents will raise a lot of interesting issues, but I’m convinced we won’t be able to live without them.
I hope agents will make people feel more comfortable dealing with the overload of information, more in control. Confident agents are working on their behalf, are reliable, and never become tired; they are always looking to help the user.
Users will have less difficulty accepting agents if they gradually gain their trust. Trust has to be earned, and that always takes time.
We never will get 100 percent accuracy – [intelligent] agents will always make mistakes.
It’s going to be impossible, if it isn’t already, for people to deal with the complexity of the online world. I’m convinced that the only solution is to have agents that help us manage the complexity of information. I don’t think designing better interfaces is going to do it.
The Nick at Nite Online service will be the preeminent nerve center for all aspects of classic TV and pop culture. It is the ultimate theater, library, clubhouse and meeting place for the millions who have the common bond of “Good TV.” In a sense, it is the virtual rec room for the TV generation…. Nick at Nite Online is also the place for interaction with classic ads, games, music, products, experiences, events, movies and other forms of pop culture.
Out of this backlash comes a warning to parents that their children will “cocoon” and metamorphose into social invalids. Experience tells us the opposite. So far, evidence gathered by those using the Net as a teaching tool indicates that kids who go online gain social skills rather than lose them … Take all the books in the world, and they won’t offer the real-time global experience a kid can get on the Net: here a child becomes the driver of the intellectual vehicle, not the passenger.
In the near future – maybe even by the time you read this – you can expect this level of music compression to become an everyday reality. You may also gain the power to take a piece of music and squish it yourself to one-tenth its size, without any audible loss of quality. In that case, you’ll be able to fit a CD onto an 88-Mbyte SyQuest cartridge and make as many undegraded bit-for-bit copies as you want. Or, you’ll be able to swap high-quality digital files over the Net without tying up your modem for hours at a time. And maybe one day, you’ll sit at home and browse through the biggest jukebox in the universe … We will have entered a new era in which music flows into our homes like water.
To reproduce the entire service, someone would have to invest a huge amount of money. You could steal a song, but who could steal them all? And if the listening fee is low enough, no one would bother to make copies. You’d just pay another nickel to hear the song again. I think it would sell 10 times as much music as people buy now. But the guys who are potential losers are scared to death of it, and the guys who are potential winners aren’t even aware of it. You don’t find cable TV companies thinking about audio.
[Unlimited access to music online] would be a nightmare. Music publishers have fits over this kind of thing. Distributors have already panicked over digital audiotape and pretty much crushed it. They’re so fearful of the future. They don’t stop to wonder if they’d like to swap what they do now in return for a monthly subscription fee from every home that gets cable TV.