# Software Agents and Rationality

> Back when I was an undergraduate (yes, a long long time ago), there was a lot of excitement about software agents, also called intelligent agents. The general idea was that a software agent would be able to pursue goal-directed behavior…
> URL: https://www.smartdatacollective.com/15045/
> Last modified: 2008-11-30T16:11:00+00:00

Back when I was an undergraduate (yes, a long long time ago), there was a lot of excitement about [software agents](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent), also called [intelligent agents](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_agent). The general idea was that a software agent would be able to pursue goal-directed behavior on a person’s behalf. Of course, what that meant ran the gamut from the mundane (e.g., [autodialers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodialer)) to science fiction (e.g., Braniac in the [Superman](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman) comics).

With the increasing role that the web plays in our interactions, I wonder about the role of software agents on the web. We already see [comment spammers](http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/11/22/focused-comment-spamming/) and prankster [instant messaging bots](http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/11/22/the-great-hatsby-and-other-im-bots/), as well as more benign [shopbots](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopbot).

But a question that plagues me is how to reconcile the inherent rationality of software agents with the systematic irrationality of the human beings they represent. [Herb Simon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Simon) argued that humans exercise [bounded rationality](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality), but the research from [prospect theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory) suggests that the situation is even worse: not only are we bounded by our limited mental resources, but we don’t even make the most rational use of the resources we have.

		
							
					
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So, if software agents start making decisions on our behalf, I wonder how happy we’ll be with those decisions. Will software agents have to simulate our deviations from rationality? Or will we have to learn to be more rational?

			
				
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Finally, I should note that machine agents are not restricted to the web or even to software. Just pick up the [New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/science/25robots.html), and you can read about attempts to make Terminators a reality. Those efforts raise concerns not only about rationality, but about ethics and accountability.

I’ll be back.