With agents, however, the person himself is compromised. Find someone who uses one, especially the agent features, and watch them closely. A program that conceals a haphazard personality profile of a user from that user. You have changed your psychology, empowering yourself at the expense of the agent. You have murdered the agent by exposing its murky guts to sunlight.
Agents are the work of lazy programmers.
Writing a good user-interface for a complicated task, like finding and filtering a ton of information, is much harder to do than making an intelligent agent. From a user's point of view, an agent is something you give slack to by making your mind mushy, while a user-interface is a tool that you use, and you can tell whether you are using a good tool or not. The extremely hard work of making user-interfaces to genuinely empower people is the true work of the information age, much harder, say, than making faster computer chips. The Macintosh was a prime example of this work. It should be remembered as an early step in a journey that goes much farther.