Issues such as security and privacy need to be examined if an personal assistant agent is to have access to a users information store. Another important issue is how will the public respond to having an autonomous agent controlling parts of their lives. People will have to be willing, and trusting, to allow an agent to help them. But this may be difficult due to the less than perfect image people have about computers. Programs are often full of bugs and are prone to crashes and other problems.
Emergent behaviour is a very interesting area in the study of agents.
Emergent behaviour is very robust and allows the programmer to create complex behaviours that would otherwise be impossible to explicitly define. A concern is that we need a way to better develop and control emergent behaviours. I feel that the use of intelligent autonomous agents will be the next big step in user interface design. In order for this metaphor to work people will have to trust agents with their personal information. Agent designers will have to be especially careful in the design and implementation of their agents to avoid having the potential benefits of agents be lost because people are unwilling to trust agents.