Agents in this application can serve several roles. They can themselves represent people, either graphically or through other modalities. There are many reasons an ecology of distributed agents is attractive for this application. In addition, there are many different ways to represent people. An ecology of agents allows for a diversity of different approaches.
Users can make personal choices about which agents they like.
The ecology as a whole is a complex expression of how well individual agents are matching people's desires. The interaction between the programs and the network environment is what makes them interesting. The applications of ecologies are not limited to conventional computers on the Internet. That Think consortium. Individual TTT devices might not have much computational power, but agents that live in the environment of many TTT devices networked together could make great use of the diverse resources available.