But AI could still be used to replace simple sorting jobs humans do today, such as reading a news story and determining which section of a Web site it belongs in, or listening to a piece of music and deciding whether it's country, pop or jazz. Web robots don't necessarily carry out tasks for one Web site. Such agents could be given a rough idea of what we want, do some comparison shopping and order the best deal, just like a real personal assistant. Cliff even envisions virtual organisations composed of autonomous agents, which could form spontaneously to carry out a specific task and then disband again. Of course, there's the question of whether we really want to cede control over our affairs to an artificially-intelligent piece of software, which might even have its own legal powers.
Some autonomy is good.
Our legal system isn't prepared yet for high autonomy systems. On a more practical level, it isn't clear users would really find agents useful. Another potentially irritating application, under development by Autonomy for Tesco, would notice when you visit a competitor's food-shopping site and then suggest Tesco's lower prices. People know roughly what they want, and they seek it out. The idea that I want things to be delivered to me automatically might be interesting, but it isn't a killer app.