Our existing systems for processing this data are becoming increasingly poor as the signal to noise ration drops. When you consider all of the social media feeds that we feel we need to hook into just so that we can allow ourselves to believe we are still relevant is it any wonder that we begin to feel increasingly stressed about our inability to keep up with it all. Something has to give because if we are not careful we will allow ourselves spend our days simply surfing to find that small nugget of information to make our day worthwhile whilst neglecting our actual work duties, friends, or family lives. We are becoming consumers not producers or if we are producing anything at all we are simply regurgitating what others have already regugitated.

Whilst there is a manual solution: just unplug your device(s), there is no clear technological answer as yet as to how to tackle this problem. Search engines are certainly one option but only for information which is in the past, we need a search engine for the current view of the world. This was the promise of software agents; entities which act on your behalf within the digital realm. These software applications could sit in cyberspace performing all of the tasks that you would normally do, only reporting back when required or when something of real interest to you shows up. Therein lies the rub. How do you imbue in the software the understanding of what you are interested in? For some tasks this is very simple: tell me how my football team are doing, or tell me when the new Dilbert cartoon is available. These kinds of systems exist now but their delivery is disperate and may require multiple applications running to view all of the content, or potentially a number of different web pages to be open in your browser. Aggregators do exist that bring this information into a single interface (Instapaper is one such (manual) example, Newsblue is an automated example.)

What’s missing are the richer pieces. The ability to bring you information that you might think is interesting when you haven’t given the system any a priori information. An example of this would be when you are surfing the front page of the BBC news and an article title or summary grabs your attention. It may not be related to a subject that you would normally look at but it has caught your attention in some way - perhaps because it’s funny, cute, or thought provoking. I think this is the most important part and others agree with this point of view: Filter bubble. If we are not careful then we will allow ourselves to receive and consume a myopic view of the world, only receiving those opinions which gel with our own. In my opinion it is just as important to understand the opposite point of view, perhaps so that we can further refute claims, but more importantly that we understand what it is we are fighting about.

All of this will be for naught though if services continue to hide themselves behind paywalls or create strange and interesting rules as to how the data can be used and displayed.

It should be clear that we will not have a single agent but a small army of them working as our digital avatars. These will co-ordinate themselves in both cyberspace and also across the many devices that are becoming commonplace in our lives. What will be interesting is the co-ordination mechanisms for these disperate agents. Will they individually present information to us, or will there be a small neural nexus that amalgamates, cogitates, and deliberates on the information gathered by the agents prior to presenting it to us. Will we then provide some kind of reinforment feedback into the system to help them further refine their choices…

I don’t have these answers, but I hope I will see some of them in my lifetime.

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