Intelligent agents on the Internet: Fact, fiction, and forecast

In the future, intelligent software agents will help us navigate the information superhighway by serving as backseat drivers or taxi drivers. Better yet, they have the potential to act as sophisticated concierges who make it unnecessary for us to approach the highway at all. We describe a selective sample of software agents currently under development, to give an idea of the agents that will emerge in the next few years. We organize our discussion by the agents' sophistication and the degree to which they make the information superhighway disappear. Following the information superhighway metaphor, an intelligent agent may be a backseat driver who makes suggestions at every rum, a taxi driver who takes you to your destination, or even a concierge whose knowledge and skills make it unnecessary for you to approach the superhighway at all. The Internet Softbot is discussed as a case study.>