Yesterday I got myself enthused for personalized intelligent agents, user-controlled systems that would be a generalized filtering and mediation point for commu

Yesterday I got myself enthused for personalized intelligent agents, user-controlled systems that would be a generalized filtering and mediation point for communications. A concrete example is to take a user's Facebook feed and automatically detox it: scrub it of the ads, content marketing, and fake news, and reprioritize the remaining content in a way heuristically believed to aid user well-being, rather than engagement metrics. A polished, credible implementation of that would mark the beginning of a new marketplace centered on agent services that prey on existing Web companies and tear open their data silos and adtech, one user at a time. But what ultimately stops me from further consideration is that the level of AI know-how needed to do this is not a commodity at this time - you'd need a full team of top talent, and it probably wouldn't be cheap/fast/customizable/secure enough for users if done now. I think it will happen though, the signs of it happening are gradually emerging, and when it does, watch out!