I haven't heard anyone talking about "agents" since the days of the AT&T "You Will" ad campaign. They've been a couple years in the future for at least half my

I haven't heard anyone talking about "agents" since the days of the AT&T "You Will" ad campaign. They've been a couple years in the future for at least half my life. Although honestly I feel like at least half the stuff people used to breathlessly imagine "agents" doing is being handled by a social media algorithm whose controls are in the hands of a corporation whose only aim is to increase engagement to sell more ads against, regardless of whether or not what it shows you is total lies that make you angry, or by specialized websites. Like you want your customized feed of things your friends said, things your potential friends said, news, etc? In 2024-via-2023, your "agent" would make your daily newspaper. In 2024, you open up whatever your favorite social network is. It is either a chill, low-engagement open-source ActivityPub server run by someone in your friends circle and supported by donations, or it is a corporate site which chooses what to show you based on what is most likely to keep you stuck to the site, scrolling and commenting, and seeing ads, regardless of whether it's showing you total lies that make you angry. Perhaps by 2024 the ActivityPub servers will have added the same kind of "hey you might like this" stuff that the for-profit corporations have, except with the controls in the hands of the end users rather than the site owner fat on VC and ad revenue co-opted from the people who make the stuff they're putting online. Like you wanna book a plane? In 2024-via-1994 you would talk to your "agent" who would go out and query multiple airlines and show you a few that matched your desires, in 2024 you visit flightpenguin.com and get a browser extension that hits the API of airline sites and presents some cool graphs that let you sort for things like "least agonizing" as well as "cheapest", and doesn't reveal a single thing about where it makes enough money to keep up with airline and browser redesigns. But it has a cute penguin mascot. Back in 1984 you would have gone to a "travel agent" who would have had deals with various airlines and access to their schedules, who would put together a few possible flight plans and say "this one's fastest, this one's lowest-stress, this one's cheapest", and negotiate from there. They'd make a commission off of it, and probably be pretty open about how this motivated them to upsell you. I mean that's an "agent", really, right there, no AI involved. Cute cartoon character who performs a specific job on the Internet, that used to be a specialty field. You'd find travel agents in every mall, with pretty pictures of the places they could arrange a vacation to, for deep pockets and shallow ones, and neat plane models to look at. Apologies for the stoned ramble. TL, DR: most of what people dreamed "agents" being is pretty much here IMHO, just not with one single unified interface.