Evolution and Mutation in Push Technologies: Social Concerns Resulting from the Effects of Memes on Intelligent Agents

Abstract

PointCast was a magic carpet of content providers. Imagine that of all the information that users needed to complete their work would suddenly appear on their desktops. Although PointCast and other technologies did not survive the hype that surrounded their introduction, push technologies are now back in vogue. RSS feeds and podcasts are now part of many people’s daily lives. Software robots, called autonomous agents, are helping users download what they want from the Internet. The next helpful software agent will be more akin to a butler who anticipates all of the user’s needs today, tomorrow, and in the future. This agent will change as the user changes and is therefore referred to as an evolutionary agent. Evolutionary agents will also change because memes (or messages) one agent broadcasts to another will cause the evolutionary agent to mutate. In this chapter, we explore the social implications of meritorious and malevolent memes exchanged by evolutionary agents. We also discover that interactions occur among humans, evolutionary agents, and memes. Finally, we raise a series of questions for future research regarding genetic determination of evolutionary agents; if it is possible to predict whether a meme will be meritorious or malevolent; and whether it is desirable to legislate the evolution of agents that are evolved from malevolent memes. This chapter contributes to the awareness of the movement toward push technologies deploying evolutionary agents and the social implications their use entails.