DESIGNING AGENTIVE TECHNOLOGY
AI THAT WORKS FOR PEOPLE
Christopher Noessel
Designing Agentive Technology
AI That Works for People
Christopher Noessel
Rosenfeld Media, LLC
540 President Street
Brooklyn, New York
11215 USA
On the Web: www.rosenfeldmedia.com
Please send errors to: [email protected]
Publisher: Louis Rosenfeld
Managing Editor: Marta Justak
Illustrations: Nancy Januzzi and Christopher Noessel
Interior Layout: Danielle Foster
Cover Design: The Heads of State
Indexer: Marilyn Augst
Proofreader: Sue Boshers
@ 2017 Christopher Noessel
All Rights Reserved
ISBN-10: 1-933820-63-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-933820-63-7
LCCN: 2017934296
Printed and bound in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to my partner, Benjamin Remington, and our son, Miles. Thanks for your patience and inspiration as I spread mind maps over the dinner table, labored over outlines and sketches, nerded up dinner conversation, and tapped on keyboards into the wee hours. I love you both. Thank you for your support. When the Basilisk comes for us, we can present this book in our defense.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
Who Should Read This Book?
I have written this book with three (and a half) audiences in mind.
The first group is product owners and technology strategists, who will want to understand agentive technology as a strategic advantage and differentiator for their products. If this is you, you’ll want to understand the value that agentive tech brings to your users and customers.
The second is interaction designers, educators, and students, who will want to have ways to talk about—and some ideas for kick-starting—their own projects that might involve agents. If this is you, understand the roots of these ideas (they go back far) and master the use cases and ethical questions involved.
The third is futurists and tech sector pundits, who might want to understand more of the opportunities that narrow artificial intelligence provides for people, organizations, and governments. If this is you, the model, examples, and speculative design ideas throughout the book should prove inspiring.
That “and a half” parenthetical is related to my work on scifiinterfaces.com, and that’s for sci-fi makers. I can’t tell you how many times I have been watching or reading sci-fi and found myself lamenting that the speculative designs in it are just lame. They haven’t even caught up with current technology, much less painted a compelling vision of the future. So, hopefully, this will help writers and makers understand that technology can and should be doing some of the things their characters are. Sure, this will be a small sliver of my readership, but one that’s near and dear to my nerdy heart. If this is you, understand what narrow AI can do, get ideas for your worldbuilding, and, of course, in the ethics section you can find ideas for dark new dystopias.
What’s in This Book?
Despite solid advice to the contrary, I’ve structured this book as a logical argument because of the nature of the universe and who I am as a person.
Part I, “Seeing,” makes the case for agentive technology, taking the stance that it’s a genuinely new, unique, and exciting category of technology all on its own, with fascinating predecessors and deserving of its own consideration.
Part II, “Doing,” presumes that you bought the argument presented in Part I, walking through use cases that are germane to the tech. The use cases are structured according to an explanatory model. To bring the use cases to life, I introduce a speculative gardening service called Mr. McGregor.
Part III, “Thinking,” touches on what the consequences of the tech might be, including the future of the industry and the ethical questions that this technology raises. It’s not light summer reading fare. It’s not meant to be.
To make the book easily referenced, Appendix A, “Consolidated Touchpoints,” brings together all the use cases into a single place. There, they are first presented chronologically, and then according to the conceptual model used to introduce the chapters in Part II.
Appendix B, “A List of Referenced Agentive Technology,” collects the real-world examples mentioned in the course of the text. There are other agentive technologies out there, and I expect there will be many more in the future. But if you’re trying to remember that one “chaperone” service, you should be able to find it there more quickly.
What Comes with This Book?
This book has a companion website (
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
How do you pronounce “agentive”?
“Agentive” is a once-languishing adjective that is built on the word “agent,” so I pronounce it emphasizing the first syllable, “Ā-jen-tiv.” I like that this pronunciation points back to its root, which helps people suss out its meaning when they’re hearing it for the first time. I’ve heard people stress the second syllable, as “uh-JEN-tiv,” which rolls off the tongue just fine, but doesn’t do much to help people’s understanding.
Did you invent this kind of technology?