Even worse is that virtually no one in this space even recognizes the fairly rich research into “agents” throughout the history of computer science.
Mention John Holland’s work in adaptive systems, Hewitt’s actor model or even Minsky’s “Society of the Mind” and you’ll be met with blank stares.
I do believe LLMs have the potential to make these older ideas relevant again and potentially create something amazing, but sadly the ignorant hype makes it virtually impossible to have intelligent conversations about these possibilities.
If you know more than others, that's great, but in that case please share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. Just putting others down doesn't help.
Hewitt's actors are arguably the earliest version of "agents" out there. But about one out of every 17,000 techbros running around claiming to be an AI expert today has even heard of actors. Much less Society of Mind, or any of the pioneering work on Agents that came out of the Stanford KSL[1] or UMBC (remember "AgentWeb"[2]?).
And don't even mention KQML, FIPA, DAML+OIL, or KIF, or AgentSpeak, or JADE...
Nah, all joking aside, no problem. I think it's relatively rare for me to be that way, but I'm human like everybody. And certain "hot button" issues can occasionally set me off. Too late to change this, but I'll try to keep that in mind in the future.
Mention John Holland’s work in adaptive systems, Hewitt’s actor model or even Minsky’s “Society of the Mind” and you’ll be met with blank stares.
I do believe LLMs have the potential to make these older ideas relevant again and potentially create something amazing, but sadly the ignorant hype makes it virtually impossible to have intelligent conversations about these possibilities.