John Smart is a futurist exploring the intersection of technology and culture. In his new post he explores the five- to-twenty-year future of smart agents and the knowledge bases they use and build. These may be the most socially important forms of AI that will emerge in the coming generation. Here are a few quotes:

“A new kind of software agent called a personal sim is the most empowering and intimate form of AI on the horizon. We’ll soon be using sims that model our interests, goals, and values in their knowledge bases, and which act as our assistants and digital interfaces to the world.. Our most intimate agents will be highly personalized to us, building accurate internal models of our current context, preferences and values..  perhaps like Carson in Downton Abbey”

“If your mother dies in 2030, will you find it helpful to talk once in a while to the sim she herself talked to for the last ten years of her life? Will you let Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or whoever provided her sim keep improve her AI, and even talk to surviving friends and family, so her sim can become an ever better contextual interface to all the data of her life? There’s even a few startups working on that idea today, like Eterni.me.” See also EternityHill.com.