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Why Bill stepped down
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By Scott Kirsner
[01/24/00]

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"EXCUSE ME, ARE YOU HUMAN?"
How do you know your new e-mail pen pal isn't an intelligent agent?

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By Simson Garfinkel

Jan. 25, 2000 | "The number you have reached is not in service at this time. Please check the number you are dialing or contact your operator for assistance. This is a recording."

Remember that message? The time was the 1970s, and Bell Telephone was in the process of upgrading phone switching systems all over the country. Ma Bell, it seems, was fearful that a technologically unsophisticated customer might mistake Bell's recorded messages for an unresponsive, unfriendly, human being. Rather than risk an upset customer, the Bell system prefaced every message with a few tones, and concluded each with those oft-parodied words, "this is a recording."

Perhaps Ma Bell was being too cautious. Today those four magic words have largely been banished from the telecom lexicon, yet there's little fear among telco executives that somebody's grandma will start e-mailing complaints about rude and insensitive operators.

Ironically, if Grandma did write an e-mail about poor service, it's increasingly likely that her message might be read and replied to by a machine -- a machine engaged in the elaborate deception of pretending to be a human being.

Already, most of the e-mail sent to President Clinton at the White House is intercepted, categorized and replied to by a sophisticated mail handling system. Originally designed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the system determines the purpose of the e-mail that has been sent to the president and chooses a response from one of many that have been previously written by a human staffer.

According to MIT professor Tom Knight, the White House system then displays the e-mail message and the selected response to a human operator who nominally checks the machine's work before clicking the send button. The system keeps track of how many times each constituent writes; if this is the second time you have written on a particular subject, you automatically receive a different form-letter response -- one designed for people who are especially concerned about a topic. Of course, the White House system also keeps track of how many letters have been sent on each subject and their stated opinions, so that the executive branch gets some kind of feedback from the people it allegedly represents.

Automated technology for handling e-mail is rapidly moving into the world of e-commerce as well. The January issue of MIT's Technology Review magazine includes a profile of General Interactive, whose EchoMail product is currently used by Nike, J.C. Penney and other companies to automatically screen and route incoming e-mail.

Interestingly, the article credits EchoMail with J.C. Penney's rapid decision to cancel its sponsorship of the television show "Ellen" in May 1997 after actress Ellen DeGeneres' TV character came out as a lesbian. According to the article by Deborah Shapley, EchoMail analyzes each incoming e-mail to determine which product is referenced, the kind of request, the issue and the "attitude" of the person who composed the e-mail message. Back in 1997, EchoMail determined that lots of hostile e-mail messages were coming into J.C. Penney and alerted its human supervisor that they demanded immediate attention.

Next page | Could intelligent agents destroy online communities?