Thoughts on Bots: The Emerging Law of Electronic Agents

Abstract

One sign that the Internet is beginning to mature is the increasing prevalence of web sites whose purpose is not to revolutionize your offline world, not to automate some mundane aspect of your being, not to interconnect you with other people who are just like you but rather to make it easier for you to use all the other web sites which are revolutionizing, automating, and interconnecting your life. The appearance of these web sites for web sites metasites, if you will suggests that the Internet has turned introspective. The people who create, shape, and use the net have begun to harness the power of all of this software to help manage all of this software. Just as people in pre-silicon days turned to intermediaries to handle many of the routine tasks of their daily lives, today we have the option of employing software operating over the Internet to take care of some of our daily chores. For many people, the biggest task of the day now is managing all of one's personal information scattered among various web sites. To ease this burden, there are now software intermediaries who will interact, on your behalf, with all the web sites demanding your attention.

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