Electric Elves: Immersing an Agent Organization in a Human Organization

Abstract

Future large-scale human organizations will be highly agentized, with software agents supporting the traditional tasks of information gathering, planning, and execution monitoring, as well as having increased control of resources and devices (communication and otherwise). As these heterogeneous software agents take on more of these activities, they will face the additional tasks of interfacing with people and sometimes acting as their proxies. Dynamic teaming of such heterogeneous agents will enable organizations to act coherently, to robustly attain their mission goals, to react swiftly to crises, and to dynamically adapt to events. Advances in this agentization could potentially assist all organizations, including the military, civilian disaster response organizations, corporations, and universities and research institutions. Within an organization, we envision that agent-based technology will facilitate (and sometimes supervise) all collaborative activities. For a research institution, agentization may facilitate such activities as meeting organization, paper composition, software development, and deployment of people and equipment for out-of-town demonstrations. For a military organization, agentization may enable the teaming of military units and equipment for rapid deployment, the monitoring of the progress of such deployments, and the rapid response to any crises that may arise. To accomplish such goals, we envision the presence of agent proxies for each person within an organization. Thus, for instance, if an organizational crisis requires an urgent deployment of a team of people and equipment, then agent proxies could dynamically volunteer for team membership on behalf of the people or resources they represent, while also ensuring that the selected team collectively possesses sufficient resources and capabilities.