Gangs are a nice emergent hierarchical multiagent system.  They exhibit robustness, adaptability, high level of communication, vision (as in forethought and planning), and a strong level of cohesiveness given volatile settings.  Of course all gangs and organized crime exhibit these features in varying levels, but they exist.  The interesting thing is that they are fault tolerant enough and learn quick enough to exist against, what I hope, is the strong opposition of governments and police.  They train, equip and recruit, even make it something sought after to be part of the gang.

While the multiagent systems we create in the lab exist in an environment we have established, how do we maintain that level of pristine lab setting in real life?  I mean how would an agent operate in the “wild”.  I imagine one day we will have virtual cities that our virtual agent assistants “live”.  They will be our proxy to our devices, information, security, advice, and more.  They will be able to act and make decisions for us in order to achieve the objectives of their handlers (us).  However, they must be able to learn and be able to generate opinions.  I would imagine in the future bounties may be placed on obtaining information about things.  Then that info might be sold in an auction or sold to the contractor.  Bounties seem to be a good tool for gathering information because it can generate a lot of “heat” per se.  In the future I believe we will have so much information that google and the other search engines will not suffice for sophisticated individuals.  I believe that we will be producing so much info that useful info will become a commodity.

I think that probably first we will have to pay for search services like google.  Eventually AI will become sophisticated enough that we will be able to have personalized assistants that can interact on our behalf to obtain information.  I think that we will start to create micro-internets in order to organize information off the main net to act as a repository for our agents to barter with.  Hacking will be done by these agents in order to discover these isolated systems to gather information.

People’s identity may very well be established by their virtual agent.  A black market for such agents may exist.  Policing such a system would be extraordinarily difficult.  Probably only capable by well funded research firms in AI and networking.