1. How helpful was it to have the Assistant?

Very helpful. He consistently helped me in finding other searching routes and consulting search engines I hadn't thought of. This was to be expected: two heads think better than one. (In this case, at least). Having a browsing assitant is like browsing in parallel - two people thinking about the same thing or scanning the same territory can cover more area in the same interval than just one person can.

Yes, and these were mostly cases in which he couldn't tell why I was doing something in particular and started recommending a different way of doing things. It made me think about how annoying an artificial agent could become if it coulnd't "second guess" what you're trying to do.

3. Was there some kind of assistance you might have liked [to receive] from the Assistant that you didn't get?

Not really. He was very helpful most of the time.

4. If the assistant was a computer rather than a person, what could it have done or what would be impossible?

As I indicated earlier, the central difficulty in assisting users in their tasks is trying to find out what they're trying to get at - guessing their intentions, and then trying to help upon what you think they're trying to do. Humans have amazing skills for 'mind-reading'. By this I don't mean anything para-normal - I'm talking about speech, gestures, etc. We're pretty good at figuring out what another person is up to. It is not clear that artificial agents would have the same skills - at least not with the same degree of refinement. They require huge amounts of common sense, interpersonal (inter-agent?) skills, and communicational knowledge of the sort that it would be extremely difficult to program. This is not to say that artificial assistants can't be useful. I'm just saying that guessing what a human is up to is a something very difficult to implement on a machine.

5. If the assistant was another person (but not in the same room), how could a computer have facilitated interaction between you?

Probably by transmitting those signals that aid human communication - hand and facial gestures, looks, etc. We already have an extremely efficient system in place - best thing would be to transmit these same signals and let humans figure each other out - similar to the way a telephone works better than morse. It's easier to transmit speech and let humans understand each others' extremely complex code rather than come up with a new way of transmiting the same information.


¢{^