Agents on the Web: Agent Jurisprudence.
Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh · 1998
The agent metaphor comes packaged with a number of powerful abstractions. Some of these are psychological, such as beliefs, knowledge, and intentions—abstractions that were traditionally studied in AI. However, there are a number of other abstractions that the agent metaphor brings to the fore. Of these, we have been emphasizing the social abstractions. Close cousins of the social abstractions are the ethical and legal abstractions. These too are being recognized as increasingly important in developing agents that are not only sociable, but also well behaved. AN UPRIGHT AGENT Traditional computing approaches to actions focus on their causes and effects. But with agents, we also need to distinguish between right and wrong, legal and illegal. We need to make this distinction as agent developers, and we