Memes and Mutation: Societal Implications of Evolutionary Agents in Push Technologies

Push technologies are rapidly moving toward autonomous and evolutionary intelligent agents for seeking, organizing, and creating information via the Web and other pervasive and innovative information technologies. We describe and define autonomous and evolutionary agents designed for push technologies. Memes, which are messages one agent broadcasts to another, causing the agent to evolve are introduced and we explore how memes will influence evolutionary agents. We develop the social implications of meritorious and malevolent memes exchanged by evolutionary agents. In the conclusion we explore the interactions among humans, evolutionary agents, and memes in order to reflect upon the future. Finally, we raise a series of future research questions regarding genetic determination of evolutionary agents, whether it is possible to predict if a meme will be meritorious or malevolent, and ask whether it is desirable to legislate the evolution of agents that are evolved from malevolent memes. Our contribution is to raise awareness of the movement toward push technologies deploying evolutionary agents and its promise and caveats, as well as to provide future research directions.