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my robotic underlings
Thursday, October 29 1998
Last night as we were going to sleep, I told Kim about the most satisfying thing I do at work: the making of personal agents to automate the repetitive tasks that it would otherwise be my job to do. I called these agents (which are really just active server page programs written in Visual Basic Script) "my robots." I said that I was making robots to do my work for me, and that ultimately all I wanted to do was make robots, not do work normally assigned to robots. I somehow made the story delightful, like a fanciful children's tale, devoid of all the dry boring technical references with which programmers usually pad their speach. Kim even thought it would make for a good children's book. I'd do the art of course. "My robots" could look like anything, since they're made up entirely of non-visual concepts.
Today at work I pushed aside almost all my routine tasks to focus on my most powerful robot so far. He's an unusually intelligent beast who goes about his business in a slow, steady, thorough & intelligent manner, selecting the two most recent articles from each of twelve folders, extracting from these an abstract and a title, and placing this information in a place to be picked up by another routine that creates an index page for each of 12 subsections. As the robot finds new content, it appends a link to each of 12 different sidebar indices. Finally, it makes 12 lesser robots for on-the-fly forwarding of specialized content to a section of the Lycos portal, with whom my company is partnered. I felt kind of guilty as I worked at this fun and entirely self-assigned project all day, almost like I was playing on company time. But I'm too hard on myself; these robots have the capacity to make my company far better equipped to deal with the increasingly dynamic imperative of the maturing web medium.
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