Personal agents that work just for you have long been a dream in the tech world. Toiling in the background on your computer to manage your schedule or sort through your email, or venturing out on to the internet to carry out research or make purchases, they could take on much of your digital load.
The technology pieces are finally falling into place for this to become a reality. But as the first demonstrations of personal digital agents see the light of day, the questions that still need to be answered before they can hope for wide acceptance are becoming clear. Chief among them: How can you be sure that they will always be working in your own best interests?
A glimpse of one possible future for personal agents has come with OpenClaw, a technology project that took the developer world by storm earlier this year. OpenClaw, which was first known as Clawdbot, then Moltbot, drew wider public interest late last month when agents created with the technology started chatting among themselves on a social network built just for bots.