A bot might someday take
A recent research paper (PDF) suggests that AI agents could do all sorts of useful haggling, providing they become a little bit smarter, and users can be persuaded to trust them.
The authors envision a world where an AI agent negotiates on your behalf, like buying a house or working out the details of a pay raise. And they write that such technology could allow negotiations in new areas like figuring out the terms of an energy-sharing deal with your neighbor, or the amount of money you should receive for giving up some privacy information to a mobile app. The team has experimented with an Android app that lets you do just that, in fact.
In an interview with Science, one of the authors, Tim Baarslag from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam, says the key challenges are giving such systems deep understanding of a particular domain, like real estate or energy, as well as enabling some sort of long-term perspective, so that it can negotiate with an entity that it’s dealt with before.
