An odd corollary. When buying a house, we needed to sort out insurance, and the usual online suspects tended to generate a “computer says no” on account of one detail. We got word-of-mouth recommendation for an insurance agency, sat down in an office with all the relevant details, and got sorted out in minutes at no additional cost.

There’s an interesting fuzziness around “agents” and the deep definition of “agency” — the capacity to get things done, the assumption of responsibility for actions — that reaches back to the days when human agents carried out their work with tremendous autonomy, and forward to the blue-sky future first indicated by Pattie Maes’ MIT work.