Been thinking a lot about intelligent digital agents, which I believe will be a tremendously big deal within the near future. Some simple tasks they may perform would be collecting and sorting data for you (which could include scouring web pages, renting movies from the store, purchasing things automatically for you, queuing up music playlists for parties based on the collective musical tastes of party-goers based on their iTunes profiles, etc).

Anyway, I have not been thinking about this very long, but it strikes me that a more appropriate (or at least direct) term for an “intelligent agent” is in fact, a slave. Digital slaves. I wonder how the three-fifths compromise (Constitutional Law, United States) would play into creating that association on a larger cultural and legal scale?