[hopeless]

I worked on agent-based systems >20 years ago, including large research projects and standardisation/interoperability work.

Ultimately, that effort failed but I don’t see any awareness of that considerable volume of work reflected in today’s use of the word “agent”. If nothing else, there was a lot of work on the use-cases and human factors.

It’s just a bit disheartening to know that so much work, by hundreds of researchers (at least), over 10+ years, has just slipped into irrelevance

[ethbr1]

It was opined on HN the other day, but operations research (aka data science), the annals of human process mapping (aka process automation), and control theory (outside ME/hardware) all suffer similarly.

A field retitles itself, and suddenly no one is aware of the still-applicable research from before the name change.

Which is probably more broadly to say that no modern courses teach surveys of previous material.