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"Agent" was already established lingo in computer science and AI when The Matrix was released.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/648203.749270

Fun fact, you're browsing the web as fetched for you, and rendered in a way you find acceptable, by your user agent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent

Better page specifically for user-agent in a browser context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent (although has a lot less content)

Besides Firefox, I don't think many of the browsers are user-agents anymore, but more like corporate-agents, as they don't seem to act in the interest of the software user anymore.

They were indeed. “Autonomous agents” were extremely trendy in CS 30 years ago.

https://dlnext.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/267658

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