Do you want an LLM writing and sending important messages for you? I don't, and I don't know anyone who does. I want to reduce time I spend managing my inbox, archiving stuff I don't need to read, endless scheduling back-and-forths, etc. etc.

> Sure, at first you will want an AI agent to draft emails that you review and approve before sending. But later you will get bored of approving AI drafts and want another agent to review them automatically.

This doesn't seem to me like an obvious next step. I would definitely want my reviewing step to be as simple as possible, but removing yourself from the loop entirely is a qualitatively different thing.

As an analogue, I like to cook dinner but I am only an okay cook -- I like my recipes to be as simple as possible, and I'm fine with using premade spice mixes and such. Now the simplest recipe is zero steps: I order food from a restaurant, but I don't enjoy that as much because it is (similar to having AI approve and send your emails without you) a qualitatively different experience.

So here's where this all feels a bit "build me a better horse" to me.

You're telling an AI agent to communicate specific information on your behalf to specific people. "Tell my boss I can't come in today", "Talk to comcast about the double billing".

That's not abstracted away enough.

"My daughter's sick, rearrange my schedule." Let the agent handle rebooking appointments and figuring out who to notify and how. Let their agent figure out how to convey that information to them. "Comcast double-billed me." Resolve the situation. Communicate with Comcast, get it fixed, if they don't get it fixed, communicate with the bank or the lawyer.

If we're going to have AI agents, they should be AI agents, not AI chatbots playing a game of telephone over email with other people and AI chatbots.

Short reply:

I agree, it only goes half-way.

Elaboration:

I like the "horseless carriage" metaphor for the transitionary or hybrid periods between the extinction of one way of doing things and the full embrace of the new way of doing things. I use a similar metaphor: "Faster horses," which is exactly what this essay shows: You're still reading and writing emails, but the selling feature isn't "less email," it's "Get through your email faster."

Rewinding to the 90s, Desktop Publishing was a massive market that completely disrupted the way newspapers, magazines, and just about every other kind of paper was produced. I used to write software for managing classified ads in that era.

Of course, Desktop Publishing was horseless carriages/faster horses. Getting rid of paper was the revolution, in the form of email over letters, memos, and facsimiles. And this thing we call the web.

Same thing here. The better interface is a more capable faster horse. But it isn't an automobile.

> Or to take another example where I've seen people excited about video-generation and thinking they will be using that for creating their own movies and video games. But if AI is advanced enough - why would someone go see a movie that you generated instead of generating a movie for himself

This seems like the real agenda/end game of where this kind of AI is meant to go. The people pushing it and making the most money from it disdain the artistic process and artistic expression because it is not, by default, everywhere, corporate friendly. An artist might get an idea that society is not fair to everyone - we can't have THAT!

The people pushing this / making the most money off of it feel that by making art and creation a commodity and owning the tools that permit such expression that they can exert force on making sure it stays within the bounds of what they (either personally or as a corporation) feel is acceptable to both the bottom line and their future business interests.

Related short story: the whispering earring http://web.archive.org/web/20121008025245/http://squid314.li...

> Seems like many, if not all, AI applications, when taken to the limit, reduce the need of interaction between humans to 0.

This seems to be the case for most technology. Technology increasingly mediates human interactions until it becomes the middleman between humans. We have let our desire for instant gratification drive the wedge of technology between human interactions. We don't want to make small talk about the weather, we want our cup of coffee a few moments after we input our order (we don't want to relay our orders via voice because those can be lost in translation!). We don't want to talk to a cab driver we want a car to pick us up and drop us off and we want to mindlessly scroll in the backseat rather than acknowledge the other human a foot away from us.

> AI applications, when taken to the limit, reduce the need of interaction between humans to 0. > But if AI is advanced enough - why would someone go see a movie that you generated instead of generating a movie for himself.

I would be the first to pay if we have a GenAI that does that.

For a long time I had a issue with a thing that I found out that was normal for other people that is the concept of dreaming.

For years I did not know what was about, or how looks like during the night have dreams about anything due to a light CWS and I really would love to have something in that regard that I could visualise some kind of hyper personalized move that I could watch in some virtual reality setting to help me to know how looks like to dream, even in some kind of awake mode.

Are you saying this is what you'd like to happen? That you would like to remove the element of human creation?

It's the setup for The Matrix.

Lmao re modern media: every script that human 'writers' produce is now the same old copy paste slop with the exact same tropes.

It's very rare to see something that isn't completely derivative. Even though I enjoyed Flow immensely, it's just homeward bound with no dialogue. Why do we pretend like humans are magical creativity machines when we're clearly machines ourselves.