Who manages the agents?

"What should the future of humanity look like?"

Some of these people have lost their damn minds.

People building an agent framework that will struggle to correctly infer that my appointment at a hospital will require additional travel time when organising my calendar for me waxing lyrical about the future of the humn race is chaotic behavior.

Th Wright brothers would have had no credibility discussing what ATC protocols should be, and they, at least, actually did something credible.

Maybe a useful concept to adopt here is the DRI - Directly Responsible Individual, which is apparently a term first used by Apple. The GitLab Handbook has a good definition: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/directly-r...

"ultimately accountable for the success or failure of a specific project, initiative, or activity"

I think that role should be reserved for a human, who can then use all the agents they like but has to take accountability for what is ultimately delivered.

Did anyone notice how the article goes on and on about making AI accessible to the billions of people in the world, but then in the same article says this:

> Your agents need to be sovereign. Your company must own and control the agents’ identities, permissions, memory, skills, artifacts, and audit trails. Those assets must be portable, governable, and inaccessible to anyone you have not authorized.

That's not very open, now is it? In fact it sounds like the author assumes that all 8 billion people in the world will all be running their own company, and they will all still be competing in a game of capitalism.

The closer I start working with and on AI stuff, the more I start seeing the disconnect between doomsday predictions of what AI will replace vs. what it is actually capable of. Yes, it can do stuff, and yes, it's getting better. But the closer you look the more clear it becomes that the enthusiast vision of completely independent AI systems is unrealistic as of today. Yes, all the tech companies are pushing for exactly this, but reliability and accuracy is all over the place. Plus, many of the technologies that everyone is talking about in the wider public (e.g. image recognition) have been quite well-developed and widely applied for years, before the current LLM boom, but they now get more attention as part of the overall AI hype.

Many indistries are changing, but in most cases the new tools will be more akin to cars that still need drivers, rather than robots who take over the whole job. Yes, jobs might be lost, or shifted to others, but it's not like suddenly 90% of people will have nothing to do. There were similar shifts in the past with new technologies, and we made it past them.

Agents manage agents.

The middle management in companies is one of the worst inventions ever. I think baboons have better middle management structure than us.

Might as well replace all that.

One kind of weird future alternative is we are like 5 year old children in a world we don't understand with vast complexity and we are completely reliant on our AI mommy and daddies to protect us from danger and provide for us. We manage the agents, but we only have a very vague idea of what is actually going on. If they join a cult at the behest of their doomer eschatology obsessed creators, we are kind of screwed though.

The author is completely right about the AI Lab's promised vision of the world: They claim to want to create superhuman intelligence, which will produce vast abundance. But superhuman intelligence would be extremely dangerous, so it needs to be controlled by a tiny "priesthood" of trusted people, or somehow designed so that the superhuman intelligence could be trusted. (We have no idea how to do that.)

But the author's vision is also suspect, if you assume that the models will become much more intelligent:

1. Hypothetically, we can't give every human their own personal SkyNet to command. That would, uh, probably end very badly. If everyone gets an agent, those agents can't be too capable?

2. If you do somehow build a model that's much smarter than you, what do you contribute by managing it? How many people here have ever worked for a well-intentioned manager who couldn't understand the people they managed? So in this scenario, human management would be mostly displaced by agent management. Most companies could lay almost everyone off and let the agents manage each other. We only need humans to manage models now because the models are still pretty broken.

3. If we create models that can genuinely replace humans at almost any task, you won't be able to buy those on the API. At that point, the billionaires and the politicians wouldn't need human workers any more, because everything can be done better using their pet agents. Just have the robots build stuff for the billionaires directly. And if any of the former human peons get upset about being locked out of the economy to starve, then have the agents pilot the drones, too.

Basically, almost none of the people imagining a future of superhuman intelligences have actually though through how it would actually work in the real world. We're going to spend trillions of dollars and vast amounts of resources chasing the goal of making ordinary humans obsolete. Now, that goal might be unobtainable, I hope. But I'm deeply alarmed at how much we're spending pursuing it.

As the Matrix documentary showed, when one goes rogue even the machine overlords can't stop it..