Originally published at: Why AI Agents Fill Me with Dread - TidBITS
If you’ve been reading any media coverage of AI, you’ve probably gotten the idea that Silicon Valley has decided that we’re all going to be using AI agents to help with the tedium of our everyday lives.
I’m pretty technical, generally game for trying new things, and reasonably enthusiastic about the benefits of AI in general. I think AI chatbots backed by Web searches significantly outperform classic search engines, AI editing tools like Grammarly do an excellent job of eliminating mistakes and infelicitous wording, and AI coding is the most fun I’ve had building something on a Mac since HyperCard.
But I’m baffled by the talk of autonomous AI-powered agents like OpenClaw. The breathless examples that are bandied about seem either trivial, impossible for an AI to complete without reading my mind, or something I wouldn’t delegate to hardly anyone. Among much else, AI agents are supposedly going to:
- Schedule meetings and appointments
- Make restaurant reservations
- Buy event tickets
- Book flights and hotel reservations
- Research and buy products
- Respond to email, messages, and social media posts
- Plan group events with friends
- Deal with customer service disputes
Even setting aside my skepticism that an AI agent could actually accomplish any of these tasks, I’m horrified at the idea of one doing them for me. I may be a bit of a control freak, but the only person I’d trust to do most of these things is Tonya, and even then, she’d confirm with me before committing to anything. (As I would with her.) That trust was built over decades of living together, but AI agent proponents seem to expect the same level of trust on day one.
I’ve identified a handful of reasons why all this AI agent talk fills me with dread. See if my reticence resonates with you or if you think I’m merely yelling at the AI agents to get off my lawn:
- Minimal labor savings: Some of the supposed ways an AI agent will save me time are simply spurious. There’s minimal effort in clicking an Unsubscribe link in a newsletter I no longer want (and only I know when I no longer want it). I rarely want to track a package, but when I do, it’s merely a matter of clicking a link if I haven’t already been inundated with delivery status emails.
- Missing my internal context: No matter how much context an AI thinks it will have, it can’t know everything I know, particularly my internal goals and desires. How will it reply to emails or texts for me without knowing how I want to respond, especially since each response will be tailored to the individual and situation? How could it guess where I’d want to eat dinner without knowing what I’m in the mood to eat and how far I’m willing to drive that particular night?
- Lost information I need: Information that comes through my devices falls into three categories: important details that I have to know, information that interests me but I don’t need to retain (see “Reading Doesn’t Fill a Database, It Trains Your Internal LLM,” 28 February 2026), and stuff that’s neither important nor interesting… unless it becomes one or the other for some reason. For instance, I don’t care about email from Tompkins County about roadwork unless I need to drive on one of those roads that day. The relevance of those emails is contextual and changes daily, and only I know which bucket a given piece of information falls into on a given day. An AI agent would constantly have to ask me to recalibrate, which defeats the point of delegating.
- Unacceptably high stakes: For many tasks, the risks of having them done badly are too high to even consider handing them off to an AI agent. I always double and triple-check my own travel arrangements because getting it wrong could mean missing part of a conference. If I have to check an AI’s work that carefully, I might as well do it myself.
- Discomfort with mimicry: Even if an AI could respond to email or text messages accurately and at least roughly in my voice, I’m uncomfortable having someone or something speak for me. It’s not just my comfort at stake—the person on the other end thinks they’re hearing from me, not an AI, and that’s a deception even if the content is accurate. If they later find out an AI wrote that text, they’ll reassess how they read other things I’ve written. That’s why my Driving Focus auto-reply is upfront about who’s actually talking: “Good day, human! This is Adam’s iPhone. He’s driving right now, and while he swears he’s an Above Average™ driver, it’s best not to interrupt him unless it’s urgent. I’ll inform him of your message once he parks the car.”
- Problematic spending: When I do manage to overcome my innate frugality, I want to be certain I’m getting precisely what I want. I can’t imagine giving an AI agent permission to spend money on my behalf.
- No net benefit: I’m a great believer in automation, but as Randall Munroe has pointed out in xkcd (more than once), it’s important to ensure the effort saved outweighs the effort invested. Training a human assistant is time-consuming; training and maintaining an AI assistant feels like it would be vastly more work than just doing the tasks myself. Even getting a chatbot to respond to simple queries in ways I want has taken non-trivial amounts of training.
Ultimately, I wonder if some of the enthusiasm for AI agents comes from people who are sufficiently busy, wealthy, and senior that they’re accustomed to at least the idea of having human assistants.
Years ago, when Tonya and I were struggling with an overwhelming amount of work on TidBITS, Take Control, and parenthood, advice pundits were recommending offloading and outsourcing mundane tasks. We tried hiring a personal assistant for a while, but the experiment wasn’t a success, for many of the same reasons as I’ve outlined above. Too many tasks required personal knowledge, needed a personal touch, or were beyond our assistant’s skill set.
So I’m sure some people benefit from having an AI agent manage aspects of their lives, but I can’t imagine how it would work for me or for most people. And since even one hesitation about what an autonomous AI agent might do is to stop someone from trying one, it’s hard to see this field taking off.
But how about you? If you’ve tried an autonomous AI agent, how has it worked out for you? Have you worked with a human assistant, and if so, what lessons from that would you apply to an AI agent?