Why AI Agents Fill Me with Dread

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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?

 

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It all seems so small scale. So we’re destroying the environment and economy so I can have automated restaurant reservations?

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Adam, many thanks for making explicit the doubts I’ve had about this entire topic. AI agents have not filled me with dread because I have had a great deal of difficulty working out what possible use I might put them to. Of course, as I am now retired I no longer schedule meetings, research vendors, competitors, or providers, make travel arrangements, etc. etc. When I was an IT executive I had staff for these tasks. I can see that if AI agents were as easy to work with, as responsive, as trustworthy, and as reliable as my staff were they might be useful. But AI has none of these qualities and I share your disbelief that any serious person would let them loose on their personal data or allow them to make decisions on their behalf.

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Haven’t tried any AI agents and thank you for saving me the time of finding they’re a waste of time and energy.

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It’s the shiny new thing that marketing departments are talking about in order to secure VC funding and pump their stock prices.

And in a year or two, when the tech proves to be less than expected, they’ll quickly pivot to the next shiny new thing and pretend that the current one never existed at all.

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Although I don’t bring any firsthand experience to the topic, much of Adam’s perspective seems reasonable—verging on plain common sense. An essential element called for in all these actions, which AI lacks, is emotional intelligence.

Adam wrote; “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.” That will certainly be true if one expects equivalent results. Call me cynical—I expect the AI developers know their LLM/agents are inadequate to the task all the while they are pitching the glories of agentic AI. The paramount interest here is to have as many users spend as much time, data, effort and money as possible on further training their LLMs.

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Back around 1993 or so, a friend did a back-of-the-envelope calculation. He said, “It’s not worth deleting any file less than 10kb, because the time it takes you to look at the file and decide to delete it is, at our salary, more costly than the cost/kb of disks.” And that’s back when 100mb was a big disk drive…

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For the foreseeable future, I expect AI to take no actions on my behalf. “Dread” applies when I think of being unable to avoid others’ AI agents.

Joy of Tech had a nice commentary: The Joy of Tech comic... Human communication is disappearing!.

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To me, the dread of AI agents lies in their capacity to run amok with potentially horrible consequences either on your machine or on the internet. And who is responsible for their disastrous actions?

Nasty, nasty stuff.

Dave

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I concur. None of the tasks suggested sound like anything I’d want an AI to do, nor are they things I do often enough where any time savings would be significant.

I do restaurant reservations maybe a few times a year and flights/hotels maybe once or twice a year; and for the latter I am extremely picky about getting the flight times, ticket restrictions, and pricing just right. I have no idea how AI would know to do what I want and by the time I teach it, I might as well do it myself!

The only scenario where I can think of this kind of thing working is for repetitive stuff: like if you frequently book certain flights or stay at certain hotels, maybe the AI could do that for you. But you certainly wouldn’t use it for a vacation to Europe where there are a million preferences you’d want just right.

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All tasks you listed do not benefit at all from AI. Anyone who lets AI have full access to a live email account is just crazy.

As a developer some of my workflows have been improved by using AI. The workflows are now sorta agentic. Handling translations was a manual process taking at least half a day for each release. Instead of manually editing testimonials it’s now a simple 3 step process where I only need to check the result.

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The movie Fifth Element was ahead of its time:

Also “Anticipation denotes intelligence”

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Right on, @ace!

I have no experience with any “AI” and hope I never do, and was never a big enough fish to have any staff, so it’s hard to imagine needing one. A self employed family member could use an assistant but as @ace noted, it may be harder to train the person than do it yourself, as tough as that may be. I’m perfectly happy with the asistance my digital devices provide now, I don’t need any more “help” or “suggestions” or “top hits”.

I was trying to formulate a reply in my head while reading comments and I think @Shamino nailed it better than I could have.

This is absolutely not about the users, im(small and)ho, and even more for we sceptical curmudgeons:

there is also the “All the Presidents Men” movie, where a famous quote, possibly from the original reporters, was that to find what’s really going on, “follow the money”.

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Bingo! The sales pitch is an ‘assistant’ who will do whatever you ask without complaint… or pay. (Though the latter never actually went way, it just got externalised. And now the cost part is starting to come back to bite users, either directly (pricing) or indirectly (ads)).

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Yep. The only one I use is the free version of ChatGPT…and for me it is just a better Google search that can be a 2 way interaction rather than editing my query to get more detailed info. It gives suggested follows ideas and a one word answer goes there. I haven’t decided if it is worth paying for a subscription or even know what extra that gets me because the free version suits what I want it to do.

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  • Schedule meetings and appointments
  • Make restaurant reservations

The fun part is, AI agents are being sold by the likes of Microsoft as productivity aids for work. That motive doesn’t necessarily align with the priorities of the users, ahem, employees, on whose behalf they will be deployed.

“I’m sorry, Dave, but the boss wants you to meet with an important client. I have cancelled your dinner reservation with your wife, and scheduled a Teams meeting with Frank in California instead. This meeting is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.”

  • Deal with customer service disputes

That one I wouldn’t mind. Since companies are already using chatbots to respond to customer concerns, this would just be two bots botting at each other.

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Love this. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to convince people to stop worrying about text files for this reason.

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I’m picturing the algorithm (with weights) I’d have to write for the flight reservations. Not before 8 AM and an aisle seat unless the exit row is available but maybe I’d pay for premium economy and it better be non-stop and it should be one of these two airlines…

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That’s largely why I don’t delete email or label it manually (I have lots of filters that do appropriate labeling). It’s just not worth my personal CPU cycles when Gmail’s search is so fast. And the very few times I have had trouble finding something recently, an AI-informed search has helped.

And if you’re traveling with your spouse, adding in their preferences as well. It’s a massive multivariable calculation.

@podfeet and I were chatting more about this in Messages in preparation for discussing the topic on her podcast this afternoon, and we were pondering what’s different for those people who have gone down the AI agent path. Perhaps less of a deep-seated belief that we can do whatever it is better than any other person or system, such that they’re willing to accept sub-standard results in exchange for less upfront effort.

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Adam, I (and apparently a lot of others) are totally with you, on this issue. Thanks for explicitly stating the case for everyone.

The notion of AI-Agentics is simply ridiculous (at least, at this point in time). We’re still in the age of “AI slop”, and online cautions/disclaimers like “AI information may not be accurate.” So if a person is to trust their everyday, important-to-get-it-right items, to AI, seems pretty foolish to me.

And please, don’t tell me AI can “write code”, like I have heard so many times recently from the general news media. I was a software engineer for years, and I still don’t believe this claim. Maybe AI can generate code that compiles, but does this code actually accomplish anything useful? As I have stated before on TidBits threads, in order to develop good, quality software, one needs to have a deep understanding of the problem to be solved. AI is not nearly capable of that understanding (at least yet).

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