I’d say something that could be behind the “difference” is, as has been seen throughout history, an individual’s openness to change and interest in change. Scepticism and resistance to newly-popular technologies seems to be a deeply embedded human trait. There isn’t anything inherently wrong about this, in my view, as long as enough people who are curious and risk-takers—let’s call them optimists—exist to balance the pessimists. After all, none of us would be discussing this topic on TBT today if those who felt “the telephone is good enough for me!” had prevailed.
Put another way, it’s similar to the difference between venture capital investments (which, by the way, are usually put into private companies so there isn’t any stock price to pump up), buying shares in a publicly listed company, and purchasing US Treasury bonds. Each has a different level of risk and may or may not be appropriate for a given investor.
I was definitely in the skeptical camp myself, but I’ve seen with my own eyes that AI can indeed write useful code. At first I used it like an enhanced Google search through Apple’s docs (I write primarily in Swift/SwiftUI). Then I started giving it (ChatGPT at first, now Claude Code) actual coding tasks, but within a more narrow set of parameters. My latest project is a macOS receipt management app which Claude designed from my specifications, and wrote all the code.
From my perspective, I feel that having a software development background is a tremendous advantage in that I’m able to provide very specific guidance and guardrails, like I would to a team of human programmers I might have led. But Adam @ace has stated he does not have that background, and yet Claude has built his SetShot app based on his specifications. So maybe I’m just flattering myself to believe such a background is needed.
I routinely use Perplexity Pro over a general google search or DuckDuckGo search, both of which also proffer A.I. supported answers to queries. I value that. No agentic work there without buying tokens. I was given access today to A.I. Siri on my iPad Pro and am curious and probably positive about exploring Apple’s approach. The relationship is too facile to entrust my life and work just yet to it, I asked it what was I heading into these coming weeks and it simply summarised my Calendar.
One example (that I use) is delegating the management of my investments. Most of my investments are managed by a UBS person (not an AI and I don’t think he uses AI) and he contacts me for major decisions about investment changes. I trust him and that has been rewarded over many years. I would never hand off my portfolio to an AI agent to manage. (I have some investments in a personal account that I “manage” but that consists mostly of dividend stocks and funds that I never touch.)
These kinds of relationships rest on a foundation of trust and I can’t imagine that extending to AI models (at least at this time).
I am in agreement with everything that Adam has pointed out. I am also very uneasy about the possible exponential growth of inaccurate, perhaps deliberately biased, information that will result from A.I. “learning” from the incredibly massive amounts of information it has vacuumed up from around the Internet. If some of that information is deliberately skewed or woefully wrong (or fabricated), it will still end up in A.I. “knowledge,” and then consider that the flawed output from A.I. will likely also end up being ingested, more errors added to the same “knowledge” base, and so on, and so on….. Yikes.
I recently started a new job as a software engineer. Management is very excited about being “AI forward.” We recently had training on using the AI Google built into its suite. One of the touted features was being able to point it a collection of documents, have it generate a summary and if you want, have it turned into a podcast so you can listen to the summary. A couple times during the presentation we got the safe-harbor statement that we should be sure to check what the AI produces for accuracy. So, should I check the podcast for accuracy before or after I listen to it? And why would I have it do all that if I have to summarize the documents myself sufficiently to determine if the machine summary is accurate?
Also, the cutesy words that Claude uses when it’s doing its thing annoy me to no end. Just show me a spinning wheel or something until the output is ready to be viewed.
Lastly, I’m curious how “AI forward” we’re going to be when OpenAI, Anthropic, et al start charging what it costs to do the queries. Lighting other people’s money on fire is all well and good, but our company’s money seems like an entirely different thing.
Seems to me AI Agent is the slippery slope thing that all the movies are about.
vs general AI assist?: I don’t want AI interfering with my creative writing, so I turn those platforms off (even when Google sneaks it back on)
vs ChatBots? … One thing I notice is that online AI can actually help one create more thoughtful questions. As I was researching a subject the other day, reading the responses helped me conjure up more sophisticated complex questions … resulting in helpful prompts to further and better-informed inquiry.
Although I can see the trap, so to speak, of how students can use it to, basically, do their writing for them.
1 1/2 cents
p.s. I can’t help but laugh though, when it’s obvious that a chatbot, that’s not a real entity, feigns flattery
“what an excellent and nuanced perspective on the subject”, “How incisive of you” LOL
Agent is useful as two other a-words: Advisor and Actor.
You need to purchase a replacement for an aging security camera, subscribe to a better video generation model, and book a hotel room.
An Advisor provides a quick compare-and-contrast.
An Actor commits your wallet.
Both save time and effort. Only one can damage your lawn.
The AI pushers like Altman, Musk, Thiel, … knew to get users addicted with prompts. Then add costs/credits per prompt. Then sell the AI to support and corporate help desks, hospitals, etc. Remove the human from humanity and its AI.
Watched a funny but scary youtube video and its maker asks the AI to order him a car, and a robot, and have the robot drive him around. Not like a self-driving car, but to show the next level of fear!
We have every right to fear AI, to hate AI, because we didn’t need it, and it needs regulation.
Meanwhile, I’m on perchance.org, making some renderings for an idea of friend to paint for me. (the AI generated art would be a reference but not the original). So AI can be useful. If I had to hire a designer for this… I would be broke.
I was thinking that it takes alot of effort to command an AI “assistant” for your needs. And if it learns your nuances and subtleties, then it could be useful. And you would be dependent, and you would have to pay, in the end. I can’t even get Carplay to shuffle without repeating songs… or telling Siri to set alarm for forty minutes and she(it) replies, “setting alarm for 15 minutes”. No No NO!
I keep looking back at Do robots dream of electric sheep, PKDick, and wonder, are we going to make slaves of AI, robots and end humanity?
Adam, I know this is an area where your expertise is higher than mine, but an AI agent seems like it could be ideal for endurance training. It could account for your work schedule, the weather forecasts and use biometric data to come up with work out advice to improve or maintain endurance with lowest injury risk. For example - if high heat indexes are forecast - it will prompt for an early morning work out the next day. I know that I would need to plan that out a day or two in advance since morning workouts are not in my routine. The AI agent could even ‘close the loop’ so to speak as it could evaluate results of your workout data and continue to adjust advice. Along the same lines, there are a whole bunch of ‘Life Coach’ functions that will certainly go to AI Agents - I can see them as a big part of chronic disease management like diabetes, hypertension, heart failure and many more conditions. A lot of the management is protocol driven already and AI agents do a pretty good job of taking a general protocol and personalizing it. So like a lot of this tech, you may not be the customer of the AI agent, you will be the target product.
I have a minority opinion. While I agree that AI agents now aren’t up to what we want, I hope and expect that in the future they will be.
Imagine you’re rich or a company bigwig with an executive assistant. It is the executive assistant’s job to do all they can to take care of the drudge work. You fully expect that the assistant will be trusted, know your goals and desires, know what’s important and what’s not, be able to filter contacts and stand in for you in communication, and so on.
So why shouldn’t we all be able to have an AI agent than can do the same? Everything except drop off clothes at the dry cleaner?
Science Fiction predicts it will happen. For example, Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (2006).
I don’t think it is that far off. As Bill Gates said:
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.
Today I will not use AI for any of the tasks you list @ace Maybe in 10 years @mschmitt if I am still alive
I think it should be possible to start with something simple though. I have just begun thinking about having an AI system that is trained only on my data. It should know nothing about the external world and all about my world. It will not be allowed to contact external sources. The goal is to be able to ask for information that is only mine. I have 1677 text files that document a lot about what and how I do things. I have a lot of videos showing how things are done and PDF manuals. I have all my mail back to the 1990s. Checklists for packaging to go fishing. Digital insurance documents. Work-out checklists. And a lot more. I want the AI to answer simple questions like how do I prepare the toilet in my wife’s cabin for the winter? Where did I buy my TV? What is the tyre pressure I use on my studded winter tyres? Things I do only once a year I have been documenting for many years. I always find my documentation today, but I would love to have a fast answer instead of the slow process it is now since it often is information that is found in the combination of a video, a text file and a PDF manual. I will probably work with Claude to make this system.
This is what I’d like an AI agent to do for me. I want to do a brain dump every weekend:
Ride my bike as many days as possible (needs to check the weather)
Here is a list of random things I need to buy at some point, some have priorities, some do not.
Here’s a list of things I need to get done sometime this week.
I plan on billing about 20 hours and like to do most of my work in the afternoon.
Here are the current meetings on my calendar (or access my calendar for meetings scheduled)
If it’s summer I need to mow the lawn. If it’s snowed I need to shovel.
In a perfect world, with read access to my calendar, the list of things I want to buy and the knowledge that I want to ride my bike daily, my agent would, every Monday say:
I’ve checked the weather and it looks like Monday, Wednesday and Thursday will be good days for you to ride in the morning.
How is your bank balance? Oh you have $225 not assigned? Consider buying Items 3 and 7 on your list. If/when you do, I will cross them off
Since it’s supposed to rain all day Tuesday, I suggest you do “this" batch of errands since they are all near each other. When you get back you can start on the prep for Wednesday’s meeting.
Don’t forgot to start a load of laundry this morning so it can dry on the line today.
Alas, that does not exist yet. So I continue to manage my tasks with a combination of “in my head” and sticky notes for random daily things (because the notes go with me then get tossed), all while cursing the weatherman.
In a nutshell, I need a personal assistant. But I would not want it to do the things you listed in the article.
I have played with the free tiers of Gemini and ChatGPT. It is interesting to find that ChatGPT will pull knowledge from all threads but Gemini will not. Gemini is better with some product research that I do.
Perplexity sounds interesting for some research that I do but I’m not willing to pay for it.
I will try a local model when I get a chance to install, because I like the idea of keeping everything in a contained room.
Some days I feel like this the way the internet used to be, even for simple searches, before it got so commercialized, all while hating the reality of data centers.
Thank you for writing this. I agree completely. I can’t see ever using this. I don’t like the idea for giving up control of anything.
I can see benefits for ai in medical research. I’ve read that it could speed up creating new drugs for diseases significantly. I just don’t want it in my personal life.
That’s my thinking. Right now those ideas for agents are generated by AI companies desperately trying to find a use for them (and failing). In the future, I see agents as being useful, but for tasks that we can’t think of right now because the concept is too new and radical.
What I want agents to do is keep my life organized. Sort my photos and files by analyzing the content, remind me of bills and expenses or appointments I might have forgotten about (like annual subscription renewals coming up), find me good shopping deals on things that are low-priority but I might have an interest in, etc.
I definitely don’t want AI doing anything automatically for me, but if it could hang out in the background and watch for things that are important to me, that could be valuable.
I agree with just about everything you said. I also find the chatbots a quicker way of doing web searches and aggregation of information to get a quick understanding of some things I was trying to figure out. And it’s helpful with many technical things I do.
But I can’t imagine letting it run wild and being an agent for me. I would dread checking my monthly bills afterward.
I have to wonder if the human species is heading down the path to become Eloi (H G Wells’ Time Machine, 1895). Will we be using less and less brainpower and become more reliant on machines (run by Morlocks!) ?
Yes, I use a smart watch to set timers and sometimes agree to calendar events suggested by iOS (eg based on the content of emails). But I don’t see a benefit in having an AI assistant that tries to anticipate my needs any further than that.
I suppose my reluctance to accept the technology started with the annoying, intrusive MS Office Paperclip (that app, incidentally, was in a Windows folder called Actors - I found I could disable it by renaming the folder).
But maybe I am getting too grumpy
Unfortunately, this AI business is going to make us all robots. Really sad and disappointing. It started with calculators. Folks got to depend on them more and more, and that led to people not able to do even basic math in their heads. I used to teach Mathematics courses on a part time basis at some community colleges, and it was distressing to see how much the students depended on their calculators. Wonder what would happen if the calculator ran out of battery power? I suspect most of them could not think on their feet.
Then it was the cell phone, and things got worse. In fact, the entire world is wired to cell phones.
Many folks (like myself) stick to the “old fashioned” way of doing many things, and fortunately we can think on our feet. But an incident from the other day indicates what is coming with AI. A woman was driving a Tesla on I-5 north about 30 miles south of Seattle. She passed a cop doing almost 80 mph (speed limit is 60 mph). The cop followed her, and noticed strange behavior from her in the car. Also she was swerving some. So, he pulled her over, and apparently while letting the Tesla do the driving, she fell asleep! Luckily she did not hit anyone, but who knows?
So, once again we see that folks will stop doing the thinking.
