When Is There Too Much Tech? – Part 3 – AI Agents and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice

The AI revolution marches on.  The chatbots are somewhat old news now, though they are everywhere and inundating the world with content that is very difficult to distinguish from human endeavor.  The big new AI blitz is ‘agents’ and one of their primary uses – ‘vibe coding’.

AI agents are software programs that performs tasks autonomously on behalf of a user.  They utilize neural networks and machine learning like chatbots, but they are set up to act independently from the user once a set of instructions or goals are provided.  The classic use case is for an AI agent to act like a human travel agent, booking flights, rental cars, hotels and other travel details without user intervention.

When I envision a world of AI agents I am reminded of the sorcerer’s apprentice, that Disney Fantasia animation that portrayed a magic spell run amok and out of control.  I wonder if AI agents will have a similar effect on human activity.

The use of AI agents in the workplace is being aggressively marketed and the corporate world seems eager to incorporate them, whether out of FOMO or true belief. Companies hope to see significant increases in productivity when these agents are deployed.  

For the economics to work out the huge expenditures that AI companies are making in data centers, development and LLM training must be offset by ever-increasing revenues from companies paying for these agents.  And in turn, these companies must see increasing productivity which either reduces expenses (less employees) or increases revenues for the same number of employees.

I have little doubt that AI agents will have significant impact in the corporate world.  Whether they will cause the feared tsunami of layoffs and unemployment is difficult to predict.  In a perfect scenario, the cost of goods would decrease and there would be full employment with a shorter workweek.  But getting to that perfect world will be painful at best, and perhaps impossible.

We are seeing a test case for this in the coding world.  Vibe coding is eliminating the need for low level programmers and increasing the output of higher-level architects and designers.  Computer science majors, having been exhorted for decades to ‘learn to code’ are leaving college facing a scorched earth landscape of job options.  The industry may evolve to establish new job types and accommodate future grads, but first indications are not encouraging.

In our personal lives, the prospect of using an AI agent may seem tantalizing, like having your own administrative assistant.  It can pay bills, set up doctor appointments, schedule lunches or coffee with friends, plan a trip, organize your computer, manage your investments and perform a multitude of other tasks.

But when you hand over so many of your tasks to an AI agent, do you lose agency in your own life?  Do you become ever less aware of the details and mechanics of living?  It may save you time, but what will you do with that time?  Isn’t part of being human attending to the mundane details of life?  Isn’t there a certain satisfaction and Zen-like quality to performing those tasks?  

AI will seem irresistible to many, if not for its utility, then at least for its cachet and the feeling that one is technology savvy.  But its creeping invasion into our lives must be carefully monitored and measured to calculate its true value and measure what we lose in the process.  Beware that you do not end up like the sorcerer’s apprentice, outsourcing your tasks and being overwhelmed with runaway technology.

Payback is Hell

The 90’s were a great time, right?  The cold war was over, the Soviet Union humbled and dismantled.  The technology revolution brought ever more powerful computers and the shiny new Internet, with all of its potential for bringing knowledge to the entire world and leveling the playing field.  Global trade was growing and large numbers of people were moving out of poverty into a semblance of middle-class lives.  The United States was the world’s policeman, protecting free trade, settling squabbles and projecting power in a benevolent, quasi-altruistic manner (ha!).  The western developed countries were at the peak of their power and wealth.

It would have been the perfect time for the west to attempt to compensate for the damage that hundreds of years of colonialism and imperialism had wrought on the developing world.  

It would have been the perfect time to recognize the looming hydrocarbon crisis and begin to work towards alternative energy models.  

It would have been the perfect time for reaching out to former adversaries (Russia and China for example) and making a sincere effort to integrate them more fully into the global community.  

It would have been the perfect time to encourage a worldwide effort to address the drug trade and the growing rate of addiction in the west, which was, after all, the driving force for the trade.

It would have been the perfect time to promote education and entrepreneurship in developing countries rather than steal the best and brightest to further consolidate our dominance.

Yes, all of those things are super complicated and hard to achieve, but it would have been a perfect time and a very good idea to make our best effort while we were flying high. 

But that time is over.  Now the west is in free fall, with rising debt, government paralysis, rampant populism and authoritarianism, a supremely self-absorbed class of plutocrats, global warming looming, immigration crises and the USA led by an insane narcissist and megalomaniac.  

The formerly second tier nations – China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Russia and others – are rightfully claiming their share of the world’s bounty.  The African and Latin American nations with long histories of corruption, squandered economic opportunities and political turmoil (much of it initiated and exacerbated by the west) also yearn for their share, but see their young abandon hope in desperate efforts to immigrate or cleverly fuel the west’s out-of-control drug habit.

All is not lost yet, but the west is rapidly learning that payback is hell.  Now is the time for the world to come together.  The Trumpian unilateralism is a dead end that will lead rapidly to our demise as a species.  AI will only accelerate that demise unless we band together to share its power and potential.  Who will lead us forward?  Who will reject the current zero-sum mentality and argue persuasively for cooperation?  The world is waiting.

Two Hundred Bonjours a Day – My Spiritual Journey on the Camino

I have a very unfortunate injury to my left foot, presumably from playing soccer.  There is no cartilage between two midfoot bones. Walking at all is slightly painful, but becomes ever more so as the distance increases on a given day.  This is a profoundly discouraging injury to a person who expected to run, hike and play soccer into his 70’s and even 80’s.  But such is life.

When Karen decided to walk the French portion of the Camino pilgrimage from Le Puy to Estaing with her German friend Gudrun, I thought I would fly over with her and drive around while she was walking, practicing my French.  But as we got closer to the trip, the idea of joining them for part of each day’s walk and chatting with the predominantly French pilgrims seemed like a better idea and more likely to produce genuine French conversations.

So I rented a car and drove ahead of the walkers, walking a few miles back to meet them each time as I leapfrogged their progress.  They walked from 10-14 miles each day and I would do between 5 and 8.

Walking backwards on the Chemin de Saint Jacques, as it is known in France, was rather odd.  Since almost all of the walkers are moving forward, I passed large numbers of them (sometimes several times in a day!), cheerfully greeting them with a ‘Bonjour’ and maybe a ‘Bon Chemin’.  Some of them stopped me to ask why I was going the wrong way and this allowed me to engage in a conversation about my unique approach, my injury and anything else that might come up.  It was great practice for my French.

In the evenings we stayed at ‘Gîtes’, the very low-cost but convivial lodges for pilgrims.  We stayed in private rooms with bathrooms (spoiled Americans!) but many chose to sleep dormitory style and share bathrooms.  Breakfast and dinner were communal, offering great opportunities to make camino friends and share life stories.

Most of the pilgrims were older, between 50 and 80.  These baby boomer French were less likely to be confident in English and were super supportive of my efforts to improve my French.  The shared goal of walking (even though I was a ‘faux’ pilgrim or Pelegrin, as I joked to all who learned my story) and our shared humanity was a wonderful elixir that seemed to imbue everyone with an optimistic spirit and a sincerely friendly demeanor.

I never tired of saying ‘Bonjour’, and the people I met repeatedly over the course of our ten-day pilgrimage were equally buoyant in their greetings and our shared moments laughing and conversing.  It is clear that human beings really want to get along and enjoy one another’s company when we are on equal footing and sharing a goal.  But sadly, it all seems to break down when the real world gets in the way.  

My very odd and somewhat fraudulent Chemin de Saint Jacques, with its 200 Bonjours a day was a reminder to try harder to see our common humanity in every person I meet.  The bitter pills of our current political climate have poisoned me in that regard, but the antidote is out there if I will only remember to reach for it.