Thanks for the Bill and Ted reference at the end ;)

I'm humbled that somebody made it to the end. Doubly blessed because it's not every day you get to make 2 Keanu Reeves movie references in one post

made it to the end as well :wq

it was good, resonates with my own experience dialing it back and reconnecting with other human beings, I like being pro-Ai, but not pilled-Ai, and trying to moderate the Ai discourse

:wq indeed :)

it's been a wild ride, in a lot of ways I feel like I speed ran running my EQ into the ground, only to be reborn like a phoenix.

I've been told in the past to "think like an entrepreneur, not an engineer" and in a lot of ways I think that was bleeding into how I was approaching AI-usage.

I'm on your blog now, hoping you've posted your own musings so I can read them!

I have not :x

Supposed to be redoing that, I've been making zines instead (physical blogs?)

really? that's freakin' cool. what kind of topics??

I'm old, so I remember 'zines from the 80s and 90s :)

Mostly political oriented, one of my returns to humanity was getting involved in my local indivisible. I have one on May Day, lots of Get Out The Vote, "changing the constitution" (wip). I've been using the exercise to learn the history of things.

I'm currently (like right now) working on A Survey of Ai Regulation (and more), which is far too much to fit into the mini-zines I make, and will be used to force my hand into updating my site q:]

Very cool! Heck, need to force that hand just to help spread the word about the other zines! :)))

Using AI agents to email each other is just a reflection of "If you're not going to bother to write it, I'm not going to read it"

How would you approach this. You email a company that has something you want to license. An agent responds. Do you abandon your pursuits at that point and consider other options?

I mean honestly yes, if given the choice not to interact with an AI system for something I will. Simple example, the Comcast AI slop bot stonewalls you online, but you can walk into a retail location and have a human resolve the issue in 30 seconds

Depends on how close other options are to what I want.

But if you're going to have an agent rather than a human respond to enquiries from potential customers (= $), then I'm not convinced I'm going to like how you respond after I am a customer.

Yeah, that closeness of options makes it tough to really dig the heels in. Also, you can become a customer today, and have them fire their entire support staff and replace it with an agent tomorrow. Dwindling QC and CS isn't a new concern though, just need to make sure the space isn't owned by a single company

It's certainly true that companies can take a turn for the worse and stop treating their customers well. But a company using bots to communicate with prospective customers is sending you a signal that they already treat their customers poorly. Maybe you don't have any alternative options, but if you do, it's wise to listen to the unintentional warning this company is giving you.

Yes.

Let's say it was critical for the business, with no viable alternatives? I'm all for "find a way or make one" but there are times when you need to be more practical than dogmatic.

Would love to hear your thoughts

Sometimes in business you ultimately and unavoidably have to eat shit, so it is what it is. But you should strive to be someone who doesn’t have to eat shit, and until then, if you still gotta eat shit, then try not to make a habit of it.

Well said :)

One of the nicer blogs I’ve read on the subject, thanks Josh.

Pretty sure you only get to drink the Kool-Aid once. At least in UK this is Jim Jones ref.

To the chagrin of the unfortunate General Foods corporation, the water flavor enhancement product used at Jones Town was actually Flavor Aid.

And maybe that's a pretty good analogy to what's going on with this post. It contemplates a world of suburban parental neglect and private burrito taxis and lays them at the feet of AI. But these were happening before LLMs burst onto the scene.

In a world of $3,000 rent and $3,000 medication and $3,000 preschool, what do you expect will happen?

I'm glad for Author to write on the subject but think the article was tough to get through due to undeveloped ideas and too many cliches. I was additionally confused where the Kool Aid thing was going because the "drinking it" phrase originates from LSD/acid tests--mentioned in the wiki [1] page but not the post.

Where do we go from here and what is the intermediate ground of leveraging LLMs and Agentic AI? It's odd for me to read about someone going "all in" on AI--to the point of using it for email with humans--and then having a massive reversal.

I think this is a really interesting case study and temporal snapshot of where we are with AI technologies. I have always been wary|skeptical|cynical of the technology and this is affirming but also just confusing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid

Reasonable piece. I always thought the hope/promise of AI was to make it do the work we don't want to do so that we can enjoy life the way we want to which is typically socializing with humans? I get that it generates so much that if you are reviewing thoughtfully everything it is doing, it can suck you away like being a worker at a conveyor belt, but hopefully that is a short period of growing pains. A related take on staying human in the age of AI: https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/the-lost-subject-ai...