It's reasonable to be cynical, but the future hasn't been written yet. If we choose only to see a negative future, we will ensure that it can only exist.
In the negative vein, I see a lot of VCs and business leaders talking about making AI for companies that directly interface with customers.
Those agents will be used to manipulate and make painful existings services exactly like today. Enshitified transactional websites engineered for maximum pain.
A different direction can happen if we choose instead to use our ai agents to interact with business services. This is actually what's currently happening.
I use gemini/chatgpt to find things on the web for me without being manipulated and marketed at. Maybe one day soon, I can buy airline tickets without the minefield of dark patterns employed to maximize A/B tested revenue.
The only thing that needs to happen to keep us on this path is to bite the heels of the major companies with great agent systems that put the user at the center and not a brand. That means selling AI agents as a SaaS or open source projects - not ad-supported models.
This community is probably the group that has, collectively, the most say in where this future goes. Let's choose optimism.
The thing is, if AI agents become a significant part of web traffic then the content of the web will simply shift to manipulate the agent instead of the human.
And don’t forget when you use an AI agent today to buy something it’s using “marketing” information to make its decisions. It’s influenced by SEO in its search results, indeed there’s no shortage of marketers busy working out how to do this.
I do agree there’s much to be optimistic about but the fundamental dynamics of the consumer market won’t change.
> In that world, those agents will sift through the noise. And the one that does that the best will win.
The existence of agents capable of learning to cut through the enshittification also implies the existence of agents capable of learning to enshittify all the more effectively. It's an arms race, and there's no reason to suspect that the pro-consumer side will win over the pro-exploitation side.
In the negative vein, I see a lot of VCs and business leaders talking about making AI for companies that directly interface with customers.
Those agents will be used to manipulate and make painful existings services exactly like today. Enshitified transactional websites engineered for maximum pain.
A different direction can happen if we choose instead to use our ai agents to interact with business services. This is actually what's currently happening.
I use gemini/chatgpt to find things on the web for me without being manipulated and marketed at. Maybe one day soon, I can buy airline tickets without the minefield of dark patterns employed to maximize A/B tested revenue.
The only thing that needs to happen to keep us on this path is to bite the heels of the major companies with great agent systems that put the user at the center and not a brand. That means selling AI agents as a SaaS or open source projects - not ad-supported models.
This community is probably the group that has, collectively, the most say in where this future goes. Let's choose optimism.