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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

I have yet to understand this obsession with agents.

Is making decisions the hardest thing in life for so many people? Or is this instead a desire to do away with human capital — to "automate" a workforce?

Regardless, here is this wild new technology (LLMs) that seems to have just fallen out of the sky; we're continuously finding out all the seemingly-formerly-unimaginable things you can do with it; but somehow the collective have already foreseen its ultimate role.

As though the people pushing the ARPANET into the public realm were so certain that it would become the Encyclopedia Galactica!

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If you reframe agents as (effectively) slave labor, the economic incentives driving this stampede become trivial to understand.

> Is making decisions the hardest thing in life for so many people?

Should I take this job or that one? Which college should I go to? Should I date this person or that one? Life has some really hard decisions you have to make, and that's just life. There are no wrong answers, but figuring out what to do and ruminating over it is comes to everyone at some point in their lives. You can ask ChatGPT to ask you the right questions you need asked in order to figure out what you really want to do. I don't know how to put a price on that, but that's worth way more than $20/month.

Right, but before a product can do all of those things well it will have to do one of those things well. And by “well” I mean reliably superhuman, not usually but sometimes embarrassingly poorly.

People used to (and still do) pay fortune tellers to make decisions for them. Doesn’t mean they’re good ones.

fwiw I used it the other day to help me figure out where I stand on a particular issue, so it seems like it's already there.

> Is making decisions the hardest thing in life for so many people?

Take insurance, for example — do you actually enjoy shopping for it?

What if you could just share a few basic details, and an AI agent did all the research for you, then came back with the top 3 insurance plans that fit your needs, complete with the pros and cons?

Why wouldn’t that be a better way to choose?

There are already web sites that do this for products like insurance (example: [1]).

What I need is something to troll through the garbage Amazon listings and offer me the product that actually has the specs that I searched for and is offered by a seller with more than 50 total sales. Maybe an AI agent can do that for me?

[1]: https://www.policygenius.com/

> There are already web sites that do this for products like insurance

You didnt get the point, instead of going to such website for solving the insurance problem, going to 10 other websites for solving 10 other problems, just let one AI agent do it for you.

> Or is this instead a desire to do away with human capital — to "automate" a workforce?

This is what I see motivating non-technical people to learn about agents. There’s lots of jobs that are essentially reading/memorizing complicated instructions and entering data accordingly.

> I have yet to understand this obsession with agents.

1. People who can afford personal assistants and staff in general gladly pay those people to do stuff for them. AI assistants promise to make this way of living accessible to the plebs.

2. People love being "the idea guy", but never having to do any of the (hard) work. And honestly, just the speedup to actually convert the myriad of ideas floating around in various heads to prototypes/MVPs is causing/will cause somewhat of a Cambrian explosion of such things.

A Cambrian explosion of half baked ideas, filled with hallucinations, unable to ever get past the first step. Sounds lovely.

They were already not getting past the first step before AI came along. If AI helps them get to step two, and then three and four, that seems like a good thing, no?

Only a small percent of people will actually produce ideas that other people are interested in. For most people, AI tools for building things will enable them to construct their own personalized worlds. Imagine watching movies, except the movies can be generated for you on the fly. Sure, no one except you might care about a Matrix Moulin Rouge crossover. But you'll be able to have it just like that.

> Imagine watching movies, except the movies can be generated for you on the fly

These are just called dreams

> A Cambrian explosion of half baked ideas,

Well yeah, that's how evolution works: it's an exploration of the search space and only the good stuff survives.

> filled with hallucinations,

The end products can be fully AI-free. In fact, I would expect most ideas that have been floating around to have nothing to do with AI. To be fair, that may change with it being the new hip thing. Even then, there are plenty of implementations that use AI where hallucinations are no problem at all (or even a feature), or where the issues with hallucinations are sufficiently mitigated.

> unable to ever get past the first step.

How so? There are already a bunch of functional things that were in Show HN that were produced with AI assistance. Again, most of the implemented ideas will suck, but some will be awesome and might change the world.

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