pgBouncer

Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy: • Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies. • How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be. • In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good! • It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.) • A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to). • Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big. • Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions. Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

The problem with all of these AI personal assistant things is that people don’t actually want to do stuff. You fucking get that right? Do you understand that? Just like AI tools in the workforce, AI assistants don’t actually abstract decisions for you, they let you accelerate decision making. So instead of making one decision a day and then lamenting you can’t do more, AI assistants are going to let you make ten decisions a day and act on all of them. A miracle? Nah dog, a fucking nightmare. Nobody except type A strivers who need Twitter fodder actually want that. Let me tell you a story. When I got back from college I was inspired. If I could take on an elite university with grit and determination, so could everyone I know. I was all razzed up to get people I know to achieve their potential. What I learned after many years of trying is that absolutely nobody wants to realize their potential. People want to hang out with friends and complain. That’s how the world has worked for ten thousand years. This weather fucks. Can you believe the cows walked off. People don’t want enablement. People don’t want you to take all of their excuses. TV is mindless passive activity. AI assistants are not. They’re telling people that they can achieve more. And people absolutely do not want that. Let me tell you another story. Once upon a time I lead a big process overhaul at work and it was great. Two years later I hired a contractor to do something similar. But I personally didn’t want to have to do a bunch of work. Within a week I knew I fucked in. This contractor kept coming to me with decisions I needed to make. Dude I wanted to not have to think about this. Again, a helper when you don’t actually want help is a disaster. None of these AI assistants will take off because people don’t actually want assistants.

in every new beginning there is a little magic

Long live the humanities