On AI agents: how are these digital butlers supposed to get paid?

FILE UNDER: the trajectory of any new technology bends toward money.

I’ve been hearing and reading a lot about AI agents lately.

Ezra Klein has been discussing them all month on his podcast, in a pretty excellent interview series. WIRED’s Will Knight wrote a newsletter last month with the headline “The Age of AI Agents Is Fast Approaching.” The general consensus seems to be that this is where we’re headed.

I have my doubts.

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As background, an AI agent is a piece of software that can complete tasks on your behalf. Ezra provides a clarifying example in his most recent interview:

“The example I always use in my head is, when can I tell an A.I., my son is turning five. He loves dragons. We live in Brooklyn. Give me some options for planning his birthday party. And then, when I choose between them, can you just do it all for me? Order the cake, reserve the room, send out the invitations, whatever it might be.”

That’s a tight and evocative description. You can immediately see the appeal, right? It is, broadly speaking, rich-people-shit. One of the (many) advantages that the wealthy have over the rest of us is that they can afford a personal staff that takes care of everyday-life time sinks. Planning a kid’s birthday, figuring out travel logistics, submitting paperwork, etc. Our normal daily lives include an inordinate number of tasks that consume time and mental energy. Rich people can hire someone to handle all that stuff. The rest of us just grin and bear it.

The promise of software agents is that sometime, in the not-too-distant future, the trappings of rich-people-shit could become available to the rest of us.

I’d love to believe in that promise. I am, amongst other things, a perpetually-overwhelmed parent. If technology could reliably help me manage the day-to-day life churn, I would be thrilled.

And Klein’s reasoning is facially quite strong: A whole lot of very well-funded businesses are working quite hard to build software agents right now. The technical hurdles are comparatively small. They have (much of) the necessary technology. They have the funding. They (likely) have (some) market demand. This is not an absurd belief for Ezra to have arrived at.

But I keep being troubled by the ghosts of digital futures’ past. These promises are not new. Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab folks were insisting that the age of software agents was imminent in the early ‘90s. Douglas Adams wrote and performed Hyperland, a “documentary of the future,” for the BBC in 1990. it featured Tom Baker as the personified software agent, dressed up as a literal butler.

Instead of software agents acting as personalized digital butlers, we ended up with algorithmic feeds and the infinite scroll.

Facebook’s algorithm is personalized, sure, but it is designed to maximize value for Facebook by keeping you within the company’s walled garden. Amazon’s algorithm is optimized to sell you the most products.

These are not digital butlers. They are digital sales associates.

And, with the benefit of hindsight, we can generalize this phenomenon: the trajectory of any new technology bends toward money.

We could have developed software agents 10, 20, 30 years ago. Software engineers were working quite hard on it. They started companies and obtained funding. The technical hurdles were comparatively small. But there was little money in it. And, in a VC-dominated marketplace, we do not get products that would be useful to the end-user unless they hold the promise of phenomenal financial returns to the investors.

We didn’t get free (or cheap) digital-butlers-for-everyone, because there was no money it.

That’s why the current wave of enthusiasm seems like a hype bubble to me. I am seeing a lot of very smart, normally insightful people being taken in by the idea of “AI personal assistants for the masses,” without asking what the revenue model is meant to resemble.

And let’s be clear: Dario Amodei is casually dropping numbers like “$5 or $10 billion” to train the next-generation models that are supposed to make these AI agents possible. That’s the financial hole these AI agents are somehow meant to fill. And that’s just for starters.

The promise of personalization in internet-futures-past went unfufilled, because the money wasn’t in personalizing to your interests. The money was in keeping you on-site, seeing targeted ads. And, again, the trajectory of the future bends toward money.

Sam Altman says we’ll have agents. Sam Altman says a lot of things. Most of what he says is tuned to what he senses people want to hear at any given juncture. But what is the revenue model for personalized agents? In particular, what is the revenue model that might convince investors over the longer term that it could go to infinity.

(Side note: a number of tech critics have been arguing that AI hype is nearly over, because it’s becoming obvious that the tech companies are spending billions to make millions. I want to gently suggest that these critics are not yet jaundiced enough. The companies are spending billions on a loss-leading product that juices their stock price and makes them worth paper-trillions. The OpenAI investment doesn’t need to generate more sales than MSFT spends on it. It just needs to keep the share price absurdly high. It’s ridiculous, and further evidence that our entire economy is just derivative financial products at this point. But that’s the absurd state of things right now.)

Agents, if they are developed at all, are going to be a bespoke, luxury good. They’ll be for discerning customers with money to spend on personalization. The business class lounge set. The rest of us will get info-sludge and degraded public services. That’s the status quo ante, at least. It’s what will happen if we don’t resist, and collectively demand a better future.

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I’d like it to be otherwise. And I plan to keep a close eye on this, since it sort of represents a hard test of my broader thesis about how technologies develop.

• A lot of companies are trying to build AI agents right now. They are well funded. There is supply.

• The appeal of AI agents, if a smooth and trustworthy product can be brought to market, is undeniable. …Holy hell would it be nice if AI could make the trappings of rich-people-shit available to the rest of us, just this once.

• But we are still living in the free trial period of these technologies. The trajectory of the future bends toward money.

• So, either a market is going to develop for subsidizing these tools (packaging and reselling all of our behavioral and personal data, for instance), or the products will be rendered unaffordable to the mass public.

If you want to know where social technologies are headed, don’t focus on what the technology might be used for under ideal conditions.

Focus on the direction that currently-existing market forces will channel it.

And if that direction looks bad, exert pressure on public officials accordingly.

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Maybe I’ll be wrong. Maybe I’ll revisit this post in 2029 and, with the benefit of all the time made available by my digital personal assistant, compose a thoughtful mea culpa.

But, for the time being, I would urge you to be skeptical of the promise of AI agents.

Until someone can explain how we’re going to pay these digital butlers, I’m going to assume they aren’t ever going to be available to the masses. That’s not their purpose in this story. Their purpose is to get us excited about the promise of AI, to place our faith in these tech firms (old and new) under the assumption that the benefits will be broadly distributed sometime later.