Pluralistic: AI's pogo-stick grift (02 Aug 2025)
Not only is agentic AI bullshit, but it's a specific kind of bullshit that AI hucksters have busted out in the past, and will bust out in the future, so it's worth spending a minute to unpack this bullshit and catalog its traits so that we don't fall for it. As GW Bush says, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, we don't get fooled again."
Automation can be transformative, relieving us of danger and drudgery by getting a machine to pick up some of the heavy work. Ideally automation seamlessly swaps a human for a machine at some stage in a process (ideally, the boring, dangerous and/or difficult phase). Like, whipping egg-whites for a meringue is hard on your wrist. But swap your whisk for a hand blender, and suddenly that tiresom process becomes fast and easy. If the blender is cordless, you can use it anywhere in your kitchen, including wherever you would have stood over a bowl with a whisk.
A mixer, by contrast, requires more labor on your part: you have to decant the contents of your mixing bowl into the mixer, run its motor, and then scrape the whipped whites back into your bowl for the next phase. It's worse automation.
