That’s exactly the problem I have with all this agent ideas too. Imagine you had a human concierge that is just waiting for your instructions and is as smart or a bit smarter than you. Would you just tell them “plan this holiday for me” or “order this food”? I don’t even trust my friends to get this right, why would I give this to someone else?
Corporate travel is an example. In many organisations, you tell someone in the travel department "I need to be in Tokyo for this conference from Tuesday to Sunday, and charge it to this cost code", and they figure out flights, accommodation, etc for you, with minimal input from you.
Unless this someone in the travel department knows you and has booked many flights for you before, there are so many unstated assumptions and preferences and hidden utility functions that make that someone unable to find the best solution for you.
My employer does have corporate travel concierge who can actually do this with minimal input. But people do not want that. They think about aspects like, if I have a layover at XYZ, would the vicinity of XYZ be a good place for a few hours of sightseeing, given my own travel preferences and previous sightseeing destinations; and would I still want it if it is an overnight layover at XYZ. Or things like, if I fly via this route, I could squeeze another paid day with zero work expectations while I could rest on the plane / in lounges. Or things like, this particular airline has this particular type of aircraft with far better seats than that particular airline, so I would be happier even if the flight is longer.
Needless to say, all colleagues that I know of (myself included) prefer to book corporate travel themselves, even if from the company's perspective, spending a few hours to do it is much more expensive than having the concierge spend a few hours to do it.
I agree, but often corporate policy overrides most people's preferences, which is why such processes exist - to ensure that travel arrangements match corporate policy rather than individual preferences.
In my experience corporate policy is primarily built to control cost. It will not allow booking expensive flights when cheaper flights are available. But when prices are similar, it doesn’t really dictate much.
And in many cases having a corporate policy means just adding a few more constraints: it makes the problem more like a logical puzzle and this can nerd snipe people.
Ha, but I always hated when my company tried to get me to do that and ended up spending more time on the phone with the "concierge" than it would take me to do it myself on expedia. And I think most people feel similarly.
When I tell a bot to find the best value per volume for a reasonable quantity of unscented Dawn dish soap [so I can buy that], then: It often makes a complete mess of this seemingly-simple operation.
(And yeah, that is an actual thing that I've tried to accomplish with voice commands while standing in my kitchen and doing some dishes. It seems very simple, and it did not go well.
Maybe when we get the basics figured out we can start worrying about how inept it is at doing vacation planning.
It seems that this kind of thing isn't sorted at all, and that this is a very real problem for those who are in the bot business: These missed opportunities leave money on the table.)
I think we can safely assume that AGI is still a good ways out then.
These AI LLM products really do well on the illusion of seeming intelligent to regular folks, but I'm not fully convinced they can replace human brains... yet. ;)
I mean: That sample was only demonstrative of shopping for dish soap. :)
I often get some seemingly-good results in the non-shopping research department, where I'm exploring science and physics; things that don't generally change rapidly.
But unlike dish soap, I can't buy the science results that I want[].
[]: er. well, ackshually... let's just not talk about that concept right now.
I wouldn't even use a bot for that, there's price comparison websites and of course I know where to find the cheapest stuff already.
Which makes me think: would a generation raised on AI and automating these things even consider looking for e.g. deals on household consumables? This is spiraling doomerism at this point, but, do people who outsource the hard thinking to LLMs get fresh ideas or inspiration still?
I mean: I've been using price comparison websites since we've had a web with enough prices to compare them, and they always find some way to fail. And I don't possess the hubris required to think that I always know where to buy the cheapest of anything.
And the only reason I'm thinking about buying dish soap is because I'm washing dishes. Without some kind of other influence, I won't be thinking about it again until the next time I'm washing dishes. But meanwhile, there I am -- washing dishes, and thinking about buying dish soap. I'm stuck doing this job until it is finished and my hands are wet; I might as well engage the bot.
> Which makes me think: would a generation raised on AI and automating these things even consider looking for e.g. deals on household consumables?
Sure. If finding a deal on a household consumable is what they're behooved to do, then why would they not? People broadly do adapt to the world they grow up in, and to use the tools available to them.
We don't use phone books or video rental places anymore. We're still getting by.
And people will misuse the machine as well, but that's also not new.
When the engine light comes on in ~any car from the last 30 years and the dude at Autozone plugs a widget in and declares "It says here that it's an O2 sensor!" and people blindly treat that as a firm diagnosis, then they sometimes find disappointment: They install a brand new O2 sensor and things don't improve at all. That won't change.
(In reality, that result just means "The measurement reported by the O2 sensor is irrational." That could be because the sensor is bad, but it could also be because any other part of the fuel+air system -- from front to back -- is being funky instead.)
> do people who outsource the hard thinking to LLMs get fresh ideas or inspiration still?
As much as they ever did, I suppose. Not everybody is naturally inquisitive, nor gets to be above average.
I wanted some banana plugs for my speakers, as well as I needed some longer speaker wire. I kinda wanted it for the weekend so I could watch movies with some friends. I didn't want to order online as that wouldn't arrive in time. Three stores around me had some, but they were quite far apart and I didn't want to drive to all of them, so I needed to figure out which store had ones that were actually decent and not too crappy.
LLMs completely and utterly failed at this.
The Mensa test results are impressive but are in no way shape or form relevant to real world scenarios.
I wanna see benchmarks on successfully completing benefits applications, on finding the best option to purchase X from, on correctly identifying a piece of furniture and its condition and setting a correct price on it and selling it on craigslist/FB market place and so forth.
I've been looking for usable, insulated, stackable banana plugs that work with 12 AWG wire for over a decade.
For a lot of my audio things, I can get by with MDPs from Pamona Eelectronics. They're insulated-enough, stackable, dual-banana plugs on 3/4" centers and where they work, they work very well. (I don't recall if 12AWG is within spec or not, but it can be made to fit.)
But they do not work on audio widgets that do not have 3/4" spacing, like my aging Lexicon receiver and its great quantity of binding posts for speakers.
I don't care if they're glitzy or fabulous-looking. I just want functional, insulated, stackable single banana plugs.
(The common marketplace is full of elaborate gold-plated non-insulated things. I guess they're pretty, but they're a hazard and nobody will see them again soon at all if everything goes well. Their function-follows-form beauty is only detrimental.)
Funny, I had a similar task for an LLM recently but it succeeded, so I'll describe it:
I asked the chatbot (librechat, tavily-mcp connected, kimi-k3) if anybody tests dish soaps rigorously. It said yes. I asked it to find the consumer reports from Germany. It did so, full access is paywalled but it did see the top positions. The I asked it what term to put in evay.de if I want to order. It gave me a string that found the auctions for me. I also asked it what the actual difference is and it described what info the EU law forces onto the label and told me what to look for in the ingredient lists.
The process is still involved. I wish I could just do it all by saying "find me another dishsoap, this one sucks". But then would everybody saying this phrase except the same approach to the issue that I took?
I was about to argue against this with something like "soon everyone will just follow the average Claude/GPT generated trip to every destination"...
But I realized that this is mostly a strict upgrade to how many many people are planning trips these days. It will probably do a pretty good job of accounting for your preferences, probably better than most/any travel agent unless they're very very local.
Yeah but the contention is here automating the bookings. Did Claude book the flights, hotels, tickets and attractions for you or would you let it without oversight?
Yes it booked everything, I just had to click the final pay button. I did run my itinerary against a fresh session like: 'There are errors in my travel plans, go find them'. It found one issue where I was scheduled to be at the wrong train station.
I think it depends on what you do for work. I'm not going to ask an agent to book my flight for my vacation to French Polynesia. I want to pick my seat and potentially find a deal making an upgrade worth it, choose an airline, etc.
But my routine business trips in the CONUS with strictly defined booking options... let me just email an agent "Get there by meeting on day A, leave after meeting day B" and have it sort it all out without the drudgery of the corporate travel portal. YES PLEASE!
By that point, you don't need an AI that boils the oceans and hopefully doesn't confabulate or misinterpret your words, all you need is a better corporate travel portal, which is a legitimate workplace productivity discussion to have, and a solved problem with traditional methods. Ours is effectively close to the workflow you describe: picking dates and time brackets, destination, fine tuning flights and hotel options, sending for validation, less than 10 clicks through information-dense and effective/predictable screens which I wouldn't want to trade for a chatbot and it's usually over the top words salad.
We have had idea of expert systems for decades at this point. And spend however much on software development. Some how we have failed to reach this in way too many places. Even simplest things like cancelling some service might be broken...
And now we want to add some random factor into middle of it all...
And the reason why there are 10 clicks is that that is the number of decisions that is required to get people to hand over their money.
There will have been an A-B test with 9 clicks -> less sales, less revenue.
There will have been an A-B test with 11 clicks -> less sales, less revenue.
The people making these sites are not dumb. They are also sitting on thin margins nowadays, and mostly from the airlines and hotels rather than from the users.
That doesn't apply to a corporate travel portal. If you're on the portal, you're booking a business trip. You're not going to not book a trip because it takes 1 click too many.
That's approximated by the portals - the people building these go and look at Expedia for their flow and design ideas... so the information permeates across.
For me, it is not a matter of trust but that I actually like shopping, planning a trip, deciding what restaurant to go to. Deciding what to buy when shopping is a matter of personal taste and not intelligence.
A human assistant is largely a status symbol. Most people are not really that busy. The real problem with an agentic assistant is if everyone can have one then it no longer acts as a status symbol.
And I could bet money on that in short time after someone builds that sort of system the next step is to make it worse. Push worse and more expensive options to user. Or at least those from highest bidder... Anyone involved just can't keep themselves honest so it is doomed to be exploitative.
Plan a holiday, definitely. There are many esoteric things one has to research to properly plan a holiday that I’d rather just not. Some things require reservations months in advance and I’d rather an AI just figure all that out for me ahead of time.
