I am genuinely trying to understand the essence of the agentic wave of artificial intelligence. I am always frustrated when I don’t understand something. Unfortunately, much of popular life and capitalism is like this for me. But I work regularly to make sense of what I can. Since I have to write stories that speak to this agentic moment, engage with people on the front lines, and help provide guidance to my team and customers, I am doing the work to separate the layers, make sense of the narratives being used, and find my way forward as I do with every other application that uses APIs.
From a simple technological standpoint, I have requests, CRON jobs, and events to accomplish any automation I encounter. I can request something via a URL or URI. If I need that request to be made on a recurring schedule, I can add it to my EasyCRON interface, and if ANYTHING happens out in the world, I can respond to things using events. This covers everything I need. The CRON jobs run while I am asleep, and webhooks respond to any events that occur. This applies to my API Evangelist and Naftiko work, and any job I’ve had in recent years. I genuinely do not understand why I would need an “agent” to do anything for me when I have this robust toolbox for automating my world.
If I begin to step outside the model that guides my reality, I would have to start with science fiction. It’s just cool. That is why I’d want it. This is where I’d start understanding where other people’s heads are at. They just like technology, have read a lot of science fiction, and have watched a bunch of movies, and the desire to have agents doesn’t go much deeper than that. They are neat. They get your imagination going, aligned with the white guy science fiction you’ve read over the years and the zeitgeist of popular culture as expressed by television and movies. This science fiction answer to why you want agents is the easiest explanation for me, and it relates to my own interest in technology and my condition as shaped by being a white male in the United States.
Next, I checked in with my wife, Audrey, on this to see what she thought. She immediately declared that there wasn’t a technological reason behind this, and that operating from this vantage point was preventing me from understanding it. It was a class thing. People like having assistants. It’s a status symbol. In this world, once you become important, you have an assistant. Agents are the influencer’s assistant, or at least influencers will buy into the promise of having an assistant. This makes a lot of sense when it comes to the buying and selling of the agentic dream and promise. If you aren’t an expert and don’t actually believe in the importance and value of the tasks you need to accomplish on a daily basis, and you are just aspiring to be influential, the concept of an agent makes a lot more sense.
After this, Audrey and I both concluded that alongside the science fiction fantasy and influencer visions, it was simply a data heist. Install this agent on your machine. Run these agents within your business. It doesn’t matter if it can do any of the things we promised—we got access to your file system, data, applications, and secrets. Appealing to your science fiction fantasies and social-ladder-climbing desires was just the way to get you to open the door. It is the digital data broker version of penny stock and crypto promises, but it is about stealing your data and being able to use it to train LLMs they can use for expanding their data heist and adapting it to whatever hustle is right around the corner. This is why they want agents. These people might not be twirling their mustaches while rising to the top of their evil plans, but they do need to feed their very, very hungry LLMs.
This question and answer illustrate my focus on the technology, business, and politics of this game. I am very technical, and I regularly apply my very engineering-oriented model to how I see the world. However, over the years I have learned to zoom out to the business layer to actually understand what is going on. But this situation illustrates the role that our politics play. The cultural politics surrounding the business layer as well as the technical core is what makes agents such an appealing story. I am genuinely confounded by how excited people get about them. I can find interest in the APIs you need to accomplish the business process automation people are speaking of, but I am lost when it comes to why you’d let one loose in your business or personal life, let alone an army of them. I know that much of the world goes right over my head. I am used to this reality. But it helps me to get at what the story is behind why we’d be buying and selling this very abstract and meaningless, yet harmful word, and allows me to continue participating in the current market—even with all the hype.
