Pylimitics

There’s an idea circulating widely that if you enable a swarm of AI agents to scour the web for “deals,” you’ll get the best prices on everything. This is nonsense. It’s based on several patently ridiculous assumptions:

• Your agents might be competing with some other users’ agents, but not everybody’s.
• The vomitrocious amount of resources you’re expending to save a dollar on a car rental rate is not going to eventually cost you, and it’s morally and ethically just fine because it’s for something you want.
• The websites your agents are accessing are perfectly fine with all this agentic activity, and even though it’s costing them money, they’ll just go along with it.

The first one of these dominoes to fall is the third. Shopping sites don’t want your agentic traffic, because (see above bullet point) it costs them money! They have more resources to devote to stopping your agents than you have to devote to enabling them. The elephant in the room is Amazon; they want you to use their own shopping agent. Because they’re Amazon, it’s also called Alexa. But Alexa doesn’t work for you, it works for Amazon, which, guess what, has more resources than you.

The first bullet point is pretty obvious too; if you have 100 agents working on getting the best deal, anybody who can afford 200 agents will out-agent you. This is exactly the issue national cyberwarfare teams around the world are dealing with now; an infinite escalation loop can’t stop and can’t slow down. And nobody can win.

The only reason AI might actually be smarter than humans is that we humans seem to enjoy thinking and acting stupidly at every opportunity.