How will agents interact with the world?
2024-07-13
Lattice made a splash this weekwith a pretty crazy announcement about adding AI workers to their platform. It was shambolic and they’ve since walked it back.
While Lattice did this poorly, I think that the question of “how do we integrate Agents into the world?” is an interesting place to dig and experiment right now.
As an example, if you believe in agents, it seems pretty clear that agents are going to need to be able to pay for things subject to certain rules. So... what does it look like to give an agent a credit card?
I could just give it a credit card in my name, but that seems a little risky, and if things go wrong, who’s going to make that right?
But if I hire an agent created by another company to do work for my company, who gives the credit card to them? Is it the creating company? Do they then invoice me after the fact?
It's possible that this looks exactly like how businesses give workers credit cards... but maybe not? It might be better to know that this is the card assigned to system X by entity Y. The entity that is ultimately on the hook for the spending even if things go wrong might want to be able to track that; the credit card issuer might also want to know which of its clients are giving Agents these abilities as the patterns of spending, real and fraudulent, might look different. This transparency probably helps the system overall.
Another example is account creation. There are probably types of services where we want non-human actors to be able to create an account. We could have them pretend to be human, but it might help to let them ask for agent access to a service. This is probably different from API access; in some cases, it probably helps for them to see exactly what I see in the system.
Zooming out a bit, it seems to me that people get really upset when something pretends to be a human but it is actually AI. It also seems likely that we’re going to want to give agents more ability to act in the world and be productive. Yet the systems we have today that are essential for productive work assume human actors or computers acting on behalf of humans (programmatic access), but nothing in between. If we’re going to capture the value from agents, our systems are going to have to adapt.