In the near future, you will have your own personal army of AI agents that are always-on, doing work in the background on your behalf – 24/7. Every time you log in to your computer, you’ll have access to dozens of these agents, and you’ll orchestrate a small army of them like you’re conducting a digital symphony.
This future is definitely coming – it’s more of a question of when, not if. And those of us who’re prepared for it ahead of time will be significantly better off compared to those of us who aren’t*.*
So what the hell is an AI agent? And what will these things actually be capable of?
You’re probably already familiar with the concept of self-driving cars. You can think of AI agents as self-driving computer programs. With AI agents, instead of having a human programmer who needs to explicitly write out what happens in every scenario, you replace or augment the human programmer with AI and have the program drive itself. We call these self-driving programs AI agents.
You give an agent a task, you give it some resources to accomplish that task, and it will go out into the digital world to try and accomplish that task. That’s just one agent, though. ****Now imagine a swarm of a thousand agents at your command, all buzzing around in the background, coordinating with each other, and doing all sorts of “work”. Hell, this idea might even sound familiar to you if you’ve ever been a manager before, just with teams of AI workers instead of human workers.
It’s still very early days for AI agents, however, and agents currently struggle a lot with reliability and generality, but one point I can’t stress enough is that glimpses of this future are already here, they’re just not evenly distributed yet. And I believe it’s incredibly important for us to try and understand where the implications.
What might the UX look like for controlling distributed swarms of AI agents? (Midjourney v5.2)
As Sam Altman recently laid out, Agentic adoption will start off slowly at first, with our chatbots becoming more capable and more reliable. Soon, it’ll feel like you have your own personal chief of staff to rely on. Next, your personal AI will slowly transition to a team of more specialized agents, some of which will be working in the background on your behalf. Over time, the line between human remote workers and AI agents will begin to blur. And at some point, you will inevitably stop noticing or caring if these agents are human or AI. The ultimate Turing test.
Reliable AI agents will affect everything from how we consume the news to how we conduct research to how we socialize to how we teach our children to how we perform healthcare to how we work to how we play and everything in-between. Oh, and it will absolutely impact how we wage war... Entire industries will be disrupted over relatively short periods of time – just like what happened during the .com boom or the invention of the printing press. All knowledge work, e.g., all work that is done in front of a computer, is going through a fundamental revolution. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, said in a recent interview that we’re going through the equivalent of the industrial revolution but for knowledge workers. And the craziest part is that we’re still only just scratching the surface of understanding how this will impact our society as a whole.
Now, you might be saying that sounds wonderful and all, but what will this future actually look like in practice? And how do we get from our current AI tools like ChatGPT to this agentic, cyberpunk future of tomorrow?
Well, the first thing I’ll say is that nobody really knows the answer to this for sure. While we’re currently in the middle of an unprecedented wave of AI progress, in the past we’ve seen AI go through multiple ups and downs via so-called AI winters. It’s entirely possible that the core transformer architecture invented in 2017 that’s at the heart of most AI progress today will reach a local maximum at some point and level off, but we’re definitely not seeing that at the moment.
Anyone who’s been following tech news knows that the current pace of AI progress is insane, exciting, and concerning all at once. Every day of every week we’re seeing incredible advances both from academia and industry, and for perhaps the first time ever, we have hundreds of millions of mainstream consumers along for the ride, actively using viral apps like ChatGPT and Midjourney and drastically shortening the gap between research and consumer adoption.
I want to be clear on one thing, however; nobody really knows the full extent of AI’s impact on society in the short-to-medium-term, and we can only look to science fiction for ideas on how AI will impact society in the long-term. Whether it’s the most sophisticated AI PhDs or the most powerful CEOs, or the AI safety experts, anybody who tells you with confidence that they know how this is all going to play out is either lying to themselves or lying to you.
With these caveats in mind, there are some things I can say with confidence. And to do that, I’d like to ground this discussion in what’s possible today and think step-by-step through how the next few years are likely to play out, using ChatGPT as a representative example.