Fledging Alexandrias

Agentic AI that books your flight makes no sense

...to me, at least.

I always thought of booking flights as big screen activities. Let me give you an example. Buying a bus ticket? Small screen activity, you can do that from your phone. Ordering a new controller? Small screen activity. Buying a new couch though? Big screen activity.

The mere concept of giving any of these tasks to an AI Agent is completely out of touch with ordinary people's habits and needs. Buying a pair of scissors for many people mean sifting through 20 different listings, comparing quality, reviews, price, and only then they'd make a purchase.

Instructing it to chain different flights together, find and make reservations, and pay without you ever looking at what it's doing and how it's doing it is something only people who cum AI hype every time Sam Altman says AGI or executives whose money is not theirs can remotely think it's a good idea.

Even if it was a program that you knew was reliable 95% of the time the majority of people would never do that. I would certainly never do that. What do you mean you can spend thousands of dollars without having to care if everything was correct? Would you board a plane with the pilot asleep at the wheel?

Because let's be honest, if you have to check every single thing this agent does it kinda defeats the point. The grift in this case is that an AI Agent such as Gemini Spark or OpenClaw can just run in the background, do its thing while you I don't know take another meaningless meeting and boom, travel plan made and sent directly to your colleagues.

The trade-off? It only uses your name, your address, your credit card information, it has access to the sites you signed on, meaning that a bad actor can pose as a legitimate website and make the agent fall into a phishing link: the future is a blind digital avatar that could either give your money to the first guy it comes across and fall into open potholes.
We don't need to go that far to see how a couple months ago ordinary Meta chatbots give away Barack fucking Obama's Instagram account to random people only because they asked nicely. Now imagine that but with your credit card information.

Agents look like the latest desperate attempt at trying to find the job-replacing feature of LLMs that might convince your boss to fire you, give all the company's money to Altman and Amodei, and provide a worse service for way, way more money than it was worth. We can only hope these bots leak some billionaire's bank credentials in the process.