[vmg12]

In other words, switching costs go to 0, margins collapse. Middle men and people with products that aren't differentiated get hit hardest.

A human can't search 10 apps for the best rates / lowest fees but an agent can.

Thinking ahead 100 years from now, companies like doordash and uber eats don't exist and are instead protocols agents use to bid for items their user asks for and price discovery happens in real time.

[lm28469]

Go to a supermarket, witness that dozens of brands sell the same things at wildly different prices, they still all make a profit, same for most services, you have comparator for subscriptions, mortgage rates, &c.

And a human can 100% search 10 apps and use his brain to do basic maths, that's what we've been doing until now. Sometimes I wonder if ai shills live in a parallel universe because it truly feels like they're living a completely different life than the vast majority of people...

[warkdarrior]

> a human can 100% search 10 apps and use his brain to do basic maths

A human _can_ do all of that, but it takes time. If I have to search 10 apps for each item I want to buy (clothes, daily food, movie tickets, laptops, etc.), I will spend the rest of my life just searching for better deals. I'd rather have a bot do all of these searches for me.

[vmg12]

What exactly am i shilling?

[kryptiskt]

I don't see what the role of AI is in this. You don't need an AI to aggregate data from a bunch of sources. You'd be better off having the AI write a scraper for you than burning GPU time on an agent doing the same thing every time.

[jonwinstanley]

If you're paying a monthly fee for your agent, might as well use it to save you another few mins

[fweimer]

> A human can't search 10 apps for the best rates / lowest fees but an agent can.

Why would those apps permit access by agents?

It's always been the case that “agents” could watch content with ads, so that the users can watch the same content later, but without ads. The technology never went mainstream, though. I expect agents posing as humans would have a similar whiff of illegality, preventing wide adoption.

Local agents running open weights models won't really work because everybody will train their services against the most popular ones anyway.

[ndriscoll]

What whiff of illegality? Personal recording and ad skipping DVRs are completely legal products (at least in the US). Courts have ruled on this.

[fweimer]

As a U.S. consumer, can you buy a DVR that can record HDCP streams (without importing it yourself from a different country)? Even one that does not automatically edit out ads?

[ndriscoll]

If I search "HDCP remover" on Amazon I see tons of results for $15-$30, sure. Reviews say they work as advertised. That typically exists in a different space from DVRs since it's not relevant for broadcast TV as far as I know (AFAIK there's nothing for DVRs to remove in the first place), but it'd be easy enough to chain it if you needed to.

[ilaksh]

Right, but why the heck would you guess 100 years when we could build and adopt that in less than two weeks? There are already many people working on this type thing. Some of them have been working on it for years and a few probably already have solutions ready to go or even in use.

[vmg12]

I was using 100 years as a way to handwave the timeframe to emphasize that this will happen some time in the future.