Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Above: Do you feel your blood pressure slowly rising?
Nothing cows the human spirit more than the blank page.
Its mocking staccato cursor has intimidated braver souls than I looking to make a simple dent in a complex universe. An elegant representation of infinity, this bastion of all possibility often renders action impossible because of the heavy magnitude of choice. In the face of this everything, all too often, we slink off and choose to do nothing.1
As with the page, so too with life.
AI has handed us a blank page the size of the world. In our current age of Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Muse, Instinct, et al, the difficulty comes from knowing which question to ask.
AI agents (that is, autonomous software systems that use an artificial intelligence model to get things done) raise the same problem. They can do almost anything and are getting better every hour of every day.
The hard part is knowing what to hand them and how best to make use of them. Life now feels like the Cheesecake Factory menu. Everything is on it, and nobody knows what to order.
In tired podcasts and careless blog posts, founders keep showcasing the same two boring demos: booking a vacation and ordering take out.
These are strange picks.
Ordering DoorDash takes just a few taps and half the fun of taking a trip is planning it.2 For some inane reason, founders are highlighting those parts of life people enjoy and offering to take them away.
To me, it makes much more sense to start somewhere else: Agents are the moving companies of the internet.
Moving is, in a word, miserable. Nobody likes it as it conjures painful images of weeks of tape and boxes and dust and debris and a couch impossibly wedged in a stairwell on the last day.
A moving company turns all of that into just one phone call. You tell them where you are and where you’re going and a few days later you walk into your new place with your things are already there.
The movers neither pick your next place nor decide what you keep/dispose of. Every choice that fundamentally matters is still yours and yours alone. The big, burly men just pack up, carry the boxes, and drop them off.
That seems like the right job for an agent: Give it the stuff you dread and let it cut your part down to a simple conversation.
Think of disputing a bill for a broken arm, canceling an opaque gym membership, blocking spam texters and telemarketers, or finding lost property. Picture the insurance claim that has bounced back and forth and up and down between automated phone trees since the summer.
Nobody demos these because nobody dreams about them. They are exactly those troublesome tasks we would pay to never, ever see again.
So, before you hand a task to an agent, ask whether you would hire movers for it.
If the answer is yes, pick up the phone and make the proverbial call.
Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.
If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.
With sincere gratitude,
Tom
This, I think, is why so few individuals choose to write.
After all, people scroll hotel and real estate listings in bed for pleasure.
Exactly right! I use AI to do the things I don't want to do, and to help make the things I enjoy (or have to do to get paid) more enjoyable.