Humans will keep managing agents and handling failures

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 19:16

   your environments, et cetera. I think you have a very techno-optimistic view of what the future is going to be with how jobs are going to be shaped. Can you talk more about that? Because I think you hinted at it before. It's going to be more specialized. It's not that all these jobs are gonna go away right first off it's undeniably true that we're we're uh at the beginning of an era of like a new a new way of working like like you know this there's this term that people have used a long time which is like the future of work well uh we're like entering the future of work or certainly the next era and so work fundamentally will change but i do think um humans own the future and we we are we're like We have a lot of agency, actually, and a lot of a lot of choice in how this sort of like reformatting of of work or how the reformatting of sort of like workflows ends up playing out.

2. 20:10

   You know, I think you kind of see this play out in in coding right now. And I think coding in some ways is is really the sort of like case study for other fields and other, you know, other areas of work where sort of the initial phase is this sort of like assistant style thing where, you know, you're kind of doing your work and then the models are kind of like assisting you a little bit here and there and then you go to a you know the sort of like cursor agent mode kind of thing where you're you're like synchronously asking the the models to like carry out these workflows and you're sort of like you're you're managing like one agent kind of or you're sort of like you're kind of like pair programming with a single agent and then and then now with like codecs or other systems like it's it's very clear the paradigm is like oh you have this like you have this like

3. 20:58

   swarm of agents that you're going to deploy on like all these various tasks and you're just going to like sort of like you know deploy like um give all these tasks and you'll have this sort of like um this this cohort of agents that are sort of like you know doing this work that you you think is appropriate and that last job um uh has a has a semantic meaning in the in the current workforce it's a manager you know you're basically managing this sort of like this set of agents to do um actual work and so and and i think that like agi or you know agi or doomers or whatnot like they take this view that like oh even this job of like managing the agents will just be done by the agents so like humans will be taken out of the of the process entirely but our belief my personal belief is that you know this is um management is very complicated um management is

4. 21:48

   also like more about like what's the vision that you have and what's the sort of like what's the like end result you're aiming towards and those will be fundamentally i think like you know we have a human demand and human desire driven economy so those will be driven by humans and so i think the terminal state of the economy is just is large-scale humans manage agents in a nutshell i have a funny story where um founder friend of mine is trying to promote uh one of his you know junior employees but they're really really smart and they're working on the agent infrastructure and then he was like hey do you want to like you know I'm looking for someone who could step into management you've never managed people before do you you know if we hired some people under you like how would you feel about that and

5. 22:34

   this you know mid 20 something really smart you know sort of he's just like he's an engineer and he's like why would I do that like just give me like more compute like you know the model like look at what just happened to the model literally like last month and you know i didn't have to do anything it just started doing things that it couldn't do a month ago why would i want to manage people like just give me like i will just manage more agents for you and it's fine okay so what are the unique things that that um that humans will do over time i mean i think this like this like element of vision um is very important this element of like kind of like debugging or sort of like um fixing when things go wrong like most of a manager's job speaking as a manager is is just like putting out fires dealing with problems dealing with like like issues that come up like i think intuitively

6. 23:25

   you know the idealistic manager job seems like this very cushy job because you're like oh yeah all the other people do all the work and i'm just sort of like i just vaguely supervise and then the reality is obviously like highly chaotic i think people often jump to this like you know extreme reality where it's like oh yeah these like you know you're just going to manage the agents and you're going to sort of like live this like you know kind of victorian life where all your problems are solved but but no i think it's still going to be pretty complicated like getting agents to like coordinate well with one another and like coordinating the workflows and and then debugging the issues that come up like these are still complicated issues and You know, having seen what happened in self-driving, which was more or less that, like, you know, it's easy to get to 90%, very, very hard to get to 99%.

7. 24:07

   I think that, like, something similar will happen with large-scale agent deployments and that, like, you know, final 10% of accuracy will be, like, you know, will require a lot of work. Yeah, even for self-driving cars right now, there's the remote assist for all these super edge case. So there's still a human at the end managing the car. Yeah. And the ratio, by the way, I mean, the companies don't publish them, but I think the ratio is something like five cars to one teleoperator or maybe even less than maybe three cars per teleoperator.

8. 24:39

   So the ratio is like, you know, much lower than people think. I think that like humans are much more involved even in self-driving cars than I think most people appreciate. I mean, which if you put it in that perspective, I think it's still very optimistic. It's just the output of getting rides instead of doing, in today's world, if you're an Uber driver, you just do one car. In this world, you can do five cars, right?

9. 25:00

   Well, you have to believe for this, like, for an optimistic version of the future where, you know, unemployment is still low, et cetera. You just have to believe that humans are, like, almost insatiable in their desire and their demand. And that, like, you know, prices will go down, things will become, you know, the economy will become more efficient, and we'll just, like, want more. And I think this has been a pretty reliable trend for like the history of humanity is that like, you know, we have somewhat insatiable demand.

10. 25:30

    And so I have like conviction that like, you know, the economy can kind of get as efficient as it needs or as it like can get like hyper, hyper efficient. And then human demand will just like continue to sort of like fill the bucket. In the 20th century, when you said computer, maybe early 20th century, people didn't think of a computer as it is today.