> People coming up with these tech use cases live in a reality where price sensitivity isn't a thing.

Amen, there's a worldview difference going on here, and it goes beyond comparative pricing of 2+ choices, and includes other error/reliability issues.

For example, they aren't too concerned with the reservation-cancellation fee when it schedules the wrong fancy dinner date, the restocking-fee for returning the wrong product, the difficulty of getting refunds for the wrong flight, etc.

If it messes up sometimes, well, that's just the price of convenience... but they're able/willing to put a much higher price on convenience than the median consumer.

I think you've identified the core reason people won't use these tools to make blind purchases, at least those who aren't {m,b}illionaires.

A noteworthy proof of this is the failure of Amazon Dash buttons [1] that blindly ordered your consumables for you. Amazon gave away these devices essentially for free ($5 off with your first order, or some such offer), and people still didn't seem to have been comfortable to use it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Dash

> Ask DoorDash orders “average nearly 50% higher basket value and about 60% more unique items than the same consumers’ traditional orders.”

Really shows why companies salivate over people using these features.

I agree and I think price might be one example of a more general thing which is just that you want to make the decision - based on price and a whole load of other factors that you can't be bothered to explain or may not even be able to articulate to a third party.

I think it's pretty common to actually not want to delegate and just do simple things yourself. It can be satisfying, aside from any of the practical problems it avoids.

Maybe it's a personality thing, maybe it's a learned behaviour thing, but I'm not sure I've met many people I'd imagine being happy just speaking these sorts of things into a phone and seeing what shows up.

My wife is a dentist. She brings her lunch because its cost effective. Her assistants all order door dash, _regularly_.

> Except that regular people compare 13 different options to pick the cheapest one.

Which takes time... and the AI can do that for you, presumably? Do I trust AI _right now_ to do that _for me_? No. Will people try it out and invariably work out the kinks, for a stable set of use cases? Definitely. Screens are just one UI for ordering stuff. There's definitely a market for doing the same thing with minimal or no screen time.

If companies pushing these agents find they're reliably making customers overpay by about ~30%, I wonder why they don't run some sort of subsidy (from their pocket) where like orders placed by your AI are 30% off.

Certainly feels less gameable than the kind of stuff we already see so much of (like referral bonuses, free sign-up balance, "unlimited" promos, etc)

This stems from the differences in median income of people coming up with these tools and the target audience/median consumer, i.e. these people are out of touch

If an AI company ordered expensive food without your full consent would they be liable to pay instead of you?

Couldn’t the agent do the comparison for you? And couldn’t you give it more complex constraints? E.g. instead of saying “order an uber to the airport”, you’d say “order a rideshare to the airport if it’s under $40 and less than a 10 minute wait”

What’s your logic behind agents being worse at this than humans?

My agent routinely does comparison shopping across various sites to filter out according to my criteria, and even finds coupons - something I never bothered to do.

I would say that especially when you are price sensitive, agentic shopping should be your thing.

It's a classic example of a task that AI cannot do better than humans (because it's quite simple to do manually and the AI doesn't know what that human craves in that moment), and personal stakes (if it fucks up, you'll have to eat something you don't like or go hungry for a while - people tend to feel viscerally about their food).

> No one wants to see food appear on their doorstep followed by a bill they cannot pay.

This is why you can finance Chipotle orders with Klarna

My mother isn't even poor (decent pension) but she asks a neighbour to drive her to the hospital instead of a 50 euro Uber. A taxi is basically the last resort.

Also, such use cases are an artifact of the designer being too deep into the personal optimization cult.

I want to have 30' time to spend cooking my effing dinner, not save 5' on my DoorDash order. Is that too much to ask these days?

They would be reasonable things if you could trust the provider.

The Amazon buttons were a cool idea, except my assumption is that Amazon would rip me off if I used them.

I’d probably trust a system like that with Costco.

I like the ones that feature new AI browsers or operating systems. They will try to tell you how cool is it that you can just highlight something on the screen and/or type in a prompt, and have some 2D or 3D interactive visualizations pop up. Literally the most useless, inelegant things imaginable.

We buy our household stuff through our household agent. Very simple. It does the research, matches inventory, and browses to Amazon and buys things. Other sites it volunteers information. Overall, I’m a fan.

It’s not for everyone clearly but it’s pretty good. Wife also downloaded Muse the other day (really, how dare she betray me like this) to do a Facebook marketplace thing. Worked great. Other guy didn’t speak a lick of English and she didn’t speak the least Spanish. Another sale that went perfectly.

I think this has been a trope of how detached SV has been from the real world for a while. Google has shown this demos for ages where their AI books you a flight with no friction, as if people wouldn’t have a gazillion tabs open with skyscanner, kayak, trip.com, google flights…

What freaks me out is the canonical "AI planned my entire vacation itinerary" example. I don't think I ever pay as much attention to anything in life as I do when I'm picking flights and hotels. Travel plans will be the very last thing I farm out to AI.

I'm fine delegating my programming work to a clanker, even accounting, but come on. The clanker isn't going to have to deal with the consequences of booking $40,000 airplane trips to hotels full of bedbugs.

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