I choose the term “conviviality” to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment;
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I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society’s members. – Tools for Conviviality – Ivan Illich
The other day I had some unauthorized charges on a credit card and so I notified my bank and they cancelled the card and sent me a new one. This part of the process is pretty standard and usually goes pretty well. I also ended up not paying for the charges once I had several rounds of conversation with AirBnB about the charges I didn’t make. They were pretty unhelpful at first, including after supposedly doing an “investigation” but eventually every was reversed out.
The remaining problem of course is that this card was used for multiple recurring purchases so now I need to update those with the new card information. Maybe you are more organized than me but what this entailed for me was going to my bank’s site to look at the transaction history, noting which ones looked like recurring charges and then going to those sites to update my billing info (or in at least one case, just deciding to cancel the service).
This was pretty tedious work since each one had a different UX. Some let me update the card in place, others required removal of the card before adding a new one etc. It was all the kind of thing you hear people talking about how it will be great when we have AI agents who can do this drudge work for you. I even had that thought. But the more I thought it, the less I wanted it.
First you have to consider all the obvious things like this agent is now going to have to have access to all of my accounts to log into those websites. Also how I am going to be sure it did the right thing in each case? It can send me a list of what it did, but maybe that list is inaccurate. How much toil would I even avoid?
The problem is that this isn’t really an AI problem at the core. Its a system design problem we are trying to paper over with some AI. What should really happen is that the banks should be better at providing a UX for me when this happens. There’s should just be an “update recurring purchases to the new card” option at my bank. This option could let me review the list of all the charges. I could just tap a button to cancel ones that I don’t want to continue and then be done.
So much of our digital world is crappy because the people building it for us are only focused on what will drive more signups or collect more data. Almost no one is going to prioritize features and integrations like this.
Again I can hear the AI boosters talking about how AI can be the salvation here. When companies let us down, we can use our AI agents to reclaim power in the system and get what we want. Maybe there’s a lot of cracks in our online experience but AI is here to fill them with slop so smooth you can glide right by.
Maybe there’s no point in trying to make the UX better any more. Maybe we should just focus on MCP interfaces or AI a11y. Why cater to humans at all? I guess it depends on who’s side you are on.
These agents that are coming are not going to be working for us. They will be working for the people who build them. They will be guiding us in the directions and gathering the information about us that these companies want. They may allow us to “do things” but without actually empowering us to really be free in the sense the Illich means in his book.
Just at the “attention economy” has decimated our attention. The “AI agent economy” is going to decimate our agency.
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