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Ric's avatar

Sincere futurism that celebrates agents selling software to agents without stopping to ask what’s being displaced—or who—is just the latest expression of a deeper pathology in tech: a drive to build humans out of their own systems in the name of efficiency.

We’ve seen this before. Every time technology is framed as “inevitable,” what follows is a series of decisions made by a shrinking number of players with massive influence, hiding extractive motives behind sleek language and noble-sounding goals.

When big tech engineers systems where agents handle procurement, negotiate pricing, and enforce compliance—without human context or friction—it isn’t just an evolution of business. It’s a quiet erasure of judgment, nuance, and economic participation for millions of people.

The pitch is always speed, objectivity, optimization. But optimization for what? For whom? Replacing flawed human sales cycles with “rational” AI pipelines just re-centralizes power—this time in the hands of those who own the agents, the APIs, the data, and the infrastructure underneath.

And calling that the “end of enterprise sales theater” is clever, but it obscures a more important truth: when people lose the ability to influence systems through relationships, conversations, and even schmoozing, they don’t get more efficient—they get excluded.

The real danger isn’t that agents will pick the fastest or cheapest tool. It’s that a tiny circle of dominant actors will train the agents, define the logic, and lock others out of the loop entirely.

This isn’t the future of software. It’s a future of economic enclosure dressed up as progress.

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James O'Reilly's avatar

Jeff, I enjoyed this. Hope you are well. Thought you might enjoy these related comments by my brother Tim at a recent conference: https://t.co/Jm04A8U6Rl

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