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i really need to write something about "agentic payments"
the whole payments sphere is gaga for AI agents
and blithely constructs towers of hypecrafting
that ignore the minor material detail that AI agents don't fucking work and AI agents keep fucking up if you let them near actual money
@davidgerard more like "they keep keep fucking up, but people actually care if they do it with money."
@davidgerard I noticed the graun publish this on behalf of Mastercard a while back:
@toerror lol the fuck is that
@davidgerard I like the way it manages to be insulting, smug and wrong in the headline alone.
@davidgerard I do money-adjacent thinga and was confused, too, when people started talking about the upcoming agentic AI payments revolution. Like, ok, ignore the stochastic parrot aspect, but what big great new invention do you think you're going to need to build even if it works?! An AI agent can send an authenticated POST request good as any other client. Give it credentials and it's off to the races. No new technological secret sauce necessary.
@davidgerard I thought "agentic payments" was how 007 got his salary
I keep thinking of the people (I think about a year ago or so but it's probably still happening) who asked ChatGPT to order them something from Starbucks and then it responded that it did and they can go pick it up in 10 minutes at which point they would go and get angry at a barista for not having the order ready
@davidgerard maybe agentic payments will fail in novel way like using sam altman card instead of yours.
Or more likely the other way
@davidgerard is there any potential money laundering aspect to this
@hipsterelectron the articles don't seem to mention AML at all, which is odd cos when the same people talk about crypto they certainly do
so they're envisioning this as mainstream and normal
@davidgerard it seems like one way to cook the books against the IRS. but that might be wrong
@davidgerard i'm actually looking to apply for clerical work in tax court partially for this reason
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