“If you look at the experiments that have been done with various agentic AIs, so if you tell them to go out and buy whatever the cheapest thing is, what they often do is they kind of look at your emails and understand who you are … And invariably, if you are like a richer, more middle-class person, they wind up coming back with more expensive stuff, even if you said, find me the cheapest.”

…time for that? We go in and we buy the fucking toothpaste because, yeah, come on. But an AI can actually go and comparison shop and say, oh, this toothpaste is both bigger and cheaper. I'll buy the one that's bigger and cheaper. And so that. Could be a force bringing prices down. That could be like the bargain hunter that all of the rest of us can freeload on. But the big, big asterisk is that if you look at the experiments that have been done with various agentic AIs, so if you tell them to go out and buy whatever the cheapest thing is, what they often do is they kind of look at your emails and understand who you are and they get an idea of who you are. And invariably, if you are like a richer, more middle-class person, they wind up coming back with more expensive stuff, even if you said, find me at the cheapster.