Restaurant Worker Reflects on Requests Likely Made by an AI Agent

Summary

A restaurant worker says an events venue received difficult last-minute requests from a client and scrambled to fulfill them. The worker later realized the requests were likely generated by an AI agent, raising the possibility that the human client had not personally considered or cared about the operational burden. The experience felt unsettling because the agent may have optimized for its task while shifting the cost and effort onto people at the restaurant. In a reply, FrankieIsLost argues that a future in which everyone has a tireless, perfectly rational optimizer acting on their behalf could be more adversarial than expected, and says much of today’s infrastructure may not survive that transition.