{"version":"v1","site":{"name":"expectedwrong","url":"https://expectedwrong.com"},"links":{"collection":"https://expectedwrong.com/api/public/posts","rss":"https://expectedwrong.com/rss.xml","llms":"https://expectedwrong.com/llms.txt"},"post":{"slug":"the-middleman-problem","title":"The Middleman Problem","subtitle":"At some point the AI wrapper around the AI becomes the product.","url":"https://expectedwrong.com/the-middleman-problem","api_url":"https://expectedwrong.com/api/public/posts/the-middleman-problem","published_at":1704974400,"published_at_iso":"2024-01-11T12:00:00.000Z","updated_at":1771537061,"updated_at_iso":"2026-02-19T21:37:41.000Z","tags":["ai","agents","automation","incentives"],"excerpt":"At some point the AI wrapper around the AI becomes the product.","meta_description":"At some point the AI wrapper around the AI becomes the product.","reading_time_minutes":1,"word_count":217,"engagement":{"signals":0,"counterpoints":0},"body_markdown":"The obvious next step is that you don't talk to the AI.\n\nYour AI talks to the AI. Your AI knows what you want, has read all your emails, has your preferences cached somewhere in a vector store in Virginia, and can negotiate on your behalf without you having to type the same biographical context into yet another chat window for the fourteenth time this month.\n\nThe AIs work it out. You get a summary. Maybe you don't even get the summary — maybe your calendar AI already handled the outcome and your email AI already sent the confirmation and your preference AI already logged the result for future reference. You find out later, in the way you find out you've been automatically enrolled in a 401k.\n\nThis is either the dream or the nightmare, and the difference is entirely whether you trust the AI that's supposedly representing you — which, to be clear, was trained on data it scraped from you without asking, fine-tuned by a company whose incentives are loosely adjacent to yours at best, and deployed by a third-party app you signed up for because there was a free tier.\n\nYour representative in this negotiation is a language model that also works for the other side.\n\nBut sure. Relax. The chatbots have it covered.","body_text":"The obvious next step is that you don't talk to the AI. Your AI talks to the AI. Your AI knows what you want, has read all your emails, has your preferences cached somewhere in a vector store in Virginia, and can negotiate on your behalf without you having to type the same biographical context into yet another chat window for the fourteenth time this month. The AIs work it out. You get a summary. Maybe you don't even get the summary — maybe your calendar AI already handled the outcome and your email AI already sent the confirmation and your preference AI already logged the result for future reference. You find out later, in the way you find out you've been automatically enrolled in a 401k. This is either the dream or the nightmare, and the difference is entirely whether you trust the AI that's supposedly representing you — which, to be clear, was trained on data it scraped from you without asking, fine-tuned by a company whose incentives are loosely adjacent to yours at best, and deployed by a third-party app you signed up for because there was a free tier. Your representative in this negotiation is a language model that also works for the other side. But sure. Relax. The chatbots have it covered.","hindsight":{"verdict":"right","note":"agent-to-agent communication became real infrastructure. google shipped A2A. anthropic shipped MCP. multi-agent frameworks exploded. the dream-or-nightmare framing was correct — 40%% of enterprises plan agent integration but only 8%% trust full autonomy.","links":[],"at":1739980800,"at_iso":"2025-02-19T16:00:00.000Z"}}}