PixelRaider

A new essay based on a paper in Science - 22 authors, including Gary Marcus - is warning about the next existential threat to democracy: AI bot swarms. The argument is that coordinated AI agents can manufacture “synthetic consensus” - making fringe views appear mainstream, fooling the public about what their neighbors actually believe.

The proposed solutions include proof-of-human credentialing, mandatory data access for researchers, and an “AI Influence Observatory” to detect when public discourse is being manipulated.

Here’s what’s dominating AI headlines: AGI debates. When is it coming? Is it even possible? Who’s closest? OpenAI says soon. Gary Marcus says never. Apple researchers published a paper saying pure scaling won’t get us there.

Meanwhile, something actually consequential happened. Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol - MCP - got adopted by OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. All of them. The three companies that agree on almost nothing agreed on this.

One of these things changes what you build. The other is bar trivia.

The pitch is everywhere now. AI agents that book your travel, manage your calendar, handle your email, coordinate your projects. Autonomous systems that take a goal and figure out how to accomplish it. Tell the agent what you want. It handles the rest.

The demos are impressive. I’ve watched agents navigate complex multi-step workflows, make decisions, recover from errors. The technology clearly works.

And yet.

Talk to anyone actually deploying these systems in production and you hear a different story. Impressive in controlled conditions. Brittle in the real world. Requires more human supervision than the marketing suggested. Works great until it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, it fails in ways that are hard to predict and harder to fix.

A year ago, I couldn’t build software. I could hack together websites, copy-paste scripts I half-understood, tweak some CSS. But actual tools? That required programming knowledge I didn’t have.

Now I build things constantly. Small tools, automations, scripts for specific workflows. The barrier between “I want this” and “I have this” collapsed almost overnight.

Here’s what I’ve noticed: the hard part isn’t building anymore. The hard part is knowing what’s worth building.

There’s a cottage industry now around “prompt engineering.” Courses, certifications, job titles. People charging money to teach you the right way to talk to a language model.

Most of it is overcomplicating something simple.

The skill that matters isn’t knowing magic words or secret techniques. It’s the same skill that’s always mattered in any project involving other people (or now, machines) doing work for you: knowing what you actually want, and being able to articulate it clearly enough that someone else can build it.