I like to have hands-on experience with the topics I write about, so I have been building some simple LangChain agents on my home AI set-up, affectionately known as “The Toaster” (the Lenovo Neo is about the same size and shape as the four-slice variety).
The results were pleasing, and the process was fairly straightforward. Agentic AI is much less brittle than the old Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which was going to automate 25% of tasks across every job category by 20191 but never made it out of the pilot stage.
However, my enjoyment from tinkering with agents is tempered by real concerns about their implications.
As a tech-pragmatist, I observe that humans typically muddle through technological change, failing to achieve the original idealistic vision but also avoiding the worst-case scenarios.
