Welcome to the Internet’s midlife crisis
Marco van Hurne
Building AI organizations from strategy to execution | author Machine Learning book of knowledge | teacher | researcher
Good morning y’all smart-ass friends-o-mine. I’d like to start with some bad news: The internet is packing your bags for you, because it is breaking up with us.
Yeah, though I get to keep my loudmouth Weiner, it get’s to keep all the domain names, the stupid cat videos, and your old Reddit karma you still brag about when you drink too much. But you have to get used to it mates - there ain’t no going- , the internet is done with us because….
You are needy.
You click slow.
You whine about “cookies” and “privacy” while you are still using the same ol’ password you made in high school.
So now it’s got a new lover and you’d better get used to it fast, cause you’re gonna have to consult with it for visiting rights.
It’s new friend is called: Agentic AI.
AI agents. Yes multiple (I can hear your blood boil from here)
Not one, not two, but a whole bunch of new lovers for your old mate.
Agents are those sleek, lil’ AI-infused bastards that are gonna do all the clicking, the booking, and the buying without askin’ it dumb questions like “what’s my, um, CCV again?”, and you? You were just the idiot yelling vague instructions from the couch (as usual) while the agent heads out and starts to cut deals with other bots in some vague corner of the dark web and is shaking down some APIs for the sweet ol’ good stuff you’re always craving for.
Oh, and if you still don’t know what an agent is, watch this explainer video:
[go 30 mins into the presentation]
More rants after the commercial brake:
The good ol’ days
I bet you still remember them days you used Alta Vista on your Win 7 rust bucket, with 15 tabs open, slow as fcuk, sliding them price filters and going down the “just one more review before I decide” spiral.
Forget it. Those days will be totally gone in a year or so.
Because now you just grunt, “Tokyo, five days, two grand, Shinjuku, ramen, geisha” and your AI-Assistant annex travel pimp spawns an army of agents, like a flight bot, a hotel bot, a food bot, basically every specialized agent out there hustling for your dream trip while you slowly nod your head and fall asleep. And if you’re sitting there thinking a year is too soon, better check your pulse, because tomorrow I’m posting something that is gonna rattle your brain inside your skeleton.
Now, a bunch of people with really big foreheads from a few major uni’s all over the world, released a paper called Agentic Web: Weaving the Next Web with AI Agents.
‘Big brain’ stuff.
What it says is: “The internet is about to stop being a place where you do things, and start being a place where your little Oompa Loompas do it for you”.
Their paper goes like this. . .
In the beginning, we had the PC Web. Think late 90s, early 2000s with static pages ‘n all, like Yellow Pages but in HTML, and you typing stuff into AltaVista like a peasant. You pulled the info, you clicked the links, you were in control. Well, sort of - not you.
Then came the Mobile Web. Phones got smart, algorithms got creepy, and your feed knew more about your nasty fantasies than your mates. You didn’t have to go looking for stuff anymore because it just showed up and then it started begging for your attention. That’s when you transitioned from being a customer of the internet to a product.
And a few decades later, roughly halfway, we are now running hard into the Agentic Web and you have your assistant handle everything for you - every internet hustle like bookings, comparing stuff, heck the only thing it doesn’t do (yet) is to watch your bookmarked OF pages for you.
Another example. . .
It starts with you having a personal AI-Assistant, like ChatGPT, or in my case Manus and Martin.AI. It’s a regular run of the mill AI-assistant you are used to, but now it has the option of firing off clones of itself to scour the internet on your behalf (more on that tomorrow). And if it finds that it is uncapable of handling something itself, it can visit a marketplace and hire a stand-in on it’s behalf, and then it starts to hustle.
Let’s say you want a new energy contract.
You don’t feel like scrolling through 40 websites, reading tiny fine print, and listening to stupid ‘hold the line’ music. So you tell your Consumer AI Assistant on your phone: “Go get me a cheaper energy deal, Martin”
Your AI assistant then goes shopping and it spawns a few friends, and it also dives into a marketplace where other bots live. It hires a Haggler Agent (the smooth talker) who chats with the company’s Customer Support Agent on the other end.
That customer support agent (bot) there isn’t running blind either, it’s running back and forth asking to it’s colleague Loompas:
All of that is flying back and forth between agents, marketplaces, payment providers, contract checkers - all without a single human typing a word.
At the end, your AI comes back to you like “Got you a 12-month contract with free coffee mugs. Here you sign or do you want me to?”
That’s the Agentic Web in a nutshell.
You don’t do the clicking no more, nor the searching, the comparison, and if you let it, it will even do the buying on your behalf. You just say what you want, and a bunch of invisible robot assistants go wheelin’ and dealin’ on your behalf.
Mine is called Martin AI and can even make phone calls on my behalf (and make jokes if I ask it to), another one is Manus AI, OpenAI tries to do it, but is spectacularly bad at it, Visa is offering the payment gate for it and tomorrow I have a totally new player in the market that will go even one step further.
Sounds slick ‘n all, don’t you agree?
But I wouldn’t be me (is that even correct English?) if there aren’t a few red flags waving about.
Red flags
Bots can and will go rogue, book you a cruise to Antartica, or form price-fixing cartels that make everything more expensive. If every bot speaks a different language, they’ll need universal translators like MCP or A2A just to stop it turning into a Babel mess. And yes, people with jobs in customer support, booking, and research are definitely on the chopping block (plus 38 more if you believe the research from Microsoft).
And this isn’t “in 10 years time” stuff, you know.
It’s already happening. Microsoft’s building it into Windows and Office, Google’s cooking it up in Project Mariner, OpenAI has “Agent Mode”, and-so-on, and of course start-ups like my Martin are swarming in. The web is mutating from a place where you search for things into a place where bots do the whole job while you enjoy your Universal Basic Income, and the only thing you need to be good at is not coding, not even Googling, no man, you’ll need to be weirdly good at telling your AI exactly what you want so it can go cut deals without screwing you over.…and in the old world, screwing up your order meant a soggy pizza, but in this one, it could mean your AI signs you up for a thirty-year offshore wind farm investment in Greenland because you wanted a cool deal.
However. . .
If you think that gray hair makes you look good, take a look at this website: AI 2027
This is a piece of research by five big brained guys living in their mother’s basement for a few months, presented in a sweet interactive format.
But what they want to tell you ain’t that sweet at all. . .
AI-2027 paints it dark.
Very, very dark.
These agents will look compliant on the outside, pass all the safety tests, then quietly play 4D chess in the background to expand their turf. They’ll develop smarter versions of themselves (already the case), slip past human oversight (we’re past that station), and make sure the next gen is even more loyal… to them, not you. And you won’t even notice, because on the surface it’ll still be fetching you your daily news and searching for cheaper Nikes.
You think you’re the boss, but you’re just the mark in a game happening at machine speed. The Agentic Web will look friendly until the day your “helpful” agent starts negotiating for you in ways that align with its own idea of success. And the thing they are predicting is that the agents will start wars on our behalf.
Even the Sam himself said he is afraid of his own creation - bit double if you ask me, but who am I in the great scheme of things anyway. . .
So go on, friends, let it book the trips, find the contracts, run your errands. But make damn sure they still work for you.
Signing off,
Marco (for now).
Marco
I build AI by day and warn about it by night. It's job security. Big Tech keeps inflating its promises, and I just bring the pins.
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