You can’t put an API on everything because it’d take a ton of time and money to pull that off.

I can’t think of any technological reasons why every digital system can’t have an API (barring security concerns, as those would need to be case by case)

So instead, we put 100s of billions of dollars into statistical models hoping they could do it for us.

It’s kind of backwards.

A web page is an Application/Human Interface. Outside of security concerns, companies can make more money if they control the Application/Human Interface, and reduce the risk of a middleman / broker extorting them for margins.

If I run a flight aggregator that has a majority of flight bookings, I can start charging 'rents' by allowing featured/sponsored listings to be promoted above the 'best' result, leading to a prisoner's dilemma where airlines should pay up to their margins to keep market share.

If an AI company becomes the default application human interface, they can do the same thing. Pay OpenAI tribute or be ended as a going concern.

LLMs as a natural language interface is fine.

What I’m saying is that if there was a standard protocol for making travel plans over the internet, we wouldn’t need an AI agent to book a trip.

We could just create great user experiences that expose those APIs like we do for pretty much everything on the web.

Exactly. It should take around 10 parameters to book a flight. Not 30,000,000,000 and a dedicated nuclear power station.

You change who's paying.

Sure, as a biz it makes sense, but as a society, it’s obviously a big failure.

It is a promise alright :)