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Re:United Airlines bans AI agents from booking flights on be... by atleastoptimal on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @05:09PM (#50459388)
Yes, the question about AI agents is whether they are actually increasing productivity, or just allowing individuals with more compute to outcompete for a larger share of a finite resource.

If AI agents were more effectively managing flight paths, determining pricing, managing communication channels on the supply side, it would technically decrease cost per flight, but on the demand side, if AI agents just find the cheapest flight and book it, all it does is beat someone else who likely would have gotten to that flight a bit later.

I do think eventually it's going to be supply agents communicating with demand agents that lead to a coordination equilibrium. But until then it's just a race to who has the faster, more integrated models, and now, who has models which can bypass the restrictions providers place on their use.

Re:United Airlines bans AI agents from booking flights on be... by kolinko on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @05:15PM (#50459466)
> or just allowing individuals with more compute to outcompete for a larger share of a finite resource.

It doesn’t take much compute or anything really above the cheapest claude subscription to do this.

Similar to how internet evened out access to many things that were in the past blocked by access to knowledge.

Re:United Airlines bans AI agents from booking flights on be... by atleastoptimal on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @05:20PM (#50459539)
It takes a trivial amount of compute to do stuff like book flights or submit forms, but there are other dimensions where the marginal utility of compute doesn't taper off as fast, like legal defense or PR campaigns/mass manipulation.

Imagine two competing political candidates, one has funding from an AI lab and produces thousands of short-form AI videos per day and spends millions of analysis of the full spectrum of feedback and performance of the ads, simulates public sentiment, pruning every aspect of their persona, response strategy, channels to focus on, etc. Or a company accused of misconduct creating an AI psychological profile of the judge and every jury member via their social media history and demographic information and curating the best permutation of arguments from millions of options that maximize every predicable sentimental vector.

Re:United Airlines bans AI agents from booking flights on be... by TeMPOraL on Thursday November 12, 2026 @04:30AM (#50464975)
> Imagine two competing political candidates

Campaign spending is textbook example of a negative sum game - it can waste unbounded amount of resources and everyone is worse off from it happening.