FT's 'Infinite Work Machine': agents fighting agents could erase AI productivity gains
jburnmurdoch · x · 2026-10-27
FT columnist Tracy Alloway coins the 'Infinite Work Machine': as AI spreads, buyers' and sellers' agents may fight each other endlessly, producing lots of new work for the same result. Examples: Meta's Muse shopping agent vs sellers' AI price-maximizing tools; insurers' bots auto-rejecting claims met by AI-generated disputes; Wiz researchers using frontier models to unearth decade-old PHP vulnerabilities affecting 70% of websites, forcing an AI-driven patching scramble. The piece invokes the Red Queen hypothesis — everyone must keep deploying agents just to stay in place — while noting it's early days and gains could still go to people rather than the companies behind the machines.
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