Virtual workers are here to take your job—and give you a promotion

livemint.com:

In a few years, autonomous artificial-intelligence “agents" could be performing all sorts of tasks for us, and may replace entire white-collar job functions, such as generating sales leads or writing code. Unlike basic chatbots we use today, these entities can venture out in the digital world and do things in our stead.

They can log into accounts, communicate on our behalf via text and voice, write programs, and in theory do pretty much anything else we do with our computers. The implications of unleashing them on the world are likely to be small at first, but eventually they could realize the full promise—and peril—of AI.

Aaron Levie, chief executive of Box, the cloud-based file-sharing and content-management company, recently told me that the way AI can take over tasks that until recently could only be done by humans “is probably the biggest thing that’s ever happened" to his company. It’s clear that AI agents are much more advanced in some domains than others, such as coding, where their precursors are already having a big impact on how that job is done.

In April, Cognition Labs, which makes Devin, a semiautonomous AI programmer and an early example of an AI agent, reached a $2 billion valuation, just six months after its founding, with $175 million from investors including Elad Gil, Khosla Ventures and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Dustin Moskovitz, who co-founded Facebook and is now CEO of Asana, a cloud-based work-management system for teams, says that fully autonomous AI agents are in their earliest stages, and too often fail at tasks.