I Am Begging AI Companies to Stop Naming Features After Human Processes
Key takeaways
- Folks using AI agents often send them on multi-step journeys, like visiting a few websites or reading multiple files, to complete online tasks.
- The feature’s name immediately calls to mind Philip K.
- Dreaming refines that memory between sessions, pulling shared learnings across agents and keeping it up-to-date.”
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Photograph: Nur Photo/Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Anthropic just announced a new feature called “Dreaming” at the company’s developer conference in San Francisco. It’s part of Anthropic's recently launched AI agent infrastructure designed to help users manage and deploy tools that automate software processes. This “dreaming” aspect sorts through the transcript of what an agent recently completed and attempts to glean insights to improve the agent’s performance.
Folks using AI agents often send them on multi-step journeys, like visiting a few websites or reading multiple files, to complete online tasks. This new “dreaming” feature allows agents to look for patterns in their activity log and improve their abilities based on those insights.
The feature’s name immediately calls to mind Philip K. Dick’s seminal sci-fi novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which explores the qualities that truly separate humans from powerful machines. While our current generative AI tools come nowhere close to the machines in the book, I’m ready to draw the line right here, right now: no more generative AI features with names that rip off human cognitive processes.