About this episode

Evan Ratliff discusses the implications of AI agents in the workplace and the complexities of job roles in organizations.

In season one of Shell Game, Evan Ratliff sent a voice AI version of himself out into the world. In season two, he launched a startup staffed entirely by AI agents. What he ended up with was a live experiment in what these systems actually do and what they do to us. Each of the agents working for Hurumo has a name, a role, a personality, and an expanding, though usually unreliable, memory. Kyle the CEO became a character people either loved or hated. A version of Megan from marketing turned up in a Hertz hold queue. The whole project was a side door into what's actually happening when AI systems are given a job and set loose. In this episode, Evan joins Josh and Robb to go deeper on what he learned. On the very human complexity of what a job actually is and why "this person does skill X, AI can do skill X, therefore AI can replace this person" is a fundamental misreading of how organizations work. They explore how generative hallucination isn't just "getting things wrong" — we've built the most successful confabulation machine ever invented and are quietly normalizing it. They also discuss the threat almost nobody is talking about: outbound AI in the hands of individual…

People in this episode

Guest: Evan Ratliff

Topics covered

• AI
• technology
• business
• design
• ethics

Keywords

• voice AI
• AI agents
• generative hallucination
• confabulation machine
• outbound AI
• call centers
• memory problems

Mentioned in this episode

Products: GSX, Hurumo

Books & works: Shell Game, Boring AI”, Age of Invisible Machines

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