I have to say — many of the genius examples to come out of the Agentic AI moment have been like having someone get excited about a robot washing their hands for them.

That's the kind of consciousness I suppose I have around a sensitivity to hype and bluster..a vaguely suspicious mindset, I suppose, that comes from a strong critical eye and lots of graduate school education.

All that then collides with my engineering background and the fact that I grew up with Star Trek, the Space Shuttle, and a book on the making of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odysey that was called, you know — “The Making of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

So when I see something like OpenClaw and the signal of agentic AIs entangling themselves with the things I want to do and explore, I have to say that I get curious, which is another way of saying excited with a healthy dose of optimistic skepticism.

Now, I say all of that to say that, yeah, well..I've been playing around with OpenClaw and some other tooling that has been in the same vein. I went straight after a particularly boring but excrutiating component of a very regular workflow and I found a way to save myself a lot of time and, perhaps as valuable, petty grievances and annoyances.

This little annoyance is something that I have had to contend with for years, and while I always knew that I could, you know — write some kinda software contrivance to handle it, the energy to do that always sseemed about the same as the energy and effort to just do the thing manually.

But now, as a way of getting close to the metal of this whole agentic thing, I decided to just approach the challenge as a speculative prototyping exercise. I wanted to see if I could use OpenClaw to solve this problem for me, and in doing so, get a better sense of what the experience of working with an agentic AI is like.

This approach — to build tools to understand the present and explore the future — is something that I have been doing for a long time. It's a way of making sense of the world, and of making it better. It's a way of learning, teaching, and inspiring. It's a way of navigating uncertainty and complexity. And it is what we'll be doing in the next General Seminar where we'll wander into possible/plausible/probable Agentic Futures.

Next Wednesday at 10:00 (UTC-8) I'll be hosting General Semianr S06/E03 — a live session on using Design Fiction as a strategic practice to help organizations navigate uncertainty and complexity. We'll explore how to use Design Fiction techniques to create tangible artifacts that help teams envision and prototype future scenarios, enabling better decision-making today.

And that's what we'll be doing in the next General Seminar session. We'll wander into a variety of possible/plausible/preferable futures where things like OpenClaw (perhaps with a better naming strategy..) are here, and agentic AIs are about as futuristic (and occaionally as aggrevating) as Photoshop or Gmail.

February 18th at 10am PT (UTC-8) and February 24th at 10am PT (UTC-8).

p.s. After the last invite, a subscriber wrote in with a couple of thoughts about the agentic future that are worth sharing ↓

They reminded me of the remarkably prescient film “Surrogates” (Bruce Willis with a full head of hair, FTW!) in which it is hygiene to interact with the world through robotic proxies..a kind of agentic world in a way that is not really part of the conversation at the moment, but one in which the root semantics of “agent” move towards the telepresence dream of the mid- late 1990s.

They also raised the question of who agent systems get built for first (and who gets pushed into them), from disability support to socially resented minorities, and what “legitimacy” might look like when a persona can hold multiple agent personalities.

And then the legal and civic reality check: this is real fertile ground for moving Design Fiction into policy futures — if an agent is mobile, acts for you, or causes harm while “running errands,” where does responsibility land? If your agent “attends” a meeting and you do not, are you present, or is that a proxy with a different status? These are not abstract questions. They’re already being argued in the wake of remote presence and governance.

This is the kind of mail I love. Not because it’s “right,” but because it sharpens the terrain. Thanks Rich E!

p.p.s. Oh, busted link from last time — wondering, like..WTF is OpenClaw? Check out the discussion; it's as good as anything else..