Tobias "Tobi" Konitzer

Will there ever be a future where there is no human in the loop described in the letter statement?

I think for most fields, that would be a disaster.

There's exceptions.

Text-to-code, I don't think anybody complains if the agents become very autonomous.

But I think for most fields, including marketing, including sentencing, including diagnostics in the medical space, would fall to disaster if there was such a version of autonomous agentic AI without human in the loop.

And it's not what we're building towards.

I'll name two people.

My kids always, my daughters, my girls always influence the way I work, mostly in the sense that I work so I can spend most of my time with them.

But that aside, there are certainly, I think, big influences in the way that I think about limits of human decisioning, but also limits of machine decisioning.

One is the Rubin causal model.

It's a phrase coined by Donald Rubin, who was an economist slash statistician.

But basically, it's this conundrum, this fundamental problem of causal inference, right?

Marketing is a causal language.

Most other fields are causal language.

Think about diagnosis.

If you do cancer diagnosis really well, that's great, but nobody cares because you care about the treatment.

If you do LTV prediction really well, that's great, but nobody cares because you care about maximizing this thing, not static predictions.

So all of these fields are essentially dependent on causal thinking.

And the way that Rubin defined causality is very simple.

Causality is the difference between the outcome under treatment for any given person minus the outcome under no treatment for any given person.