goons.ai
My AI is bigger than your AI
My old Google Pixel had something called Hold for Me. If I was on hold, I could tell the phone to listen to the hold music. When the music stopped, the phone would robot-announce to the customer service representative on the other side that a real human (i.e., me) was coming, and then I would be summoned into the call. This feature didn’t work great —the call usually started with the rep shouting “Hello? Who is this? Are you a robot?”— but I generally loved the idea of having a tool (i.e., Hold for Me) that could overpower the tool of my enemy (i.e., being put on hold).
How many times have you had to navigate the labyrinth of Interactive Voice Response systems? “Press 1 for something, 2 for something else, and go take a hike if you have an issue that doesn’t fit neatly into those categories. Want to talk to a human? Good luck figuring out what series of buttons to push!” Wouldn’t it be nice if an AI agent could do that hard work for you?
Enter goons.ai, my newest business venture, where our motto is, “My AI is bigger than your AI.”
Why “goons?” (Yes, I have heard it also means something else. Our marketing team thinks any publicity is good publicity.) The anthropologist David Graeber made a taxonomy of bullshit jobs that don’t help society. One of these is the goon, a person who harms or deceives on behalf of their employer, and who often only has a job because their employer’s enemy also has goons. “Goon” originally referred to thugs and mafioso types, but clearly many lawyers and customer service reps fall in this category too.
I’m honestly surprised no one has already done this. It’s no secret that companies algorithmically screen resumes. So how is there not a market for companies that help people make resumes that will pass those screens? It’s also no secret that customer service sludge is real. Why navigate it without our help? No one else will.
But customer service goonery is only the beginning. The whole internet is turning into AI slop. How will you know what to believe? The Luddites will tell you to develop personal networks of trusted experts. They’ll probably also tell you to learn how to farm wheat. Here at goons.ai, we think the solution to AI slop is yet more AI. If you think that sounds stupid, then I refer you to the award-winning science fiction novel Anathem, in which a parallel Earth’s internet fills with slop, and then the information technology caste uses AI to clean it up.
Of course, the existence of goons.ai will initiate an arms race. For now, the demagogues and clickbaiters don’t need to try that hard to trick you. But soon, with free-tier goons.ai, you’ll be able to identify this low-grade slop. So then they’ll upgrade to create more sophisticated and convincing slop. At which point you’ll likely want to upgrade to a paid subscription with us.
We at goons.ai have no impression that we’re making the whole world a better place. We just think that you shouldn’t have to stand by while other people’s goons impede you, provided of course that you can give us more money than them.
And by “you” we also mean the American people. Eventually we will be doing cyberwarfare, and we’ll have gotten so good at fighting enemies domestic, that we’ll easily crush enemies foreign. Would you rather count on some government-employed hackers or a robust, capitalistic market force? (goons.ai of course will be unable to create a healthy peacetime domestic market for artillery shells, so we can’t guarantee we will win a kinetic war.)
I wish I were kidding.
This is genuinely brilliant - the 'my AI is bigger than yours' framing cuts right to the absudity of where we're headed. The Graeber connection is spot-on; we're basically building goons to fight goons at scale. I've actualy spent 20 minutes navigating those phone trees before, and the idea of an AI doing that gruntwork for me is weirdly comforting even if it accelerates the whole mess.