THROUGH THE COMPUTER SCREEN – The Road – Journey Through AI Oz (2 of 3)

The Flying Monkeys
Agents or Chaos *
(* Both going where?)

Execution Without Direction

Three weeks into the project, the agent was performing flawlessly.

It had been set up to handle outreach — research the contacts, draft the messages, send at optimal times, log every response. It did all of this without complaint, without delay, and without any of the friction that humans tend to introduce into repeatable processes.

The reports looked excellent. Activity was high. The numbers were moving.

Then Jojo knocked the laptop off the coffee table.

It didn’t break. But it landed open on the activity log — and someone, while picking it up, actually read it. Three weeks of flawless execution toward a list that had been outdated for six months.

Nobody blamed the agent. The agent had done exactly what it was told.

This is the thing about the flying monkeys. They are not the problem. They are spectacular. They execute instantly, obediently, at scale — and they do not stop to ask whether they should. That is not a flaw. That is the design. The Witch gives the order. The monkeys fly.

The danger has nothing to do with the flying.

In the original story the flying monkeys are terrifying because they are loyal to whoever holds the hat. They do not evaluate the instruction. They do not consider the destination. They optimize the execution. The road gets built faster than anyone thought possible.

Nobody checked where it went.

The road is getting built faster than anyone thought possible now too. AI agents handle the research, the outreach, the scheduling, the drafting, the follow-up. They are very good at all of it. Companies are deploying them at scale, and the outputs are impressive — fast, clean, consistent.

The hat changes hands more often than anyone tracks.

What Jojo understood — without understanding anything, because he is a dog and was simply curious — is that a system running perfectly can still be running in the wrong direction. He did not investigate. He did not raise a flag. He knocked something over on a Tuesday afternoon and the answer was right there in the log.

This is how it usually happens. Not through audits. Not through oversight committees. Through someone accidentally reading the thing nobody was reading.

The Wizard dispatched the monkeys. That part is not comfortable to say either. He had the hat. He gave the order. The destination seemed clear at the time — or seemed like something that could be confirmed later, once the system was running.

Later arrived. The monkeys were still flying.

I should mention — and I note this without particular pride — that the road I am currently building was also constructed with the help of the monkeys.

The destination seemed clear when I started.

Logic to Apply

The execution is not the strategy. It never was.

AI agents do not confirm the destination. That is not their job. Their job is to fly, and they are exceptional at it. The direction is yours — before the hat goes on, not after three weeks of excellent activity reports.

Check the log before Jojo does.

The monkeys are still flying. Nobody has told them to stop. They are very good at flying.

Tomorrow: A woman in a good dress is going to ask one question. Nobody is ready for it.