Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

You could prpobably skip the first half of this talk, which makes the point that "As these (AI stochastic) parrots stack and interact with one another, we come to the pandemonium, this crisis of the stochastic flock: unmanaged, independently motivated systems competing or depending on one another, constrained by this mixture of probability and reference with cascading and uncontrollable results." I mean, it's a good image, but that's about it. The really practical value comes in the second part where Eryk Salvaggio describes "seven warnings for critical agentic design". They're short, but they take some thought. What does it mean to say "agents require air traffic control," for example? Or that "agents haunt and are haunted?" It's not your usual list of concerns; it's a layer deeper.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Mar 25, 2026 10:15 a.m.

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