Fisher: AI Scheduling Assistants Must Master Implicit Game Theory and Power Dynamics
Jordan Fisher · Ask These Questions Before Starting An AI Startup · Y Combinator · Oct 7, 2025 · at 39:33
Jordan Fisher, former CEO of Standard AI and alignment researcher at Anthropic, explains at Y Combinator why agent-to-agent communication is complicated by subtle, implicit social signaling.
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“But actually, like, you've already lost the game of being a good personal assistant, because there's a game theory component to how you schedule meetings, right? And if you're, like, too liberal with, like, showing that there's free slots, you're, like, communicating that this person's not busy, Right. Or you're communicating that like, it's really important to have this meeting with the person that you're scheduling. Whereas like, if you say, yeah, like I'm happy to schedule a meeting between you and Joe, but it's like two weeks out, three weeks out. Right. Like there's a power dynamic that you're doing. Right. And like the truth is like all of these game theoretic things matter. A good assist, a good human assistant knows all these things. Right. And like abides by them. But it's all implicit, right? It's not like, oh, there's this like concrete piece of information that the agent has access to. And that's the important part of the security. It's like, Way more subtle and semantic.”
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