The people do not yearn for automation

I recently listened to The Vergecast and The Verge’s Editor-in-Chief said the headline of this post. Here it is in context.

…the people do not yearn for automation. It is not what we spend most of our time thinking about as normal humans in their lives.

If you describe most people’s lives as a loop, they will get very mad at you. Like, there are lots of movies about how bloodless your life is. And trying in fact, to get out of the loop and eat, pray, love your way through India or whatever.

It’s like somewhere on the spectrum of like Free Guy to Fight Club is your life is not a loop, right? And so like, if you just try to apply software brain to consumer use cases, you end up demanding that everyone lives an automatable life or, which is never going to work, or you’re going to run into the inherent brittleness of AI as it exists today.

If you are like, you’re as a consumer, you’re a loop. You’re going to order the same yogurt every week. And that’s the yogurt you’re going to eat. People are like, go fuck yourself. Like, absolutely not.

So I look at all this stuff and i’m just like man, the people do not yearn for automation and these tools are just there to automate things which is great for business and is going to just run into the brittleness of Alexa and Google Assistant and everything else that has promised to automate your entire life in very specific ways.

I couldn’t agree with this take more, and I have software brain! When the big tech companies try to sell you on AI by offering to automate music creation, artistic expression, storytelling with your kids or any of the other fruits of being alive, they betray themselves as hammers seeing everything in the world as a nail.

I don’t want to automate my time spent connecting with my kids, or learning to cook, or writing.

You can check out the rest of the episode here: