As AI gets better, it reveals an empty promise

This week we’ve got tandem hands-ons with Google’s new Gemini AI agent — Spark — from my colleagues David Pierce and Jay Peters. Their takeaways are similar: It’s so effective that it’s scary. Spark knew that David’s dog is named Frida and knew the first name of Jay’s wife, even though neither of them explicitly provided this information to Google. But what’s scary to me is how all of this stuff seems geared toward a future of “productivity” that completely misses what needs to be fixed in our world. “Productivity” is often pitched as a panacea for what befalls us in our personal lives, even going so far as to implicate our moral worthiness when we are less productive. Productivity lives somewhere in the space between hustle culture and proverb: After all, “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” I’m not suggesting we should all aspire to be bumps on a log, but we ought to see what we’re being sold for what it really is. Contemporary tasks on computers have a tendency to feel both important and urgent all of the time, even if they’re not. We’re living under the unholy alliance of the “busy” trap and “software brain.” And that makes AI assistance seem super valuable! But that’s because the companies in charge of all this stuff are now trying to solve a lot of problems that they created. Google, Microsoft, Apple, and others have spent decades blurring the line between office life and personal life. This slow march toward ubiquitous productivity once led the French government to declare a “right to disconnect” from work when leaving the office. (Shame my American sensibilities still convince me that’s a bridge too far.) As I read about Gemini Spark making it easy for my colleagues to color-code calendars and perform other neat tricks on command, I couldn’t help but vividly remember witnessing as a child all of the hours my mom had to spend carefully cutting coupons so we could afford groceries. Sometimes it got to the point where our living room looked like a giant experiment in collage art. All of that time was stolen from her and our family — for what? Maybe having an AI assistant in the ’90s could have helped find and organize the best deals, but it could never fix an economic system that required them in the first place. Where does the productivity march end? The people making more money than God right now have professed a vision of a postwork future where robots do everything for us so we can enjoy life without toiling away in the mines. (Well, except for the content mines.) If you’ve seen Elon Musk’s failure bot, you’ll know this is all actually less Battlestar Galactica and more John Adams in his letter to Abigail: “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy,” and so-on and so-on until the grandchildren can enjoy painting and poetry. So, ideally, after we slog through pre-transcendence, AI will make us all theater kids. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg is posting up his 387-foot yacht in a city where he just laid off a meaningful part of his workforce to offset his investments in AI. At least AI has freed up the time of these fired workers? I’d say good luck to them in Hollywood, especially because they’re trying to replace newly minted theater kids with AI-generated actors. There’s a sinister tone lurking beneath some of these advancements in productivity, because increased productivity has been one of the biggest scams of the past century. Well before consumer AI entered the scene, productivity exploded while wages failed to keep pace. Nobody is working less, they’re just earning less. And as more AI-related companies reap trillions in valuation, the current US regime is looting the social safety net — the kind that must exist if we’re all going to become out-of-work theater kids. You simply can’t look at these things separately. If the end result of private companies optimizing the workforce means nobody has to work, then we have to live in a society where people can still have a roof and a meal. Is anyone confident that will happen while leaders are cutting SNAP benefits while building taxpayer-funded ballrooms? What good is an AI assistant that can help you plan a fun day if you can’t actually afford any free time in your life? There has always been resistance to new advancements — so much so that the term “luddite” is still potent 200 years after English textile workers revolted against automation in their industry. The AI backlash is genuine, well-informed, and well-argued. Nonetheless, some of those new neat tricks are fun and maybe even pretty useful in our personal lives. But I can’t imagine that paying $99 a month to send emails, make calendar appointments, and create spreadsheets is a promising vision of the future or even a good return on investment. Especially if the broader cost is squandering the splendor of our lands while subjecting us to corporate omniscience.