Should AI Take the Wheel? (2025)

When my wife asked, “Which decisions should you not delegate to AI?”, I stumbled.

My wife had noticed (quicker than I had!) that I was leaning on AI more often. The tools kept getting better, and the questions I gave them were getting less trivial.

At first, it was:

What meal can I make with these ingredients in my fridge?

It quickly escalated to:

Should we move to another city?

That second question would once have sent me to my journal or to a friend who knows me well. Increasingly, I was opening ChatGPT first, with its convenient instant answers.

Better decisions

A friend and I recently discussed this.1 We talked about how little practice we really get with life’s biggest choices: leaving a job, ending a relationship, or deciding to move abroad. These choices come up rarely but have massive stakes attached. No wonder we struggle with them — we don’t have enough practice.

That makes AI very tempting. It can draw on more examples than any one person has seen and is not caught up in my immediate mood.2

Cheat code to life

It reminds me of using cheat codes in video games as a child (IDDQD, anyone?). At first, cheating felt amazing. Not long after, I realized I wasn’t having much fun. Without the challenge, reward was not… well, rewarding.

Relying on AI is similar in that it can suck the meaning out of life. Struggling over a choice develops the muscle needed to make good decisions; reaping the consequences, however good or dreadful, closes the feedback loop. Without that, do I learn anything? Without struggling over a choice, am I still the author of my life?

I used cheats most often when a game became frustrating or when I was in a low mood and needed a win, even though I knew they would drain the fun from the game soon after. AI offers a much larger shortcut, and I worry my willpower will not be enough to withstand the siren call of an easy life.

The analogy breaks down, though.

Some difficulties are not secretly lessons. Sometimes a situation is simply painful, or there is tedious work that needs to be done. Help is welcome there.

Not all gain requires pain. I may also have given struggle too much credit. Curiosity and making things have shaped me at least as much as hardship has. AI may give me more room for both without adding misery for its own sake.

…but some gain definitely is driven by pain. And with AI it might be easier to avoid the uncomfortable. A fast plausible AI answer can help me skip the marinating-in-my-misery part of the experience.

There’s also the local maximum trap. An AI optimized for what I want right now might keep recommending the least uncomfortable option: stay in the tolerable job, avoid the hard conversation, postpone the move. Years later, I could find that several sensible decisions had kept me stuck.3

Convenience vs. Agency

I want to be able to recognize the decision as mine.

For now, I don’t have a fixed rule for this. But my own track record gives me some confidence. Despite thinking of myself as the instant gratification monkey, I do leave my comfort zone and do things even when The Algorithm offers an easier distraction.

I expect AI to become more useful, and harder to ignore. And also I trust that I can notice when its help starts making my life smaller, and change how I use it.

Thanks to Aayush for the conversation that inspired this section. ↩

To be clear, today’s AIs carry all the biases inherited from training data; the hope is that they balance each other out. ↩

Current AIs are good at surface-level optimization but may fail to suggest difficult-in-the-moment but ultimately enriching decisions. Future models could potentially integrate second- and third-order consequencess, vectorize your preferences and your whole psyche, and ultimately be able to make decisions that are just good for you. But that is post-singularity AI, firmly in Speculationland. ↩