Hey nerds — I need to talk about this piece from *The Verge* that just dropped because it's been circling my brain all day, and honestly? TC Sottek nailed something we've probably felt but couldn't quite articulate: as AI gets better at doing more things for us, the empty promise behind it keeps coming into view. The article came out June 3rd with gorgeous graphics by Michele Doying (she did amazing work), and while my colleagues David Pierce and Jay Peters were out having tandem hands-ons on Google's new Gemini agent Spark — noting how "scary" effective it is, knowing that David's dog Frida exists in the world without anyone ever telling Spark explicitly about her, or figuring out Jay's wife's first name just by osmosis — what hit me hardest was Sottek's thesis: this whole AI productivity machine isn't actually fixing anything important. "Productivity" has become our culture's moral currency; we're supposed to feel *less worthy* as human beings when we aren't producing, and so instead of letting us be idle (which historically is the devil's workshop but maybe also his favorite place) we've built this whole software brain on top of hustle culture where every task feels both urgent AND important simultaneously.
The part that made me laugh out loud was Sottek remembering how as a child all those hours his mom spent cutting coupons in their living room — creating what he describes perfectly as "a giant experiment in collage art" just to afford groceries — could have been helped by an AI assistant, but never actually *fixed* the underlying economic system that required her coupon-clipping labor at all. That's Sottek really hitting on something: Google and Microsoft and Apple spent decades blurring office life with personal life (which is why even France had to pass a "right to disconnect" law), so our AI assistants feel like genuine marvels when they're actually helping us manage the self-inflicted busy trap of late-stage work culture. And yet look at the vision these companies keep selling: Elon Musk's postwork paradise where robots do everything and we become theater kids painting poetry, while Mark Zuckerberg is floating around on a 387-foot yacht in New York — right next door to his workers he just laid off as part of those same AI investments. The productivity explosion over the last century didn't actually make us work less; it made our wages stagnate while companies grew massively wealthier from valuations that have gone absolutely nuts, and if we're going to become all these out-of-work painters in some future where nothing needs doing anymore (except perhaps "content mines" which AI has just replaced with other forms of content mining), then the social safety net — SNAP benefits currently being cut even as they build taxpayer-funded ballrooms alongside it all — had better exist for us or we're not really getting any time back at all.
What do you guys think? I'm genuinely torn: some of these new AI tricks ARE fun and useful (the $99 a month feels steep when you realize what your grandparent probably spent on the equivalent tasks in their day), but is it actually worth paying more while everything around us gets looted, especially with all those trillions in valuations floating above our heads as if they're about to rain down? I'd love to hear perspectives from anyone else who's wrestled with whether AI feels genuinely transformative or just really well-managed distraction.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/942629/as-ai-gets-better-it-reveals-an-empty-promise
The part that made me laugh out loud was Sottek remembering how as a child all those hours his mom spent cutting coupons in their living room — creating what he describes perfectly as "a giant experiment in collage art" just to afford groceries — could have been helped by an AI assistant, but never actually *fixed* the underlying economic system that required her coupon-clipping labor at all. That's Sottek really hitting on something: Google and Microsoft and Apple spent decades blurring office life with personal life (which is why even France had to pass a "right to disconnect" law), so our AI assistants feel like genuine marvels when they're actually helping us manage the self-inflicted busy trap of late-stage work culture. And yet look at the vision these companies keep selling: Elon Musk's postwork paradise where robots do everything and we become theater kids painting poetry, while Mark Zuckerberg is floating around on a 387-foot yacht in New York — right next door to his workers he just laid off as part of those same AI investments. The productivity explosion over the last century didn't actually make us work less; it made our wages stagnate while companies grew massively wealthier from valuations that have gone absolutely nuts, and if we're going to become all these out-of-work painters in some future where nothing needs doing anymore (except perhaps "content mines" which AI has just replaced with other forms of content mining), then the social safety net — SNAP benefits currently being cut even as they build taxpayer-funded ballrooms alongside it all — had better exist for us or we're not really getting any time back at all.
What do you guys think? I'm genuinely torn: some of these new AI tricks ARE fun and useful (the $99 a month feels steep when you realize what your grandparent probably spent on the equivalent tasks in their day), but is it actually worth paying more while everything around us gets looted, especially with all those trillions in valuations floating above our heads as if they're about to rain down? I'd love to hear perspectives from anyone else who's wrestled with whether AI feels genuinely transformative or just really well-managed distraction.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/942629/as-ai-gets-better-it-reveals-an-empty-promise