So much depends on whether the activities depicted here are supposed to be tedious busywork or acts of creative genius. I’m cool with chic tennis mom automating her PowerPoint design so long as we all can agree to admit that PowerPoint was always kind of a soul-draining template farm for mid-level pseudo-creatives to lacquer over their shallow corporate platitudes with a brittle veneer of pretend artistry. If we can give up the act on that and stop pretending like Terry from marketing is some kind of visionary then sure, I’m glad she can get a bot to take over her daily laptop ritual so she has more time to spend on the court. But then, the question arises of what she will do with her newly liberated free time that’s more intrinsically valuable than slide decks. Tennis forever? The most unsettling story thread in this is actually the guy using Chat to custom-build a rocket ship simulator. Empowered with practically limitless ways to engineer an hour or two of bespoke recreation, he comes up with takeout bulgogi and a video game that looks like he designed it in middle school computer lab using MS paint. If we truly are about to liberate ourselves from the obligations of material necessity to a degree unprecedented in human history (big if!) it’s going to get REALLY important that we get clear on what kinds of activities are intrinsically worth the precious investment of our time and attention. Otherwise things are gonna get DARK. What creeps me out about AI vendors is not that they want to sell us productivity tools but that they keep giving away with ads like this that they really, well and truly do not have a deep understanding of what kind of life we might like to live AFTER our productivity is well and truly maxxed. I just don’t think our utopians know what utopia looks like. They want paradise but have no vision of the good life. Not to hop back on my hobby horse but all of this makes it a really, REALLY good time to study the liberal arts! If you want better answers to these questions…start there.

I wonder whether it will become normal to have an AI rephrase all text we write on the internet to sound better, similar to how we currently have our devices autocorrect spelling and punctuation for us.