The desire to keep up with more 

Someone, please tell me why you have so many things to automate?

AI and all its affordances have provided us with many means of automating life. Which begs the question: Do you guys actually have that many things to automate?

The quick answer is that there aren’t many automations that will truly make a difference in terms of physical productivity, but rather, it satisfies the human instinct and addiction to being part of a group. In these cases, the more you can automate, the more you can keep up with and do, the more groups you can feel a sense of belonging to.

Throughout the AI bro space, you can see people hopping onto the latest thing over and over again, touting that this will change the world with all that it can abstract away from humans and daily life. This is similar rhetoric to when the iPhone was released, with it being marketed as the one device for everything. However, when you dig deeper into the things that they are trying to automate, they tend to be actions that take a couple of seconds at most, things that they will not be able to make meaningful contributions to after the automations, or a means to automate away multiple different systems.

This is problematic in multiple ways.

Firstly, they are things that only take a couple of seconds. Do you have so little time that you can’t even open up an app or open up a second app to reference your material? When Claude Agents came out, the people in this space were touting how it can automate away the meaningless work like copying things between files or opening different apps to achieve a goal. Apps like n8n capitalised on this as well, with their Zapier-like model. Zapier itself was being built into these systems. These apps and materials still need to exist for the agents to do it. The major problem at this point is that the agents tend to be slower than a human being and prone to errors as well.

Understandably, the believers will tell you that the models will get faster and will be able to do these things in the future. Alright, fine. That brings me to the second issue: What happens when you get this automated information quickly? Are you able to respond to them in a meaningful way? Are you able to contribute to that information at all? Or are you just using it as a means to get more content into your system? The most likely answer to this is no. It is largely impossible to respond to anything effectively nowadays due to the high influx of information and the expectations for quick turnarounds. And before anyone comes and tells me that an AI can respond to it for you in the future, I pre-emptively refute with “Is it worth doing something that you have totally no involvement in. Would you be happy with that? If it is something so insignificant, then there is no need even to spend the time building an automation for it, and if it is large enough, don’t you want to be part of it?”

The last issue (just for this article) is the fantasy of abstracting away multiple programs and systems. Contradictorily, I am not entirely against this. I should not need to bounce between 50 SaaS products to get through one workday. However, people who have 100% buy into this idea have clearly never used a microwave oven toaster hybrid. It is one machine that says it can do it all, but it is incredibly mediocre at all of them. This is also what is happening to computers recently, and look at phones. They can do most things, but not to an expert level. That may be good for the majority, but it is not good enough to be called innovation.

And that, that line above, “good enough for the majority”, is the reason, I think, why people have that many things to automate. Human beings are addicted to being part of the majority. We are addicted to keeping up with as many things as possible because it gives us more groups to feel a part of. So, like most of human progress, it is largely due to the ego. Being able to spout out thoughts, knowledge, and keep up with the latest things makes a person feel powerful, feel in control, and feel like they are valuable.

This is not something that can be blamed on hustle culture and whatnot. Human society has always rewarded those who can do a lot. Not those who are efficient, but those who can do a lot despite the efficiencies. Hustle culture just commercialised that. The person who can do the most in the village is often the one who is seen as the most valuable. The person who can understand the most things is often the tribe leader, who needs to oversee every aspect of the village. Value is tied to how much you can do.

However, with the increase in content, and arguably the lack of ability to focus on effort and less value on thinking through issues, AI has become a compelling case for people to signal value through how much they can do and know, without actually doing the thing. So the AI doesn’t need to do it to excellence; it just needs to be good enough; it just needs to regress to the mean. The AI doesn’t need to be fast; it just needs to allow the user to multitask. It doesn’t need to innovate; it just needs to make the user signal to the world that they are an innovator.

These sales and hope for AI to solve and automate all your problems away are not being pursued in hopes of doing less, but rather in the desire to keep up with more, in the desire to do more, and in the desire to be more.

I still use AI, especially as a learning tool and a “I really don’t want to talk to you, here is an AI” tool. I am also holding out hope that it will get better, being able to open up true opportunities. But like a lot of folks, I am also tired of these snake oil salesmen no longer needing to sit in the sun to paddle their wares and face the risk of public shaming, and especially drowning out the really useful, helpful things that AI can do, which are commonly not the flashy stuff.