I've been listening to the Verge podcast and I've listened to Nillay refine this article piece by piece for weeks. He had the headline in mind for a long time and I've heard most of the points addressed in this article. It's now interesting to see all that distilled into this single article.

It's definitely not poorly thought out article. People want to automate away the boring parts of their work and life but, as the meme says, people want AI to do their dishes and laundry so they can do writing and art but instead AI does their writing and art so they can do the laundry.

I'm not sure what you think the straw man is here. I think he already addresses this in the article: "I’m not saying regular people don’t use Excel or Airtable to plan their weddings or have fun throwing PowerPoint parties, or even that AI won’t be useful to regular people over time [...] Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and shouldn’t be."

Working in IT and AI related fields I made the opposite observation. Taking as HR an example, professionals there wanted to keep the boring reporting tasks and automate the human part, e.g. career guidance, mediation etc.. At the time I could not understand the reason why. In hindsight it was a reward driven decision. Human to human interaction is rarely instantly rewarded. Producing reports on the other hand is measurable and mostly rewarded right away.

> A poorly thought, as a result, a poorly-written article. Almost everyone wants to automate away the boring parts of their work and life.

mm, the fact that you disagree with the article doesn't make it poorly written.

In my experience no, there are significant limits to how much automation the average person wants in their life. Even if automating something would save time, doing so could be undesirable due to other metrics such as correctness, cost, latency, flexibility, or cognitive load.

> The author created a strawman, but that is not what AI is ("Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and it shouldn’t be.")

In context, what you've quoted there is not the creation of a strawman. In fact you yourself seem to have constructed a strawman out of the article.

thank you, I was hoping to write this but your comment saved me from typing it :)