Never Enough

> Technology was supposed to make room for life but instead for more and more people life is slowly being rearranged around AI. People fear being replaced by machines and respond by giving those machines more of their judgment, attention and time. And for what? Every “saved” hour is returned to a race with no finish line.

I think this is true. I've recently heard Tim Ferriss say: Just because you can do something well doesn't mean it's worth doing.

This is so true with AI. You can do a lot of things with AI, but that doesn't automatically make them worth doing. Anything multiplied by zero is zero. If the benefit of something is (effectively) zero, it doesn't matter how low the cost is.

AI isn't useless and there are beautiful, enriching use cases for it. But the idea that AI must consume our lives so we don't get left behind by those who brag on LinkedIn about operating 12 concurrent agents in self-perpetuating loops seems faulty to me.

This really captures the danger of turning every technological gain into a new expectation. AI may save us time, but if we simply reinvest that time into working harder and competing more, what have we actually gained?

Throughout history there have been predictions that the next technological breakthrough will lead to us working less and living more fulfilled lives, that has never happened. Same seems to be happening with AI, people are just working more rather than less.

> Technology was supposed to make room for life but instead for more and more people life is slowly being rearranged around AI.

It's been downright spooky to watch people I know personally or been familiar with totally fall down the rabbit hole.

That said, like with everything, it depends on the person. Some people are taking the Jack Nicholson route, others are finally taking time off and enjoying their life (I'm taking off nights and weekends for the first time in a decade, solely because of the speed up of LLMs).

>The other story covers a founder who has Claude review her first dates and tell her whether she was engaging and empathetic enough, thanks to recording every single one of them. Two people meet and afterwards, rather than talk to the other person or trust her own judgment, one of them sits alone with a machine and asks how well she performed.

Holy insanity

This reminded me of work in general, years ago I was thinking how nursery was so expensive. I could try and work harder, earn more, to pay for nursery - or just quit and look after my children. If the goal was making money to look after my children, why make it difficult?

p.s. LOVE the animated header on this blog

>Everyone is chasing the person ahead of them

This is part of what turns grasshoppers into locusts. They're attempting not only to eat the insect in front of them, but escape the one behind that is attempting to eat them. I'll leave it up to the reader to complete the metaphor.

> If the valley shows us what it means to live in the future

Luckily, never have been. From thousands of kilometers away, Silicon Valley have always been a special place of its own, sometimes in a positive way, most of the times in a pretty awful way, but only people living in the Valley think they leave in the future.

Really appreciate the authenticity of the site design in the age of AI but damn! It is hurting my eyes!

The story about the woman recording her dates is getting extrapolated into too much. Her friends told her it made people uncomfortable and that she should stop. This is not a trend.

I wouldn’t describe the people this blog talks about as “normal people”, or “average people”.

Most people don’t behave this way or have these kinds of problems.

A reminder: tech jobs are their own kind of filter bubble. It’s worth taking a step out of this space every now and again to see what other people are thinking and worrying about.

It’s one of the things I love about my rec hockey games. People there have much more tangible worries: when they’re gonna fix the dock at their vacation homes, if the girl they texted will text back, when will their kid grow out of their threenager phase, etc.

Most of the world is not nearly as preoccupied with AI as this community is. It’s refreshing to see when you can access it.

I’m not one of those people that have agents running 24/7, but I am someone who always feels like they’re behind. The final paragraph of the post resonated deeply.

This is insanity.

p.s. Very annoying when people link to paywalled articles.

For what it’s worth, allowing agents to just run in the background provides me with more time to play with my child than I had in the past. Some stuff deserves to be automated, isn’t that the purpose of code in the first place?

But overall premise is on point, people are being pretty goofy about this tech; it’s just another tool - nothing to go into psychosis over, which seems to be happening in some cases, unfortunately. Touching some grass certainly helps.

Everyone lives in anxiety. Whether they use AI or not, people shout that their way is the right way. Right or wrong, I think it's ultimately about finding the organization that fits the workflow you want.

I use AI, but I don't feel the need to convince those who don't to use it. Conversely, if someone who doesn't use AI tells me not to, I'll just agree and move on.

I see the ongoing AI driven transformation as part of the early adoption phase of a technology, a period where it's often 'overused.' I think there will come a time when we acknowledge its limitations and adopt a more mature approach. Right now, I feel we're still in the early stage.

I don't know if the two examples in the post are real or fabricated, but even if they are, I don't see a reason to think relying on that technology is necessarily bad. Because I've seen a 30 year old woman with the intellectual capacity of a 15 year old use AI effectively. She asked about everything she didn't know, and it actually helped prevent a crime, a case of voice phishing.

Ultimately, technology is value neutral. But society's demands can reshape themselves around technology.

If that's the case, we should first question the nature of the anxiety itself. Why does a husband earning $550,000 still cling to something despite that? Why does a startup founder want even his dates to be evaluated?

It's because society demands those values and norms. From an Eastern perspective, we often say to step away from those value frameworks and realize who you truly are. But even that value framework is itself a kind of frame and a shackle.

The real question is where most anxiety comes from. It arises whenever individuals feel the need to conform to societal norms.

Both examples show that. Society demands self optimization through performance and competition, and AI simply makes that demand cheaper and more granular. The first example is about maximizing competition for promotion, wealth, and status using AI. The second example, the startup founder, treats even human relationships as improvable metrics.

We always feel anxiety in the gap between norms and our current state.

Even with a $550,000 salary, if the surrounding norm is 'a better house, higher AI productivity,' it will feel insufficient.

Even if a date was enjoyable, if the question is 'Was I empathetic and attractive enough?' then evaluation becomes necessary because you care about how you'll be perceived on her social media.

'Never Enough' isn't because desire is infinite. It's because the evaluation criteria are constantly updated externally, so we can never feel satisfied.

You shouldn't be surprised if you consider this simple fact:

We listen to tech bros trying to shape a distopian future, who spent more time with their computer then with their familly and friends.

Really sad that the latest tech debacle gets the Silicon Valley label while so much interesting and constructive work plods along in relative dark.

Pure rage bait.

Strong claims require strong evidence - which isn't offered here.

And besides, maybe the person running dates by Claude just does that for a bit of fun as a hobby. People have weird hobbies! Better not to yuck someone's yum.

Maybe alternatively it's that person's way of experimenting with these new tools to explore what they can do. Maybe that person will discover something - for example, ebay was a terrible idea when it was first brought up!

It'd be unsound to assume if you're playing with agents you don't also talk to humans.