[RigelKentaurus]

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

[wvenable]

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."

[Gooblebrai]

> I've listened to Nillay refine this article piece by piece for weeks.

What do you mean?

[photon_collider]

Nilay has been discussing these ideas on podcasts hosted by The Verge over the last few weeks. I can tell it's something that's been top of mind for him especially on his podcast series Decoder where he interviews CEOs about their approach to integrating AI in their products and how consumers feel about this.

[Lutzb]

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.

[greedo]

This is compounded by many managers not understanding the details of what their direct reports actually do. I've had so many supervisors in my career who just have no concept of what I really do in IT, though it's pretty obvious to me and my coworkers. So when it comes to review time, I'm always having to walk them through what I actually do.

Contrast this to when I am tasked with creating a report that they need. They're amazed. Absolutely amazed that I can write something coherent. I can only assume that with the Peter Principle, they're all surrounded by idiots who write emails and reports like Epstein.

[wavemode]

> 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.

[simonw]

Your comment here appears to be a perfect illustration of what Nilay calls "software brain" in the article.

(I have a strong case of software brain as he describes it myself.)

[gyanchawdhary]

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