Among all the things AI is set to take away, one of the things I’ll be holding on for dear life are the manual tasks that most people assume I’d actually want automated.
Things like:
Meal planning
Ordering or going to get groceries
Reconciling my monthly finances
Booking a cleaner
Cancelling a subscription I never use
Apparently Meta has launched Muse, their agentic solution, which is just a fancy term for an AI that is unmoored from the chat window, free to flit between your programs with full read access to your data and permission to do things for you armed with that data.
I’m sure there’s a whole can of data privacy worms that others will be more than happy to pontificate on, with no need for me to pile on there.
What I’m concerned with is something more mundane but still existentially significant, because I think it’ll have some kind of knock-on effect on our psychology and our own sense of human agency.
At the end of every month, I log on (manually) into my bank accounts, download transactions from 2-3 accounts (manually), copy the transactions (manually), paste them into my pre-formatted spreadsheet (manually) and make any manual adjustments to make the data fit properly so that all the columns and rows are lined up nicely. Then I go through each transaction and label it with the category like Bills or Groceries or Entertainment. Manually.
The most automated part of this whole process is the formulas I have embedded in the spreadsheet to calculate simple sums and averages of what I spent that month. Ancient 90’s tech, really.
You might look at all that and think, bro, even the dumbest AI agent could do this for you. I could schedule it to run at the end of every month so I don’t even need to click a button. I wouldn’t have to log in to all my accounts separately, I can dispense with menial copying and pasting, it would look up all the merchants and categorize each transaction automatically, I wouldn’t even have to think about it at all anymore.
(Of course, all I’d have to do is give it full access to all my banking accounts and my Google account where I store my info. Not even my own husband has access to these things, but again, not my bugbear for this post.)
It seems to me that the default assumption is that in all cases we want to become more efficient, do less work for the same outcome. Outcome >>>>> process, as long as it gets done, right?
But there’s something deeply satisfying about clicking into all my accounts, gathering all that data, pasting it and wrangling it, and seeing the answers come up magically in my “Monthly spent” cells, divided by category. I enjoy looking at each transaction and thinking, dang that was a fair bit to spend at the pub. Or, dang I remember this great happy hour deal for dinner and drinks for only $50 for two people. Or, wow we did a lot of stuff this month. Or, wow we saved a lot of money by being inane bores this month. Even the occasional obscure merchant name like GROENLANDSKE HANDELSP presents a pleasantly frustrating puzzle to solve, like “where the hell did I spend this $225?”
Believe it or not, I actually enjoy the whole manual process, every click and keyboard entry and tab switch.
My monthly financial session is a chance to look back not only on how I spent money but on how I spent my time, the essence of my life. And it seems to me these AI agents designed to ‘streamline your life’ and ‘give you back time’ are also here to steal away any enjoyment or satisfaction we might glean from any manual work, of a job well done, the process of engaging with our own life in time and space, here and now in front of us.
By the way, I want a robot to do the dishes and laundry for me as much as anyone else. But instead of focusing on making that happen, it seems like the best AI companies can do for us is to supplant our creative thinking and problem-solving opportunities instead, which most of us would argue is what makes us such a dominant, powerful and vibrant species and which faculties make life actually worth living. No one ever got existential satisfaction from doing the same dishes day in and day out (though not knocking those who do, we all have weird kinks).
The promise of AI seems to boil down to this: let it take over more and more tasks and actions in your life, removing the friction, disengaging your hands and arms and legs from your surroundings, until only your eyes are left to receive what the screen is showing, letting you retreat further and further into your own head until you’re reduced to a passive spectator in your own life. Is this what we want?
Well, it’s not what I want. Call me backwards, stubborn, a technological philistine, but I only have this one life and I insist on being able to experience it.
I’m ok if AI wants to do my dishes, though.