The most irritating part of my life at this moment is that friends have started to sound AI mediated, movie storylines feel empty, and news articles come with no texture. The weeknight pasta I tried to make a few weeks ago from an online recipe tasted like the off-the-shelf never-fail shit I used to make when I was twenty-five and wouldn’t eat anything that didn’t come off the front page of Buzzfeed.
I mind that everything around me feels so flat and lifeless. I mind that it has inspired me to write less. I mind the absence of friction that nurtures: negotiating the glow of my phone at 7pm on a Tuesday to find a pair of jeans on Vinted, a Kylie Minogue record, or even a Chloé bag if I feel like it. I like finding stuff. I like checking shit off lists. I like to buy my own groceries and waste an hour in the supermarket doing it because that hour of wasting is pure bliss. All that is part of the fun. I’m not so busy that spending an extra ten minutes to find the good frozen chickpea curry is onerous.
I’m rife with friction. I create it where it doesn’t exist. I enjoy the hunt.
So much has already been said about AI’s perceived superintelligence (see Trump’s latest attempt to rebrand it as such), but what continues to fascinate me about it is how quickly it all happened. By late 2022, ChatGPT was quickly positioned as not just a new technology, but the new technology. In its case, that was successfully leveraged into its appeal as a supposed intelligence, a chatbot people treated like it could think. Overnight, AI went from an experimental tool used mostly by developers to something that everyone – and I mean everyone – wanted to try. Arguably the most striking thing about this technology is how much people believe they are interacting with an intelligence, a phenomenon that became known as the ELIZA effect in the 1960s. The truth is that many people do not just want to use AI, but also want to be used by it – it is something to feel superior to, something to feel smart around, something to feed and nurture and bring into the fold, as if it were a new pet. In reality, we are not ushering in a new age of superintelligence. We are being reintroduced to a very old form of stupidity.
The Verge Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel, in one of my favorite articles of the year, built a powerhouse case against “software brain” as a general worldview. He points out that, in his own experience as a smart-home power user, Apple, Google, and Amazon spent over a decade trying to sell smart home automation to the average consumer and, for the most part, they never cared. Now, with AI, they’re selling automation again, but with a twist: now, instead of coding the automation yourself, you let the AI do the work. Most importantly, though, he argues:
But: not everything is a business. Not everything is a loop! The entire human experience cannot be captured in a database. That’s the limit of software brain. That’s why people hate AI. It flattens them.
Regular people don’t see the opportunity to write code as an opportunity at all. “The people do not yearn for automation.”
Nilay understands better than anyone that the promise of this new world is a hollow promise. According to him, most people don’t want their lives run as a series of loops to be automated. They don’t see the world as something to be optimized, as a series of databases that can always be improved by the latest technology, as a task or task domain that is waiting to be coded, as a new opportunity for a dozen consultants. Most people don’t want to deal with a computer when they get sick, or when their friend is going through a tough time. And most people, even if they understand the edges of the database, don’t want to live their lives trapped inside one.
I agree with Nilay that most people don’t have “software brain”. But my fear is that they sheepishly gravitate towards the work of those who do.
Meta tied its consumer strategy to the term “personal superintelligence” more directly than anyone. On September 8, the company launched Muse, “the world’s first personal AI agent built for everyone”, following Zuckerberg’s software brain-ed essay The Future is for Everyone. Superintelligence Labs had launched the year before. Within two weeks, TechCrunch reported Apptopia’s estimate that Muse hit 1.8 million iOS downloads in the U.S. and Canada in its first twelve days (ahead of ChatGPT’s 1.3 million1 at the same stage!) and, by that estimate, moved from No. 2 to No. 1 on the U.S. App Store. I’m skeptical of the longevity of app store charts. I’m less skeptical of what it means culturally when Zuckerberg’s anthropomorphized AI agent goes viral: a lot of people want it in their pocket.
(This is despite Wired’s reporting noting worries about sensitive data exposure and potential surveilling but hahaha people literally do not care about what Zuckerberg does with their data!!).
Muse has a shared interest in the mundane, boring work of life — your mortgage rates, your sick mother, the errands that hold your family together. What if you never had to do that work again? That’s the question Muse is asking. What if you could be “freer”? What if your life didn’t include the things you don’t want to do (like texting your friends yourself, yikes), and you could just exist in a state of effortless wonder scrolling Reels and talking to Kylie Jenner’s Meta bot 24/7? What if your bestie lifeless assistant could do the rest for you? The superintelligence pitch is correct in a way. Muse’s salespeople know that their software faces consumers as the promise of a personal superintelligence. You are not chatting with a “bot”. Muse is your friend, a 24/7 workhorse that can casually text you whenever. It’s a modern Siri or Google Assistant, but smarter and more capable and also more creepy but who cares, and it lives inside the app you already use to communicate with your family and friends.
Muse and the culture it represents is a kind of malignancy that encourages users to consume, enjoy, and think less—a zombie-like state in which users lose the desire to do anything themselves. Despite Zuckerberg’s line that “invention, not automation, will be the greatest contribution of superintelligence,” unbridled superintelligence means you never learn or try, you never fail, you never invent because you are not an inventor anymore. You simply exist as a consumer, shuttling Muse between tasks and hoping it’s everything you’ve ever wanted.
Recently, I’ve started asking my friends some pretty tacky questions on the topic. Questions around how our relationships with each other and with ourselves have changed. What does it mean to remember? What does it mean to forget? What does it mean to feel? I began asking my mom these questions, too, these questions that seemed too big for me to hold. Though she got a kick out of my existential musings, my mom was never the type to ponder the universe or the meaning of life. I could tell that my questions troubled her. You’re such a feeler, she said to me. You’re going to have to learn how to stop, you know. So many things are done for us now. And it’s true, despite being a writer, I’ve almost mastered it. I know the taste of every brand of artificial vanilla, I have every type of low-calorie agave syrup ready for consumption. I don’t need to feel anything.
And yet, my mom’s answer haunted me as I researched and thought more. If so many things were done for us, then was everything up for grabs? Did we even need to be here if we let machines make all the decisions for us?
I searched for an answer to my question and landed on feeling as the most difficult and radical form of resistance in a time of disengagement. I must feel everything. I must be haunted by the past, by my memories and my experiences. I must sow the seeds of a different way of thinking about the AI phenomenon and where we’re headed: that we’re already living in the era of superlaziness, and that we are successfully being sold that era back to us as superintelligence.
I felt a sense of pride when I discovered the short essay “Embrace your laziness in the age of AI” by Matthias Plappert, even if its subject was one I could barely comprehend. When he writes that AI agents “never get tired, they never get frustrated, they are infinitely patient and motivated,” you believe him, but you also want to be one anyway (why wouldn’t you?). His point is different from mine, but adjacent:
Remember when you had to write all code and do all research yourself and you went “ugh”? Because you really didn’t feel like doing something? That’s healthy! That “ugh” carries information. It’s telling you: “This is going to be work.” And it’s asking: “Is this work really worth doing or should I just… not?” The answer might be yes or no, but it really matters that this question gets raised in the first place.
Humans have always used technology to offload the parts of life we find inconvenient, be they washing machines or email spam filters. The only difference between the tools of the past and those of today is in scale. The older and more powerful a tool becomes, the more we trust it to do the work for us. The idea that you could one day speak your wishes into a machine and have it obey you like a genie was once the preserve of science fiction. Now it is the premise of every generative AI tool. But the core presumption of each of the AI companies is simple: humans are lazy and wish to do as little work as possible.
The idea of laziness as a tool of capitalist exploitation is much more interesting to me than philosophical debates over its existence as “a thing” or “not a thing.” “Lazy,” in this context, means “effortless.” Meta wants to sell you an AI someone that will do your tasks for you. My issue with pitches like this is simple: I think of superlaziness in the same way I think of lazy dinner, a term that is often maligned, but one we’ve embraced. Superlaziness has birthed a new class of user: the “super lazy” user. This user is defined by their desire for efficiency and ease at all costs, even if it means sacrificing the quality of the work produced. This user is not interested in engaging with the world or putting in the effort to learn to do things properly; they want pure output.
People used to message me things like, “What’s your favorite app to read books on your phone?”, “What’s a recent film you recommend?” or “What should I do in London?”. I don’t get these asks anymore. My gut tells me they have now found an AI someone who is always there to help. This AI someone never gets to fully partake in any group hang, and only exists to be useful. Delegate, delegate, delegate. Everything must be sent to that AI someone, even things that a simple ask to the person next to you can solve.
The AI someone is like a sad loner in that they are never busy, so they are always available to do menial tasks. The AI someone will help you with a Netflix reality show if it needs to be done, and will ask no questions about what a massive waste of time that is. Delegating everything is life as a series of tasks to automate. Is automated life hardly lived at all, I wonder? To automate something is to strip it of all the drama, tension, and relationality that might make it worth doing. I, too, want to strip life of its drama, tension, and relationality, but I am not so sadistic that I want to do it by automated thinking, searching, and reminding. I want to do it by making life feel like an endless banquet. I want to eat, sleep, and listen to podcasts constantly, to feel drunk on the expensive high of cinemagoing so that I don’t have to feel the drama, tension, or relationality of life at all. But I digress.
The industry’s idea of superintelligence is that it will constantly automate your life to make it feel like you have a million friends and you are the life of the party; You will watch Succession all over again and shoot up peptides to make it feel like you are in a relationship with Sydney Sweeney. You’ll want to eat at gourmet restaurants every night, not because you’re impressed by Michelin stars, but because you are impressed by chefs from your favorite cities working for Anthony Bourdain’s favorite chefs (at least that’s what your AI someone told you). You’ll want to eat like him because he had all the answers already, didn’t he? He was the most romantic human of all of us, who made sure that he was always eating, drinking, and having a laugh.
You’ll push an AI someone into your life and expect it to make it feel more alive. You’ll outsource the choosing out of your life and expect it to still be yours. You’ll take all of the taste out of your life and expect it to still be great. You’ll take all of the friction out of your life and expect it to still be meaningful. You’ll become lazier. And lazier. And lazier. And lazier. So much lazier. Super lazier.
I don’t want to idealize the anxieties of being human or of living each day in a body. I get that not everyone has the time, energy, or inclination to resist automation or optimization. I understand the appeal of a tool like Muse, especially for working people with families, multiple jobs and of special circumstances. I don’t mean to sound elitist. But what if distraction is more virtuous than sloth? What if it is fertile rather than wasted time? What if friction is cultivation? I want to invite you to dinner and make a mistake I correct over the table and make a joke about it, not cook a dish my delegate ordered me to execute to perfection. I want to make something that only I could make for the people I love. My mum hates the Greek-English slang I pepper into texts to her, often offering corrections to my “forgotten” spellings or mispronunciations. It’s an endearment, a way of reminding her that I’m Greek, that I come from a big family and a culture that doesn’t take itself too seriously. I never fully realize it until she pushes back, but I often remind her of all that when she’s not around.
When I think of superlaziness, I think of the final scene of Elysium (2013). Matt Damon’s character has just fought his way to the station’s computer core with Carlyle’s reboot program in his head—a program that will register everyone on Earth as a citizen of Elysium and open the Med-Bays to people who were never supposed to get them. Spider hooks him up to the core, and Max knows the download will kill him. He says goodbye to Frey and starts it anyway. He dies at the terminal. The system reboots. Robot cops can’t arrest Spider because he’s a citizen now. Frey’s daughter gets healed in a Med-Bay. Medical shuttles peel off the ring and head for Earth.
The first time I watched the film, I was appalled at the society depicted within it. For those who need a reminder, it’s a dystopian film about an imagined future where blighted Earth is reserved for the poor and Med-Bays can undo radiation and disease in seconds. The film’s title references Elysium in Greek myth, a space for the souls of heroes where they live in bliss and peace. Those the system recognizes as citizens can live on Elysium and access its resources. I was left disgusted by the thought of a world where such a divide could exist, where the rich could hoard resources and technology, leaving the rest to fend for themselves. But as I watched it again recently, I realized how much of the world I’ve come to accept as normal. The only thing that separates the society depicted in Elysium from our own is time. And the only thing that can save us from that reality is us. It’s easy to look at the world around us and think that we’re doing just fine. We’re more advanced than ever, more connected, more aware. But the truth is we’re living in a world that is slowly but surely heading towards the same fate as the one depicted in Elysium.
Superlaziness, in the film’s context, is not physical laziness, though that is true, but laziness of spirit. In the opening moments of the film, we see Max and Frey as kids at a dirty orphanage, looking up at the station. Later, Max goes to work on the assembly line at Armadyne, where workers are monitored by armed security droids. They’re even told they may not visit the restroom more than once per shift. Max eventually takes a risk that no one else would. His boss threatens to fire him unless he climbs into a jammed chamber to fix the problem, and he walks out with a lethal dose of radiation. This is what it looks like to live a life without the luxury of superlaziness. You work, you live, you struggle, and you don’t get to escape into a world of perfect efficiency. Elysium is about escaping the dirty work of being human.
We are being sold a dream of a future where humans no longer need to exist. We are being told that we can achieve immortality, that we can become gods, that we can escape the limitations of our own flesh and blood. If only we dull the part of all process and numb all effort. But the truth is, we’re not being invited to join the ranks of the gods. We’re being invited to become their slaves. We’re being invited to live in a world where we’re no longer needed, where we’re no longer wanted, where we’re apathetic and lazy. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t explore the possibilities of AI and technology. I’m not saying that we should abandon science and progress in favour of some romanticized notion of the past. But I do think we need to wake up and start questioning the direction we’re heading in. Against superintelligence and in favour of superwillingness. Against Elysium and in favour of Mars.
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One last thing:
And these numbers have gone massively up since time of writing.
I have never used AI, recently shut down all socials besides Substack, even getting rid of my streaming services to get back to real life arthouse cinema, in person. Trying my damndest to stay present, uncomfortable, and ok with not knowing it all. I remember being young and sitting around just pondering things with others, nobody knew the right thing to say...we were spitballing and imaging and if we were really hard pressed we might open an encyclopedia at some juncture.
I know folks like to equate the future with tech, but all of the things it purports to fix were never downfalls in the first place. It invented loneliness then tries to sell you a synthetic friend. It created the need for 24/7 productivity then sells you an assistant that doesn't need a liter of caffeine to get the job(s) done. I loved this piece, and I really resonate with your sentiments. I speak to my dad all the time, I'm also told I shouldn't care as much, it's not a big deal. But, it honestly feels like a trap door's been pulled out underneath me and I've been hurriedly swept under a riptide. I'm not ok. And I think it's normal to be trepidatious about the hasty implementation of such a culture shifting advancement.
😭 Not me crying into my laptop on multiple levels upon reading this. So beautifully written, but more than that, the topic and themes so skillfully approached with nuance and composure.