Why would I automate away my one wild and precious life?

“today is the start of a world where you never have to think again”.

That was the start of a tweet by the founder of Cluely, an AI App that promises to let you “cheat on everything”.

The tweet was meant to be a sales pitch. To me, it seemed more like the premise of a dystopian work of science fiction. A sign that something was on the verge of going irreparably wrong with the way we invest in new technologies, how we use them, and why.

My question is simple – if I could offload every mental task to allow AI to complete them autonomously (which I cannot and probably will never be able to do, but that’s beside the point…) why would I want to? What would the time I saved allow me to do instead?

I am yet to meet a single person obsessed with efficiency who was living a life I truly envied. If the people at the top of the tech field are anything to go by, it seems that once your life has been made ‘efficient’ the obsessive focus switches to immortality, without ever stopping to think about what you are hoping to experience with all of that extra time.

As someone that would self-classify as tech-obsessive adjacent since Bitcoin was the cause du jour (the first time), the current AI efficiency obsession strikes me as the intellectual version of the F.I.R.E movement. The Financial Independence Retire Early movement promises that if you live obscenely frugally while working incredibly hard you can retire as young as possible and ‘live free’. However, the reality of ‘freedom’ rarely seems to meet the expectations of the few people that manage to achieve it. Once they are ‘free’ to choose their own adventure, they are confronted by loneliness and boredom caused by their years’ long abstinence from interpersonal relationships and the fact most other people are still beholden to 9-5 lifestyles.