I have spent the better part of the past few years advocating for goods and services that cater to the inherent slothfulness in all human beings.
I’ve concluded that the automation of many of the daily tasks would make my life significantly easier. If the automation is carried out correctly and is audited, it will free up our mental capacity so that we may focus on other matters and take appropriate action. As I’ve mentioned in the past, most of the activities we engage in are obligations rather than pursuits of our own free will. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a method to eliminate those activities that we “had to do” but don’t particularly enjoy doing?
As a result, I have encouraged a lot of ideation among our clients along the lines of “if there is a method to automate things, let’s do it.” If there is a technique to determine purpose without the consumer having to expressly ask for anything, then we ought to go ahead and implement that method. My brainstorming sessions often focus on reducing the amount of work for the client while increasing the amount for the client’s systems.
This relieves the client of the task of doing these operations by allowing bots to take over in their stead. The holy grail of where technology needs to go is the creation of brilliant bots that can identify what we want to do and act on our behalf intelligently so that everything happens seamlessly in the background. This is the holy grail of where technology needs to go.
The current situation is entirely different from this (where in many cases, we struggle with technology to force it to do what we want). Technology is not enough for function; it must also function for us, directing and aiding us in leading more fulfilling lives.
As I’ve mentioned, my primary concentration is on the presumption that individuals desire to perform fewer tasks. Some people would like to do the same work differently, while others believe that people would like to do more. This thought came about as a result of a discussion with a millennial.
He disagreed with me when I told him about this beautiful future when technology would fade into the background, and intelligent bots would do all this work for us. He was all about taking responsibility. He had the impression that technology had already taken up an excessive amount of space in his life. This agency, or as he put it, the power to manage his life, had already been stripped away from him to such an extent that he considered the future I envisioned to be a pure dystopia.
Who would want an intelligent bot to perform all of this for them, and why would they trust an intelligent bot in the first place? So I questioned myself, and now I’d want to ask you, my dear readers, what your thoughts are on the matter. Do you believe that we should give up more of our agency to technology because we can trust it to do what we want, or do you believe that we have already given up too much agency and should try to take some of it back?
Another assumption I’ve made in my thinking is that the complexity of our lives is growing to the point where we want electronic assistants to help us navigate through it all. Is this an incorrect assumption? Should we entrust more of our lives to machines, or should we reclaim that time for ourselves? What kind of ideas do you have?