AI's Best Use Case – Systemic Laziness
The AI hardware category has been a right doozy so far, with product after product releasing to big hype, then offering little in the way of substance or function before dying as quickly as they arrived, typically setting fire to millions of dollars in the process.
Cluely — an "invisible AI to help you cheat on everything" — could be the best example of this yet.
Before we get into it, it's important to establish a few things.
The technology being advertised here doesn't exist, at least not in the way it's being depicted, and not to a level that's mass-market-ready at an affordable price. I won't go as far as to say it's lies… but it's certainly smoke and mirrors stuff.
The video proves this point? It offers him shitty advice that results in him fucking up his date. This is material that was best to promote this thing; incels failing to get laid?
As a direct result of the fact this is a whole load of make-believe, it's clear that this video is nothing more than a marketing ploy and that by getting angry about it, we're all taking the rage bait. We've been here before — think the Friends device — and all we're really doing is providing the buzz that will secure this grifter another few million in investment (that total is already over $5 million.)
On that point, I'm sorry I'm contributing to the discourse, and that's the last oxygen I'll waste on the concept. The tl;dr is that it doesn't work as sold, probably won't ever work as sold, and the founder will fatten his wallet by a few million dollars in the process. Rather than learn from this, or stop funding these ventures, we'll embolden countless others do the same, in some kind of infinite sludge loop.
But, what has irked me is the company's manifesto and the glimpse it offers of what our AI future could really be like.
And that is one of systemic laziness. A world where AI does everything for us, slowly rendering us more and more incapable as a species, basically a device that promotes taking the easy option, foregoing any form of effort, thought, work or learning in favor of winning in the easiest and quickest way.
There are some lines in the manifesto that affirm my growing fears of where AI, and especially hardware devices, are pushing us toward. For example:
Every time technology makes us smarter, the world panics.
Then it adapts. Then it forgets.
And suddenly, it's normal.
AI, as a technology, could make us smarter. It's a nice way to think about it because the reality is a lot darker — it's actually making us dumber. If you come to depend on an AI-powered assistant to answer questions for you make up literal lies to get through meetings or dates, or dictate most of the interactions in your life, in what way are you getting smarter? Being unable to think or speak for yourself is hardly a sign of being intellectual.
Why memorize facts, write code, research anything —
when a model can do it in seconds
Come off it now. This technology is going to make you smarter by having you stop using your brain to remember anything, learn anything, or be able to break down and understand complex topics? Again, this is the opposite of smart; this is becoming brain-dead, living a life of mental paralysis where you can only function when you're spoon-fed the next bit of information you need directly into your eyeballs.
The best communicator, the best analyst, the best problem-solver —
is now the one who knows how to ask the right question.
In a way, this is a fair statement, but I've spotted an obvious error here. Now that you've turned off your brain, aside from enough neural function to wipe the drool from your chin, you are reliant on the AI being able to ask useful or interesting questions and provide answers and information that is not a hallucination or a straight-up lie. In other words, you're in trouble.
So, start cheating.
Because when everyone does, no one is.
The most depressing mantra I've read in a long while. "If everyone lies, then lying is normal" is such a defeatist, cowardly mindset that perfectly encapsulates the AI grifters who dominate the technology right now. I recently asked why AI pushers seem to hate creative pursuits and rejoice at the thought of the technology wiping them out as jobs. One of the common threads was that these people don't want to learn or graft for a result — they just want the result.
A device like Cluely glamorizes laziness. It fetishizes the misguided belief that we should take whatever shortcut we can to achieve success. It diminishes the joy, pride, and personal growth that comes with learning new skills, solving problems, working on connecting with humans and taking up creative endeavors, favoring the Silicon Valley "growth at all costs" mindset.
If the future of AI is just a game of who can cheat better, we'll slowly kill the value of learning, trust, and mastery, replacing it with systemic laziness and AI dependency.
Hey, at least we'll be able to cheat at everything.
What I find most confusing about the AI boosters is why they think they're on the "right side" of all this?
Antagonizing artists and writers for being upset that their work is being stolen is bizarre. AI doesn't put us on equal footing as much as it just suppresses us all. There will be less than a handful of winners and the rest of us will be stuck with the ruins of what AI leaves behind.
And that's only if it's as good as they promise it will be. More likely is everything continues to degrade as we're sold overhyped models.
I've never heard anyone who has opted to talk to a chatbot or voice assistant over a human being.
We're now doing that to everything - and some are cheering it on.
I agree nearly all of the arguments you make here but I don't think the tragedy here is the glorification of laziness. It's something else. I cannot articulate it right now but to me solving for laziness has been the entire arc of human civilization. But the idea that a technology by introducing a bad game forces everyone to play the same bad game (cheat or whatever) is the ultimate tragedy.