As A.I. gets better, it reveals an empty promise.

This week, we have seen from my colleagues David Pierce and Jay Peters Tandem-Hands-Ons with Google's new Gemini-KI agents – Spark. Their findings are similar: It is so effective that it is scary. Spark knew that David's dog was called Frida and knew the first name of Jay's wife, although none of them explicitly passed this information to Google. But what scares me is how all these things seem to be aligned with a future of “productivity” that goes completely past what needs to be repaired in our world. The better the AI becomes, the more it reveals an empty promise

Your new assistant can arrange a meeting, but he can't fix our broken world. Your new assistant can arrange a meeting, but he can't fix our broken world. “productivity” is often called an all-healing remedy for what is happening to us in our private life, and even goes so far as to undermine our moral dignity if we are less productive. Productivity is somewhere between the hectic culture and the saying: “Mid hands are the devil’s workshop.” I do not suggest that we should all strive to be unevenness on a tree trunk, but we should see what is sold to us for what it really is. Contemporary tasks on the computer tend to feel constantly important and urgent, even if this is not the case. We live in the unholy alliance between the “occupied” trap and the “software brain”. And that makes AI support seem extremely valuable! But this is because the companies responsible for all these things are now trying to solve many of the problems they cause. Google Microsoft, Apple and others have spent decades blurring the border between office life and private life. This slow march towards ubiquitous productivity once led the French government to declare a “right to separation” from work when leaving the office. (Just that my American sensitivity still convinces me that this is a bridge too far.)

When I read that Gemini Spark makes it easy for my colleagues to identify calendars in color and execute other nice tricks on command, I couldn't stop remembering how my mother as a child had to spend all the hours cutting out carefully vouchers so that we could afford food. Sometimes it came so far that our living room looked like a huge collage experiment. All the time, her and our family were stolen for what? Perhaps an AI assistant could have helped to find and organize the best offers in the 1990s, but he could never have repaired an economic system that they needed at all. Where does the productivity march end? People who currently earn more money than God have announced the vision of a post-work future in which robots do everything for us so that we can enjoy life without having to build in the mines. (Now, to the content mines.) When you have seen the failure bot of Elon Musk, you know that it is less Battlestar Galactica than John Adams in his letter to Abigail: “I need to study politics and war so that my sons have the freedom to study mathematics and philosophy,” and so on and so on until the grandchildren enjoy painting and poetry. Ideally, the AI makes us all to theatre children after we have been through the pre-transcendence. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg is launching his 387-foot long yacht in a city where he has just released a significant part of his workforce to compensate for his investments in AI. At least, did AI release the time of these dismissed workers? I would wish them good luck in Hollywood, especially because they are trying to replace freshly baked theatre children with AI-generated actors. Behind some of these productivity progresses, a gloomy sound is lurking, because productivity growth was one of the biggest frauds in the past century. Long before consumer AI stepped on the plan, productivity exploded, while wages could not keep up. No one works less, he deserves less. And as more and more AI-related companies are pushing trillions into values, the current U.S. regime is plundering the social security network – the network that must exist if we all want to become unemployed theatre children. You can't look at these things individually. If the final result of private companies that optimize the workforce leads to no one having to work, then we must live in a society where people can still have a roof over their heads and a meal. Is anyone confident that this will happen, while the Heads of State and Government are shortening the SNAP performances and building ballrooms financed by the taxpayer at the same time? What does an AI assistant do to help you plan a fun day if you can't afford a free time in your life? There was always resistance to new advances – so much so that the term “Luddite” still has a strong significance for 200 years after the uprising of English textile workers against automation in their industry. The AI reaction is genuine, well informed and well founded. Nevertheless, some of these new nice tricks are fun and may even be quite useful in our private life. But I can't imagine that the payment of $99 per month for sending emails, the appointment agreement in the calendar, and the creation of spreadsheets is a promising vision of the future or even a good return on capital. Especially when the greater costs lead to the waste of the splendour of our country and at the same time to the omniscience of the corporations.