I'm sure we have all met a person like this:
People who have an AI habit use it by default. I have watched someone ask ChatGPT the weather for tomorrow rather than simply open the weather app. Another time, they asked AI the question even after I had shown them the website with the same information. It's a crutch.
— Ibster ( @ibster.bsky.social) 9 March 2026 at 09:46
At a recent tech event, I bumped into an old friend and invited him out for dinner the next evening. He proudly showed my the AI bot he'd built which responded to WhatsApp messages. "Remind me at 7pm tomorrow to go to Chalmun's Cantina for dinner with Terry."
"OK boss! That's locked in! I'll remind you tomorrow. Enjoy your dinner!" the digital sycophant replied.
I was flabbergasted. There was a perfectly good calendar app on his phone. It has an easy to use interface. There are clearly demarcated boxen to fill in. A swish time-picker, calendar scroller, and notification reminder all built-in.
Our conversation reached an ideological impasse. I couldn't understand why he was burning tokens and wasting time with a chatbot. He didn't understand why I wasn't embracing the future.
I've noticed this with a lot of technology and I think I've come up with a three-part hypothesis.
First, some people don't care for structure. Whereas some of us carefully shelve our books in Dewey Decimal order, some people just chuck a book on any shelf it'll fit. You craft a detailed personal knowledge graph in Obsidian, I have a series of increasingly erratic text documents. My blog is fully semantic, yours is just div-soup.
We all have different things we care about. You'd be aghast that I don't track my calories and I can't stand the way you store all your files on the desktop. Yes, some systems are obviously superior to chaos, but for lots of people the tedium of organisation isn't worth the effort.
Secondly, talking isn't as hard work as writing. Speaking is faster than writing - hence the popularity of voice notes. Speaking requires less mental effort than writing - you don't have to worry about spelling or grammar. Similarly, forcing yourself to organise your thoughts in the structure demanded by a form can be tiring. My calendar has event title at the top, but I think in terms of time first. So voice-chatting with an AI requires substantially less effort on your part. Just lob some words at it and it'll do the structuring for you.
Which gets me to the third and, I think, most distasteful aspect. People want servants. The long standing joke about Silicon Valley products is they're all trying to recreate having a mum to look after you. Uber to drive you, Just-Eat to bring you cooked meals, Task Rabbit to wash your pants, Tinder to be a matchmaker.
Being raised on a diet of Downton Abbey, Bridgerton, and a hundred other lives-of-the-rich-and-famous shows does a number on you. Why don't I have a social secretary to arrange my day? Don't I deserve a tireless chambermaid? Where's the smart-arse butler who can cater to my every whim?
"Jeeves! Book me a taxi to the club. Usual time."
That's the dream, isn't it? Yes, you could mash some buttons in the taxi app or - heaven forfend! - call them yourself. But isn't it much more sophisticated to have a servant?
I'm guilty of this, of course. I yell at my Alexii to turn on the lights, pre-heat my bed, and remind me when dinner is ready. My doorbell alerts me when a visitor calls so I don't have to make the arduous trip to the front door. My kitchen robot washes my clothes - next year it'll be able to order more washing supplies when I run low. I can basically chuck stuff into the machine without thinking about it, and everything comes out perfectly clean.
Is it useful for me to know how to properly wash clothes? Probably not. Do I struggle when I visit a house which only has physical light switches? Not really. Are some people going to suffer if they outsource all their thinking to servant machines? I guess we'll see.
7 thoughts on “Unstructured Data and the Joy of having Something Else think for you”
@Edent My dad turns my lights off manually every time he visits and wants to turn one on, rather than simply saying "Alexa, turn the light on", because he's reached an age where new UI/UX usually don't get remembered.
It annoys me slightly, but whatever, he's my dad. It drives my flatmate crazy though. 😄
| Reply to original comment on boing.world
@Edent The weather app is also a digital representation and not the base reality.
There's nothing inherently superior in a GUI interface over a chat interface. The real question should be: is it faster? More functional? Fewer errors?
It's cool that people are taking control of their computing experience and making the software and interfaces that work for them. It's fun to build software and use what you've built.
Your friend changed their computing environment on their own. Good for them.
| Reply to original comment on cosocial.ca
Thank you - enjoyed this!
| Reply to original comment on bsky.app
I've using pre-LLM Siri to set reminders like that one for years, fiddling around in the Reminders app UI really does feel prehistoric to me at this point
| Reply to original comment on bsky.app
A better example might be "remind me to let the chickens out at 8am every morning" - being able to bypass any form of repeating events UI is a huge win
| Reply to original comment on bsky.app
I think this thinking from Daniel Thorson is good: https://substack.com/home/post/p-187915648
He suggests that there are four kinds of relationship with AI: trivial (like the reminder), extractive (basically slop, or more refined versions thereof), a third he declines to put a name to but I'd call something like "wise engagement", and refusenik.
I'm doing my best to live in box 3:
"To recognize that it profoundly matters how we wield what we've been given, and with humility to do everything we can to align our capacity with love. The technology becomes genuinely generative because what's being fed into it has already passed through the fire of self-examination. This is a small and early space. "
I find the religious language in that piece profoundly disturbing. It feels cult-like and predatory - or the ramblings of someone who is kneck-deep in delusion.
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