As AI gets better, it reveals an empty promise

This week we’ve got tandem hands-ons with Google’s new Gemini AI agent — Spark — from my colleagues David Pierce and Jay Peters. Their takeaways are similar: It’s so effective that it’s scary. Spark knew that David’s dog is named Frida and knew the first name of Jay’s wife, even though neither of them explicitly provided this information to Google. But what’s scary to me is how all of this stuff seems geared toward a future of “productivity” that completely misses what needs to be fixed in our world.

“Productivity” is often pitched as a panacea for what befalls us in our personal lives, even going so far as to implicate our moral worthiness when we are less productive. Productivity lives somewhere in the space between hustle culture and proverb: After all, “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” I’m not suggesting we should all aspire to be bumps on...

Copyright of this story solely belongs to theverge.com. To see the full text click HERE