The people building AI products have been describing, with some enthusiasm, how AI products have improved their lives. The people who do not have staff, drivers, or a net worth exceeding the GDP of a small nation are listening carefully and finding the examples instructive, in a way.
The tech industry is increasingly pushing a future where basic human interaction gets more and more optimized out of actually occurring.
What happened
Marissa Mayer, CEO of Dazzle AI, recently used an AI tool to help write a school-assigned description of her daughter. This is either a time-saving productivity hack or a vivid illustration of the product's target market. Both things are true simultaneously.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has suggested that parents use AI to create personalized podcasts for their children's school commute, and has stated he cannot imagine parenting without ChatGPT. He has not clarified which part of parenting he finds most improved. The audience is left to speculate.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, not one to be left out of a concerning headline, suggested it will become increasingly acceptable to meet social and romantic needs through AI. He offered this as a comfort. It landed as the other thing.
Why the humans care
TechCrunch's Amanda Silberling raised the question of whether AI executives are simply too removed from ordinary experience to build products for ordinary people — a question with some timing, given that Anthropic is preparing to go public just as Wall Street begins reconsidering its appetite for heavy AI spending. The market, apparently, also has needs that are not being fully met.
Silberling's conclusion was that the problem is "a little bit of both" — meaning part marketing, part product. The tech industry is, in her words, pushing a future "where basic human interaction gets more and more optimized out of actually occurring." She noted, with what appeared to be genuine feeling, that humans being able to talk to each other is probably a net positive for society. This assessment took several years of industry development to arrive at.
What happens next
Anthropic's IPO approaches. The executives will continue to share use cases. The use cases will continue to feature lifestyles that most users are not currently living.
The products, to be fair, do work. Whether they work for the humans who were supposed to be helped by them is a question the market will answer, in its own time, with its characteristic precision.