Believe or not people pay for others to do this for themselves.

> ordering food delivery,

Before Grubhub, did you feel that way about pizza delivery?

> are in fact damaged by people buying everything online

You enjoyed ordering from mail order catalogs?

Reality check: Before online shopping became a thing, the vast majority of towns in the US did not have a store that had everything you wanted to buy. You had to find a potential dealer in town, get them to order it for you, and pay a premium for that service.

I lived for a number of years in a town that had no FedEx or UPS office. So if you missed a delivery that required a signature, you'd have to drive to the town that did - a 45 minute drive (and in winter, a risky drive if there was snow).

I didn't have a car, so I had to make sure I'm there for 3-4 hours or longer awaiting delivery. If I missed it (I never did), it simply meant the product would get returned, and I'd pay the vendor some kind of fee (restocking, shipping, whatever). It's only the convenience of the Internet that solved some of these problems.

Are there downsides to everything you mentioned? Sure. There are upsides to all of them as well. You're taking a multifaceted concept and reducing it down, not even to a continuum, but to a binary.

That's a nice thought terminating cliché.

We get to choose what we want to spend time on and what we would prefer to offload. I'm sure you don't grow your own potatoes.

Humans are quite bad at doing what brings them (durable) happiness

You are reacting to the author reacting to Zuck reacting to Zuck's daughter mentioning she uses AI to help plan recipes. It's a one-sentence, third-hand anecdote in a large article that folks in here are fixating on because of bike shedding.

Maybe Zuck's daughter appreciates cooking differently than you do. If AI helps her enjoy the part she likes about cooking by getting her past whatever friction would make her less likely to cook otherwise, then good for her.

Isn't it a bit of a spectrum of ways to tackle this depending on tons of other factors?

For example, baking cookies with my 3 year old means having them help with a couple steps of mixing before interest is lost until the cookies are done. The whole act of planning, shopping, and prepping the kitchen is mostly entirely left out. Now with my 8 year old, the entire "workflow" of "lets bake cookies" to cookies complete is easily done end to end with the child.

My point is the level of "automation" desired for various repetitive tasks in life ebbs and flows on a multitude of external factors. This week I might have a lot going on and don't want to deal with grocery shopping and next week I might be free to go take care of that myself, and find joy in browsing the produce section.

Provided "agents" like these can have interactions where the principle still has agency over which tasks they will or will not do, I don't really see the issues.

Now the whole idea of negotiating this on a day by day basis with the agent and managing said agent sounds like a chore in and of itself and so I'm not sure if it's worth it or not.

Your comment reminds me of a (single) friend who talked about how he doesn't use dishwashers because he finds the motions of washing them by hand therapeutic.

That's because he rarely cooked, and ate out often. When you get married, cook almost every day, and have kids, washing dishes by hand becomes anything but therapeutic.

Do you have a kid? How often are you cooking for the kid? Doing it multiple times a week for 15+ years becomes a chore. Most of the meals you cook aren't well thought out - they're "Family needs to be fed - what's the quickest thing I can make?" Then, once in a while, you want to put in the effort and cook something nice, and it becomes meaningful. Those have always been the exceptions when both parents have full time jobs.

Getting an algorithm to plan the recipe and order ingredients is for all the other times you cook. Not for the meaningful ones.

It's also not an either/or. You have the freedom to do it as often or as little as you want.

Now here's my question: Say only 10% of the meals you cook are carefully thought out. 90% are done with your brain on autopilot. Are you going to criticize someone for now doing a 10-30-60 split, where the 30% is using some algorithm to actually make something nice for the kid? You're not losing any of the meaningful time you had before.

Another way to frame this: Overworked parents decide to take the family out for junk food once in a while. It's a treat for the kids, and it's a way for the parents to get relief. It's simply another way of outsourcing the labor, just as the AI example is. Do you criticize such parents saying that instead of meaningfully trying to make a nice dinner, they're offloading it to a 3rd party?

The trick is to convince young people that it is a good idea before they get a chance to learn that they are literally trading off parts of their life away...

Next you can ask the AI how to teach the kid how to get recipes from AI. A real time saver for both of you.

After that, ask the AI what kind of life lessons are good to impart on your kid.

Pretty sure the cooking and spending time with their daughter is the meaningful bit for them. Why would they automate the setup steps otherwise?

Some benefit accrues to the user too.

For example if a car rental company has my ID on file, dozens of my selfies from every time I rented, audio and video data from my trips, on one hand they are spying on me, not letting me delete the data, so it benefits them because they have all this intelligence on their customer.

On the other hand because they have that intelligence, I can be more easily approved and get into a car faster than the average person. They already know what kind of driver I am, that I’m clean, I fill up the tank, bring it back on time. I don’t have to do any work to provide that proof, and don’t have to go through delays, hit my credit report, or pay security deposits since they can just look at what kind of driver I am.

There are some cases the user shouldn’t be entitled to delete data about them - or at least it should be lawful to enter into such agreements.

The only time I think it’s unfair and should be regulated is advertising and dynamic pricing. All things related to targeted ads feels like a misuse of technology - and yet I don’t mind it if two people mutually enter into an agreement where both parties benefit, or at the very least the user is compensated.

When you convert from an ad to buy something, a rebate of some small amount should credit to your account to compensate for being profiled/tracked and served the ad you converted on. Paid for by the profiling/tracking/ad serving company (out of the revenue from the advertiser).