As AI gets better, it reveals an empty promise

Key points

• 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.