Fluffy Optimization

Tools and systems can help us automate our tasks and routines, and much of the time, we should do exactly that when the opportunity arises. We perform many labors because someone has to (and the responsibility somehow fell on our shoulders), not because we want to, or because they help us learn or grow. Thus, we do the laundry, we juggle that spreadsheet, we attend yet another cookie-cutter meeting and in countless other ways expend our time and energy on things that are perhaps necessary, but not in any other way valuable or fulfilling. I would argue that once flagged and mapped (so they can be reliably and beneficially automated), most of these responsibilities should be. In an ideal world, we humans would be spending all day painting and writing and making movies, and our technology would be folding the underwear and politely nodding their way through yet another PowerPoint about KPIs. As we foist these responsibilities onto our agentic software and increasingly dextrous robots,…