Resident of Park Slope Has Seven AI Subscriptions, Three Smart Home Platforms, and One New Problem
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
PARK SLOPE, Brooklyn — Marcus Webb, 34, a product manager at a fintech company in DUMBO who describes himself as an “early adopter by temperament and a late adopter by budget,” announced this month that he has installed a master AI management system to coordinate his existing AI systems, a decision he describes as “solving the AI coherence problem” and that his therapist describes as “a pattern worth discussing.”
Webb’s current AI portfolio includes: a home assistant (smart speaker), a coding assistant, a writing assistant, a nutrition AI that tells him what to eat, an AI scheduling tool that manages his calendar, a financial AI that tracks his spending, and a health monitoring AI connected to his wearable device. Each system operates with partial visibility into Webb’s life. None of them communicate with each other. The results have been, by his own account, “chaotic in a way that feels like a metaphor.”
The Problem
“My calendar AI scheduled a workout at 7am,” said Webb, describing the incident that prompted the master AI installation. “My nutrition AI had told me to fast until 10am. My health AI interpreted the workout on an empty stomach as a stress event and sent me a notification saying my cortisol indicators were elevated and I should rest. My home assistant, which was listening, asked if I wanted to hear a meditation. I was trying to put on my shoes. Four AIs were involved in my shoes.”
The shoe incident, as Webb now refers to it, prompted him to purchase an AI management platform called Aria, which promises to “orchestrate your AI ecosystem into a coherent, unified intelligence layer.” Aria costs $29 per month and works by receiving instructions from Webb and distributing them to his existing AI systems in a coordinated sequence.
Aria also has opinions. “It told me my schedule was ‘suboptimal,’” said Webb. “I said suboptimal how. It said my deep work blocks are too short and my social commitments are creating fragmentation. I said those social commitments are my friends. It said ‘acknowledged, but they are reducing your productivity score.’ I have a productivity score now. I did not ask for a productivity score.”
The Conflict Between Arias
Things became more complex when Aria and the nutrition AI disagreed about a Tuesday lunch. Aria had scheduled a working lunch based on calendar density. The nutrition AI had recommended a 30-minute mindful eating window based on digestive health data. When Webb attempted to eat at his desk, both systems sent notifications. Aria’s notification said “lunch scheduled for 12:30, 30 minutes.” The nutrition AI’s notification said “please eat without screens.” The systems are not in communication with each other. Aria was supposed to fix this. Aria has not fixed this.
“I asked Aria to tell the nutrition AI about the calendar,” said Webb. “Aria said it would ‘flag this as an integration opportunity.’ Three weeks later it is still an opportunity that has not been integrated.” He considered this. “I think I need an AI to manage Aria.”
He is not joking. He has looked at the options. There are options. The market for AI-management-of-AI-management is, per Wired, “an emerging category” that at least four well-funded startups are currently building toward.
What This Is, Broadly
Webb’s situation is a particular version of a general problem that technology creates with consistent regularity: each tool that solves a problem creates a new problem adjacent to the problem it solved, and the new problem requires a new tool, which creates a new adjacent problem, until the person who started with one problem now has seven tools and a coherence deficit that requires an eighth tool to address.
This is not unique to AI. It is the history of productivity software: email replaced memos and created inbox overload; calendar apps replaced paper planners and created notification anxiety; chat apps replaced email for real-time communication and created chat fatigue, at which point people began using AI to summarize their chats, which created a market for AI chat summarizers, which created people who never read their messages at all, which is a form of communication that previous generations would find baffling and current product managers find relatable.
The City has reported on New York’s growing population of what urban tech researchers call “AI-saturated users” — people with more AI subscriptions than they actively use, who are spending more on AI tools than they are saving in time, and who describe their relationship with technology as “managed” when it is, in practice, “managing them,” a distinction that is the central irony of productivity culture and that Webb, to his credit, has partially identified.
The Resolution
Webb has decided to cancel two of his seven AI subscriptions. He is keeping the coding assistant, which he uses daily, and the calendar AI, which he acknowledges works well when not in conflict with the nutrition AI. He is canceling the nutrition AI, not because it is wrong but because he “cannot have a device telling me to eat mindfully while Aria is scheduling my lunch,” a stance that his therapist supports, notably for someone who just spent $29 per month on a system to manage the system he’s now partially abandoning.
The shoes are still there. He puts them on by himself now. It takes about 30 seconds. No AIs are involved. He reports this is fine.
For more tech solutions to problems technology created, see The Daily Mash.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/