The journey and the destination
If you’re a painter, do you just enjoy having the painting finished, or do you also get joy from the process of creating it? If you’re a collector, do you just like having things on your shelf or in a binder, or do you also enjoy tracking down rare items? When you’re eating out in a new town, do you just like sitting down somewhere and eating, or do you enjoy exploring and trying to find a good place? And when someone gives you a gift, say your significant other, do you care only about the quality of the thing they got you, or also about the thought and time that went into choosing it?
I ask because I’ve been using Claude Duet, which has been in a semi-closed beta for a few weeks, and I’ve been trying to understand the excitement other people seem to have for these products. The equivalents from other AI companies would be Meta Muse, chat GPT Dots, and Grock Bot. All of the things I’ve described are things these bots can theoretically do for you. And while they do them with varying levels of success, a lot of the use cases people are finding seem to be ones where they care about the end result, not the process of getting there.
I want to say up front that I don’t think that’s fundamentally wrong. This is literally what computers do for a lot of things. Hell, even a calculator means I don’t have to go through the process of doing long division. I can enter a couple of numbers and get the result easily. That’s fine, because doing long division doesn’t make the result better for me in my day-to-day life, and I don’t derive any particular joy from it. The same goes for effectively everything else computers do.
But there are things where I think the act of doing them is valuable, and adds to the experience and value of what’s being done.
It was my wife’s birthday earlier this week. Because I’ve heard so many people say they do this, I asked Duet to help me brainstorm gift ideas and recommend restaurants in our area based on some criteria I gave it. As the responses came back, a distinct hollowness fell over me. The suggestions were fine and reasonable based on the information I gave. On a purely technical level, the computer was doing what it’s supposed to do. This isn’t a huge surprise: I’m not an AI denier, or someone who thinks these systems still hallucinate 90% of the time.
But that hollow feeling mattered. By asking these questions and getting responses, I felt like I was taking away the important part of my wife’s birthday. Where should we go to dinner? What should I get her as a couple of gifts? The process is the important thing. In neither situation are we looking for the algorithmically perfect solution. These are fundamentally human things, where I’m trying to show how much I care and how well I know her by making the decisions myself.
I partly tried this because I knew I’d feel this way, but it really hit me how strongly I did. I used none of the suggestions the AI gave me. We had a really great birthday, she enjoyed her gifts, and it was great. In that moment, I appreciated that this is something I don’t want to offload to AI. I don’t want to offload it to a computer.
I’ve heard from people who collect things like cards and trinkets, and I do a little of this myself. Part of the fun is the hunt. A big part of the hobby isn’t just having the thing and looking at it, but the process of getting it. For some collectors, setting up a robot to scour the web, find things, buy them, and do everything else would suck the human element out of collecting. It would suggest that collecting isn’t actually a hobby for you, but some sort of status thing: you want the thing on your shelf, and the hunt isn’t important. Maybe that’s fine. I don’t know. That’s not how I feel about collecting.
It’s not exactly the same, but I also like waking up at weird hours and preordering things I’m really excited about, whether they’re iPhones, game consoles, or whatever. Yes, it’s a little inconvenient, but I kind of like the ceremony of trying to get it to work. Sometimes it goes great, sometimes it doesn’t, and I think that’s fine. That’s part of the game, part of the fun. When it goes well, it’s exciting and rewarding.
Even now, after doing this for 20 years, when the iPhone 18 Pro came out a couple months ago, a bunch of my online friends and I were online together, counting down to when preorders started. We posted when our orders went through. And even for the iPhone Duo preorder, which did not go well for me, and which still says it will arrive a month from now, that’s part of it. It’s slightly annoying, but it’s part of the game. That’s why it’s exciting and rewarding when it goes well.
Computers abstract away a lot of stuff. That’s fundamentally what they do, and AI can do more of that than a lot of other new technologies we’ve seen in our lifetimes. But it’s still doing the same thing: letting you offload the process to the computer.
I think there are certain types of people who are drawn to cutting the process out of everything. They don’t actually enjoy doing it. They enjoy the end result, the destination, not the journey. For some things, especially the important things I do, the journey is a core part of what I enjoy about using computers and using them to make my physical life better. I can’t get on board with a lot of these use cases for agents because I feel like they suck all of that away in a way I’m just not comfortable with.
I’ll have more to say about Claude Duet in a later post. I do think it’s useful for some things, and I am using it. It’s actually in my dock right now on my iPhone. But I absolutely don’t see myself using it for nearly as many things as I’m seeing some other folks use it for.
