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I don’t think there’s a single serious critic who says AI’s not useful? The concerns I see are about content rights, worker impacts, environmental effects, epistemological threats, or media manipulation. But that’s all predicated on the idea that it *does* work, often too well for people to manage…

Kevin Roose@kevinroose.com

The NYT Magazine asked me and @caseynewton.bsky.social to open their AI issue by talking about how we use AI, why it's not going away, and how you can't be a serious critic if you're in denial about how useful it is. Bluesky's gonna love this one! www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/m...

I mean…or we could just pay people? I am hard line anti. I’ve never used Siri. I LOVE tech. I HATE automation. There doesn’t seem to be a place for people who (like Dr. Ian Malcom) take the time to ask “should we do this?” And after much study and rumination come up with: no. We should not.

Why wouldn’t you ask Siri to set a timer for when you are supposed to take the cookies out of the oven? What is served by not doing that?

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Why would you need to do that though? I have two timers built into my kitchen as well as a couple others close at hand. I can push a button on the oven I put the cookies into in one easy move. My phone (expensive and fragile) doesn’t need to be near food prep.

I should never have even engaged. Because now I’m distracted by the idea that your kitchen doesn’t have a microwave with a built in timer and losing sight of how shocked you were that someone wouldn’t use tech to do the simple tasks that they already have a routine for.

You… think I should incorporate using a microwave touchpad timer when I’m baking cookies? And this is the pure, simple way of using less tech?

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve been a tech enthusiast most of my life. And if tech can save me serious effort or money or time, I use it. But people aren’t foolish for not using it if they don’t find it useful. And your original argument wasn’t about something as benign as Siri setting a timer.

Your microwave has one timer. And you have to stop what you're doing, and press a bunch of buttons to set it. That is nowhere near as useful as just speaking to set infinite timers. I usually have 3-4 timers running on my Google Home at once, with the name of the things they're timing.