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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?

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 don’t have any of those, and I can do this when my hands are full or dirty.

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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?

Man you are way too hung up on this example. People usually adopt a new tech into their daily routine when it changes their life enough to bother. If you find a phone useful in the kitchen that’s great but you maybe need to think that for other people it’s simply not needed.

Also your op was about AI not timers. Why would I use the plagiarism pollution machine to help me? What can it do for my life that is worth the cost of communities not having enough water or poor Black folks not having decent air to breathe? Lots of stuff is useful, but there are costs with AI.

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.