Should we delegate living?
09/03/26Recently, as a lot of people, I heard about OpenClaw. For those who have not heard about it yet, it is an Open Source software that allows a, usually remote, LLM to take action on the computer on which it is installed, usually a self-hosted server. Using the computer, and with a bot more setup, you can allow him to connect to your account on multiple services and let him run pretty much anything you want. The task I have heard OpenClaw being good at were things like:
- Managing your calendar
- Planning your day
- Answering emails
- Manage your journal for you
- Develop and deploy websites
- Run basic scams or things quite close to it (like sending low ball offers to seniors on second hand websites)
- Find content that could interest you and produce a TLDR
- Read books for you ????
Of course, an OpenClaw advocate would add “The wonderful thing with it is that it has no set limits!”.
Now, why am I talking about this? Well, to be honest, I found it quite appealing. I am usual on the careful side with LLM, chatbot, coding AI, etc. but for some reason this was something I could want.
I felt weird for a few days (and I am still feeling unsure) but I think I was able to find what bothered me.
[!WARNING] The rest of this post is about my opinion and ideas , I am not a psychologist and the fact that I do not cite any work should make it clear that these are just thoughts.
Let’s clear the easy part first, why we find it appealing. I think I am not the only person that thought about Jarvis (IronMan AI assistant) when seeing this. This is clearly what made it cool for me. Who wouldn’t want to feel like an insanely smart and powerful superhero ?
This thing can remove all friction in your life. It’s like having a personal assistant, but you pay it with Anthropic credits. Who never felt overwhelm about planning events ? Who haven’t felt bad when faced with the productivity narrative, making us believe that we should do more with the time we have ?
Yes, maybe if we have an AI taking care of all the mundane tasks, then we can use our time to be productive !
But why though ? What is there to produce really ? Are these things truly frictions to be removed ?
I feel like this boils down to a will to delegate living. You do not decide how you organise your time, you do not reply to the messages yourself, you do not write a journal or read a book. You just become the robot living the life an AI is deciding for you, ingesting the content that it somehow decided was of importance (Let’s keep in mind that these systems are not reliable)
This is very scary to me. Are we to lose our capability to place ourselves in time the same way GPS destroyed our capacity to place ourselves in space ? Or maybe it’s the capacity to talk to other human being that will go first, or the capacity to understand a text that has not been preprocessed by an AI to make it simpler (while removing some important parts).
Maybe I am just very pessimistic, but I can help to see this as an insanely slippery slope. Our brains haven’t evolved yet to live in our modern world, it has already been high jacked by ultra processed food. High sugar and fat content is rare in the wild, our brain still believes that we should eat a lot of it while it is accessible. In the very same way, if something can make us spend less energy by removing basic cognitive tasks, it is hard to imagine that we will resist it.
Of course, it can be tedious to write boilerplate code, but it also makes you plan the architecture of the software you write, and gives you potentially new idea in the process. Reading a book is not natural for our brain, it is long and can be painful, and it’s even worse when the content ended up being useless for us. The thing is that I am not sure that there is such a thing. Maybe this very blog article will give you an incredible idea or will start a thought process that will not resolve before many weeks.
I just hope we do not trade our freewill, our autonomy and the very things that constitute our lives, just for some convenience and shareholder value. I can read my emails, plan my life, write my websites and read my books.