What is AI's Status in the Family?
The rise of AI Agents raises questions about tech's impact at home
Here’s the secret to stalking England’s most elusive coarse fish. Pre-feed your peg with an assortment of goodies at night. Luncheon meat, sweetcorn and maggots usually do the trick.
Next, return in the morning, use a light line, a small hook and a strong yet agile rod, and you just might be able to get into a barbel. If your hook does sink, good luck – you’re in for one hell of a fight.
These are the tactics my uncle taught me on the Avon when I was in my early teens. He wasn’t a massive fan of carp fishing, that was for the lazy anglers, the ones who fished with artificial bait and sat for weeks to catch bulbous bottom-feeders that looked remarkably like themselves or their dogs.
Nowadays, I imagine your average 11 or 12-year-old just looks this all up on YouTube, gets the cheat codes and heads out to their nearest lake or river, so long as they’re not engrossed by Fortnite or Call of Duty.
In many ways this is a good development. If my uncle wasn’t around, I had to find-out second-hand Bob Nudd fishing manuals and try to navigate their 2D diagrams. Let me tell you, it’s a lot easier to be shown how to do a knotless knot via a video, rather than a crusty old book.
Equally, there are some fantastic anglers online and they are expanding the sport to a whole new audience.
On the flip side, however, this is just another example of technology replacing at least two core benefits of the family system: education and recreation. What’s the point in a family member taking you out and showing you the ropes of any past-time, if you’ve already got the answers in your pocket?
Likewise, media phenomena like solo-viewership (link) make it harder for households to have shared interests and views. The algorithms of the social media platforms – programmed to push more and more of the same content to consumers – have also helped Balkanise the living room.
And even when the family does get together, there’s likely to be a form of multi-screening at play. Attention is subsequently divided between chat messages, games and alerts.
Sure, technology has allowed for more flexible work-patterns, but the barrier dissolving between home and office hasn’t been all good, contrary to what futurists like Alvin Toffler once predicted (link).
The electric cottage can limit personal interactions, further cement individualistic behaviours and create new tensions in families that didn’t exist before. Try being on work calls at the same time as a loved one in the same room.
And remember when people even started ‘fake commuting’ during the pandemic to get much-needed exercise in? This really showed that the suburban techno dream had physical pitfalls too.
Now there’s increasing talk of AI agents which could be deployed to run your life (link). Want to book a holiday? Ask your AI agent. Planning to make an exotic meal? Ask your AI agent. Want to learn French in just a month? Ask your AI agent.
If you think about it, such powerful technology could replace all of the major functions of the family system: education, communication, recreation and home management. And it could even help you make some of life’s big decisions: who to partner with, when to buy or rent a property and how to retire.
Here’s an important point to consider. The AI agent wouldn’t be carrying out these tasks and providing advice in a vacuum. No, they would be interacting with other frontier technologies, including IoT, XR and 5G/6G, and operating in an environment with a set of socio-economic norms.
Look at where the West is now at, for example. The start of adulthood has been pushed back to the mid-20s, people are now buying their first home in their late 30s and retirement is in your late 60s (link), if you’re lucky.
More and more adults are living at home with their parents (link), while facing high student debts and an increasing tax burden as nation states try to deal with very high debt to GDP levels (link).
Could AI help families navigate these issues or merely catalyse the status quo? And, in doing so, would the AI actually become the head of the family unit? More omniscient host, rather than subservient butler. Well, if they’re waterproof, maybe.
JD’s Algo
“Have you ever been to Ukraine? You say what problems we have.” That was President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s rebuttal to JD Vance in the Oval Office two weeks ago.
The VP’s reply: “I have been to…I have actually watched and seen the stories [of Ukrainian troops forcing conscripts to the frontlines] and I know what happens – you bring people on a propaganda tour, Mr President.”
There was a lot to takeaway from the wider exchange in the White House, as I’ve written about here (link), but this part of the encounter got me thinking: what does the social media algo look like in the US government, and how much social media content is the VP and other high-up players in the new Trump administration consuming?
Here’s the point. After writing Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard later claimed that the Gulf War, played out in front of 24-hour news channels, was not real. To be clear, Baudrillard didn’t deny that there were acts of violence and war which did take place in the Middle East, but the media created its own synthetic version of the conflict.
This simulation of sorts was presented to and digested by consumers. It may have been inspired by the Gulf War, but it wasn’t the real deal. So when someone spoke about the Gulf War, or even created policy in reaction to the event, they were basing their actions on a warped perception.
Today, with the information overload of the social media feed, the algo both creating and benefiting from echo chambers and the popularisation of short-form video, the Russo-Ukrainian war has its own hyperreality, one which JD Vance isn’t immune to.
UX and 2FA
An old workmate of mine, Orlando Crowcroft, got me thinking about this issue and now I’m noticing it everywhere online. Two-factor authentication (2FA) is crippling the user experience of the web. Sure, it may be safer, but it’s definitely more frustrating. I looked up some of the academic research into the issue – the studies are limited.
However, some researchers (link) showed that 2FA standards were mixed across some of the web’s most popular platforms. At least going through the same journey every time might prepare you for the double-device click-fest. The $1 billion question: can you make Web 2.0 safer without introducing more friction?
Tech and Political Legitimacy
The interview of Professor David Betz by
(link) is worrying, frustrating and a must-listen. Betz talks about political legitimacy — a subject I’ve written about in relation to what I’ve dubbed the ‘lazy surveillance state’ (link).His intervention also comes after the rise of the anti-ULEZ ‘Blade Runners’, an activist group which took off after Sadiq Khan expanded his car/van tax into self-employed/suburban areas of London, and follows the UK government’s attempts to ban end-to-end encryption.
You could put more police on the streets in a bid to counter the predation of children and its causes, but apparently Apple should be blamed and the Home Office’s budget should be shrunk (this is happening under Starmer/Reeves). Did anyone vote for any of this by the way? No.
The TikTok Bid
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian has joined Project Liberty (link), the group hoping to buy TikTok US from Chinese parent company ByteDance. Ohanian, who is married to Serena Williams, adds some further tech credibility to the bid being led by billionaire Frank McCourt.
The team wants to rebuild the platform “in a way that prioritizes the privacy of 170 million Americans while directly addressing the national security concerns at the center of the proposed ban”.
WaPo and NYT Changes
Jeff Bezos’ paper is reportedly (link) facing a big restructure. The Post will “divide its national desk into two sections that focus on national reporting, and politics and government coverage, respectively,” Axios said.
Beyond the politics and government desk and the national desk, business, technology, health, science and climate teams will be brought together to focus on “how businesses are transforming across the economy; how scientific and technological shifts are affecting daily life; and what it all means for people's health, security and the planet”.
The news follows the Post’s announcement that it would concentrate its opinion pages on two main subject areas: personal liberties and free markets. Some editors of its opinion pages quit in protest.
There are also changes afoot at The New York Times, where the outlet is “rethinking the frequency and design of its editorials, the makeup of its editorial board, and its policy on endorsements,” according to Semafor. “Opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury, deputy editor Patrick Healy, and publisher AG Sulzberger are contemplating having other editors in opinion getting more involved in the editorial board, and having fewer people on staff who solely write editorials.”
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