A use case provided in this very article is "plans daughter's recipes and orders the ingredients." The whole act of doing that without automating it is what makes it meaningful.

What a miserable mindset.

Isn't it a bit of a spectrum of ways to tackle this depending on tons of other factors?

For example, baking cookies with my 3 year old means having them help with a couple steps of mixing before interest is lost until the cookies are done. The whole act of planning, shopping, and prepping the kitchen is mostly entirely left out. Now with my 8 year old, the entire "workflow" of "lets bake cookies" to cookies complete is easily done end to end with the child.

My point is the level of "automation" desired for various repetitive tasks in life ebbs and flows on a multitude of external factors. This week I might have a lot going on and don't want to deal with grocery shopping and next week I might be free to go take care of that myself, and find joy in browsing the produce section.

Provided "agents" like these can have interactions where the principle still has agency over which tasks they will or will not do, I don't really see the issues.

Now the whole idea of negotiating this on a day by day basis with the agent and managing said agent sounds like a chore in and of itself and so I'm not sure if it's worth it or not.

Your comment reminds me of a (single) friend who talked about how he doesn't use dishwashers because he finds the motions of washing them by hand therapeutic.

That's because he rarely cooked, and ate out often. When you get married, cook almost every day, and have kids, washing dishes by hand becomes anything but therapeutic.

Do you have a kid? How often are you cooking for the kid? Doing it multiple times a week for 15+ years becomes a chore. Most of the meals you cook aren't well thought out - they're "Family needs to be fed - what's the quickest thing I can make?" Then, once in a while, you want to put in the effort and cook something nice, and it becomes meaningful. Those have always been the exceptions when both parents have full time jobs.

Getting an algorithm to plan the recipe and order ingredients is for all the other times you cook. Not for the meaningful ones.

It's also not an either/or. You have the freedom to do it as often or as little as you want.

Now here's my question: Say only 10% of the meals you cook are carefully thought out. 90% are done with your brain on autopilot. Are you going to criticize someone for now doing a 10-30-60 split, where the 30% is using some algorithm to actually make something nice for the kid? You're not losing any of the meaningful time you had before.

Another way to frame this: Overworked parents decide to take the family out for junk food once in a while. It's a treat for the kids, and it's a way for the parents to get relief. It's simply another way of outsourcing the labor, just as the AI example is. Do you criticize such parents saying that instead of meaningfully trying to make a nice dinner, they're offloading it to a 3rd party?

The trick is to convince young people that it is a good idea before they get a chance to learn that they are literally trading off parts of their life away...

Next you can ask the AI how to teach the kid how to get recipes from AI. A real time saver for both of you.

After that, ask the AI what kind of life lessons are good to impart on your kid.

Pretty sure the cooking and spending time with their daughter is the meaningful bit for them. Why would they automate the setup steps otherwise?