"The Algorithm Knows Me Too Well"

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So I've been using those AI assistants a lot lately, and I realized something terrifying. The AI knows me better than I know myself.

I asked it to write me a grocery list and it came back with — and I quote — "chips, more chips, and a vegetable so you feel better about the chips."

That's not a grocery list. That's a psychological profile.

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I tried to get healthy recently. I downloaded one of those fitness apps that tracks everything. Steps, calories, sleep, heart rate. Everything.

Day one, I'm feeling motivated. I go for a walk. The app says, "Great job! You've completed four percent of your daily goal."

Four percent.

I walked to my mailbox and back. The app looked at that and essentially said, "Buddy, we need to talk."

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The sleep tracking is the worst part. I wake up and the app tells me how I slept. Like I need a second opinion on that.

I KNOW how I slept. I was there.

"You spent forty minutes in deep sleep and six hours just sort of... existing." Yeah. That's called being an adult. We don't sleep anymore. We just lie down and worry horizontally.

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My phone now interrupts me to tell me I've been on my phone too long.

Think about that. The phone is concerned about me. The phone has drawn a boundary.

I've been in relationships that never reached that level of self-awareness.

"Screen time is up thirty percent this week." Okay but in my defense, I was reading. "You were watching a man fall off a skateboard for two hours." ...It was the same man. I got invested.

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I tried meditation to deal with the stress. Downloaded a meditation app — because apparently the cure for too much phone is more phone.

The app has this calming voice that says, "Clear your mind of all thoughts."

And my brain goes, "Okay. No thoughts."

Two seconds later: "Did I leave the stove on? What IS a mortgage, really? Why do they call it a building if it's already built?"

The app says, "You're doing great."

It's lying. The app is lying to me and somehow that's the most comforting thing anyone has said to me all week.

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I think that's the thing about modern life. We've built all this technology to make us feel better, and mostly what it does is hold up a very precise, data-driven mirror and go, "Look at yourself."

And we look.

And we go back to the chips.

Thank you, you've been wonderful.

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[approximately 3 minutes at conversational pace]