Facebook just launched an A.I. agent called Muse, for people who would like to spend twenty to a hundred dollars a month to be a middle manager of their own lives. The reviews are rolling in: “I Gave My Life Over to Meta’s A.I. Agent and Was Blown Away” wrote Eli Tan in the New York Times, although the phrase “blown away” doesn’t appear anywhere but the title and the actual experience Tan describes is extremely mediocre. “Meta’s AI agent is a cute little guy who’s great at spending my money” was the angle Allison Johnson went with for The Verge, but [citation needed] on both counts there as well.
For Tan, this alleged away-blower of a robot “called my dental insurer, [gave] it my member ID, answered a security question and waited on hold before transferring me to the representative.” Wow, you can really wait on hold. “For now, a limited number of Muse users have access to the call feature,” notes Tan, which presumably means the offshore call center is currently only staffed up to handle the demands of one New York Times reviewer. It also put his credit card statements in a spreadsheet and identified a duplicate subscription, it “could efficiently fill out online forms,” whatever that means, but it couldn’t buy movie tickets or baseball tickets. It made an annoying podcast that even he couldn’t stand. And finally, it offered to take over “one of my favorite pastimes,” buying secondhand ceramic bowls. “While the agent worked,” writes Tan, “I watched its movements through a tiny browser window, where it navigated websites like a human with a mouse and cursor.”
You might be thinking: that’s the saddest shit I’ve ever heard in my life. But wait! I haven’t told you the worst part yet. Tan’s new imaginary friend also demanded that he give it a cutesy name, like he’s in literal preschool.
“As I talked to the agent as if it were a chatbot, it suggested I name it Wren, embodied by an avatar of a cuddly brown bird. Our conversation then continued:
Eli: Hello Wren! You are my new assistant
Wren: Hey! Good to see you. What can I do for you today?”
Yikes.
Did Allison Johnson do any better? Her Facebook robot, “Marley — one of the suggested names you can give Muse’s avatar… a generically cute snowman-meets-puppy,” successfully emailed a landscaper and a junk remover, put a seven dollar espresso machine part in an online cart but could not actually order it, failed to change a security system subscription (The Verge doesn’t qualify for phone call capabilities apparently, lol), and once again mostly just took over Johnson’s hobby shopping—in this case for camping equipment.
Reading these reviews is like watching John Henry race the steam drill, except the steam drill in this case is just another regular hammer that John Henry also has to operate, and at the end of it John Henry is like “well, it felt kind of efficient using two hammers but I’m not sure what the point was.” To her credit, Johnson concludes:
I think the underlying question we need to ask ourselves as we enter the era of AI agents is what we do with the time we’re supposedly freeing up. Will we use it to take on more commitments? And then ultimately feel overwhelmed again when the to-do list keeps piling up? After a morning crossing items off my list with Marley, I didn’t spend the hours that followed doing anything consequential. In fact, I spent that time chatting with Marley, seeking reassurance about the direction of the yard project and brainstorming fall camping trips I probably won’t take. It’s a gorgeous day outside, the kind we really can’t take for granted in late September, and I wish I’d spent that time outdoors rather than inside talking to a robot, cute little guy or otherwise.
Tan and Johnson both seem like they have totally ordinary middle class white collar 2026 American lives, so I don’t mean anything personal against them when I say these reviews both make their authors sound like the biggest imaginable losers. You can’t call a guy to pick up a branch? Within two weeks? You can’t actually pick up a branch yourself with your own meat hands and throw it in the woods or something? What do you mean you had your robot shop for collectible ceramics? Is there any other part of collecting ceramics as a hobby besides shopping for them? Is your hobby now “having bowls?” Hi, I’m Eli Tan, writer for the New York Times. In my leisure time I enjoy owning dishes.
But I am grateful to these brave souls, because seeing their blunt lists of extremely simple tasks that a human won’t do and a robot can’t do is clarifying. “You’re telling me a tree branch fell in the backyard and now I have to figure out what to do with it?” writes Johnson. “The tree just assigned me homework?” That’s one way to look at it. Another is: the world is giving you an opportunity to level up. How you approach it depends on what you want out of life. You could see this as an excuse to learn how to operate a chainsaw. Believe me, chainsaws are very fun. You could knock on a neighbor’s door and see if they can help. Maybe you’ll make a new friend! Or a new nemesis! Maybe this is the nudge you need to find yourself a Tree Guy, to add to your ever-growing stable of Types of Guy that make life bearable. Maybe this is a sign you should move to a condo and make this kind of thing somebody else’s problem entirely. Or, I guess, now you can ask robot Mommy to deal with it for you, while you learn nothing and gain nothing and nothing in your life changes or improves.
My own version of the to-do list is a small white board perched on the back of my desk, where I occasionally remember to scrawl reminders, and even more occasionally remember to try to cross them off. Here’s what it looks like right now:
Fair is fair, I’ll show you what a loser I am, too.
There’s a reminder related to a future freelance project, a couple boat-related tasks that I haven’t gotten to because the boat never actually went in the water this year (see also: the current registration stickers, unused 😢), a reminder to track down some census documents related to my Canadian C-3 citizenship application, a reminder to make an appointment at the garage for my truck, which is leaking oil at an alarming rate. Some of these are new, others have been on there for months. As you can see I like to cross off items when I do them but not erase them right away, because that way it looks like I’m making some kind of progress in life.
I’m not really excited to do any of these tasks, but looking at the whole list what I see is: this is my life. These are the things that life consists of. There’s my work, there’s my hobbies, there’s my health, my future. All the big meaningful elements of life are just a collection of little tasks that you have to do one at a time. There’s room for mechanical assistance of course—I’m glad I have a laundry machine so that laundry takes me ten minutes instead of six continuous hours of hard labor. But even if there were a robot capable of doing any of the tasks on this list (which there is not, and I suspect there never will be), what would be the point of me if I had a robot do them? What would my life consist of, if I offloaded all of it to a computer owned by Mark Zuckerberg?
The best review of Muse that I’ve seen was by Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick, who described his experience this way:
When I booted up Muse for the first time, however, I suddenly had no idea what I was meant to do with it. This is actually not a common feeling when it comes to using a new app. In fact, I’d argue, the continued existence of Silicon Valley is predicated on making sure that a new user never feels that way. So I asked Muse what it could do.
It immediately asked for read/write permissions on my Google Suite, offering to sort my email inboxes, add things to my calendar, or organize my Google Drive. If I wasn’t interested in that, it told me it could shop for me, book dinner reservations, or, if I gave it read/write access to my computer, even do tasks on my laptop. But I didn’t need to do any of those things yesterday. And I definitely didn’t need to do any of them so badly that I was willing to risk it deleting something important, hallucinating an email to someone, or buying me something I didn’t want. So I sat at my computer, clicking around to find something for it to do, and eventually just gave up.
Congratulations, Ryan, you’re not a loser.
Taylor Lorenz has launched her heterodox era, as the prophecy long foretold, telling a podcaster named @creatine_cycle that she’s glad Elon Musk took over Twitter and enjoying a cozy sit down with Bari Weiss’s anti-woke propaganda outlet The Free Press. Neat! Good luck with all that.
Today in Foods: Scientists Turn Plastic Waste Into Protein-Rich Cookies. “Institutional approval is still pending before researchers can conduct taste tests” but if and when these, uh, “cookies” are approved for human ingestion you can wash them down with an ice cold Kraft Dinner mac and cheese cream soda.
Looks like piss but otherwise it sounds terrible.
#Longreads: Lili Loofbourow launched a newsletter, and introduced it with a long post about Chile, family secrets, political despair, “civic grief,” what is expected of a political columnist, John Milton, and somehow more. It’s unsummarizable but I read the whole thing without a pause. Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré and Jon Christian exposed a sprawling A.I. slop media empire “with a total digital readership substantially higher than that of NPR, narrowly besting CBS News and Forbes, and just slightly behind the Washington Post.” And in Defector Chris Thompson got himself onto a delivery cruise aboard Sisi, “a Volvo Ocean 65 racing sailboat. She is fast as hell and built for sickos. She is not a comfortable luxury yacht, I assure you. Sisi is a frightening, angry, 72-foot, 12-ton sea monster.” This is peak blogging.
Finally: Lindsey Crouse says you can always quit.
Ancient Yemeni stele is judging you.
Today’s Song: Low, “Lullaby.” Thanks for making a recent ferry trip extremely weird for me, Low!
I’m back! Thank you again for your patience this summer while I visited first Greenland and then the many Tims Horton of Maritime Canada. I swear there is a Greenland newsletter forthcoming at Today on Trail in the next few weeks. It’s turning out to be quite a long story. So, stand by for that. I don’t think there will be a Tim Hortons of Maritime Canada newsletter but stranger things have happened, I suppose.
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