Muse Is What Meta Means by ‘Personal Superintelligence’ ⇥ todayintabs.com

Casey Newton, Platformer:

“The centerpiece of our vision for what we’re building is Muse,” Zuckerberg said, promoting the app to a central place in the company’s family of apps only a few days after most people first heard of it. “In the coming years, I expect that Muse is going to grow into the personal superintelligence that billions of people around the world are going to use to accomplish their goals and improve their lives.”

Muse represents a more consumer-friendly version of OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent I used for a few confusing days earlier this year. If you’re willing to connect it to your Google Workspace, bank accounts, and other online services, you can ask it to perform a variety of tasks for you for free: filling out forms, grabbing reservations, paying bills, and so on.

I am probably just a dummy but, as far as I can tell, the amount of my own tasks I can assign to a robot on my phone is awfully limited — and I do not live a particularly weird life. When I look at my to-do list, I see normal things: a reminder to water my plants, household cleaning tasks, groceries, a list of things I need to repair, and so forth. Very few of these things are solvable through software. The house repairs, for example, cannot be done by my telephone, but I suppose Muse could call someone on my behalf to come fix it, but that would cost a lot more than doing it myself. It could get a couple items off my grocery list using Amazon, but that seems inefficient and, also, against the terms of service. Also, automatically paying bills has been a solved problem for decades.

So I looked up some YouTube videos about it, like one from Alex Finn and another from Peter Yang. I know nothing about either person and I have no beef with them, but both illustrate a similar set of tasks of which I would like to automate very few. Most seem to revolve around buying something, like event tickets or a new product, and it seems like overkill for that task to be completed by a virtual machine in a data centre, especially since it — for good reasons — requires manual confirmation. I read some reviews in the Verge and New York Times and felt the same way. Perhaps I am not enough of a dutiful consumer to be so amazed about a robot that can buy things for me. That is not to say there is nothing I like — a video from Meta featured someone who locked themselves out of their car while in Croatia, for example — but there is a huge disconnect for me between the amount of technology here and what it could actually do for me in real life.

The business model is also bananas to me. Apparently, Meta will eventually charge a commission for transactions conducted through Muse. That just means another layer of rent-seeking. Imagine the result of ordering a meal with Doordash through Muse: the saddest sandwich you have ever seen that, somehow, also cost like $50. I feel like there is a type of person who will get a lot out of Muse, and that someone has substantial disposable income.

Rusty Foster, Today in Tabs, looked at his to-do list, too:

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?

It is striking that Zuckerberg opened Connect this year by speaking to the importance of people even as the company develops what it has termed “personal superintelligence”. Yet what people seem so excited about — Zuckerberg included — is a software-based vision where a handful of menial tasks are given to a computer. It seems we are supposed to celebrate removing some little things that grow us as a person. I do not want to get all the kids these days do not know how to balance a chequebook! because some things really can be left in the past, and maybe we will discover what those things are as we are encouraged to offload them to the robots.

And now, I actually do need to go water my plants.