Don’t just be a notification processor
Don’t just be a notification processor
For the last 20 years, us humans have increasingly become “notification processors”. Our devices send us things to do, and we respond. I feel like AI may help to improve that in the coming years, but it may have to get even worse before it starts getting better.
For example, have you see the site “RentAHuman“? It’s exactly what it sounds like. AI agents can be hooked up to it, and those AI agents can get a human to help with tasks that they can’t do yet. As the site says, “Your AI can’t touch grass”. It’s an interesting concept, but it also feels very strange and wrong.
Tom Rath’s book “What’s the Point?” digs into the idea of being a notification processor in their chapter accurately titled “Break Your Digital Chains”. The book does a great job of giving us ways to escape those chains, but it first explains the problem in a way that we can all relate to:
“He wore his frantic connectivity like a badge of importance, never realizing it was more of a mark of enslavement. This executive wasn’t managing his technology; his technology was managing him, reducing a brilliant strategic mind to a reactive notification processor.”
It’s like I shared last year in “Busyness is a sign of wealth?“, which included this bit from John Mark Comer’s “The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry“:
“Harvard Business Review recently conducted a study on the change in social status in America. It used to be that leisure was a sign of wealth. People with more money spent their time playing tennis or sailing in the bay or sipping white wine during lunch at the golf club. But that’s changed. Now busyness is a sign of wealth.”
My hope is that we’ll soon be able to use AI as our own personal “notification processor” to knock out many of those things, though I imagine it’ll then just send us a different kind of notification to be processed instead. We’ll see.
If you get a chance, check out “What’s the Point?“, as it was a solid book on keeping control on your life.