Three years ago, in a blog post titled “The Age of AI has begun,” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates painted a picture of what he thought this new age would bring. He argued, among other things, that AI would power a surge in productivity. It would, he said, allow for the creation of the “personal agent.”
“It will see your latest emails, know about the meetings you attend, read what you read, and read the things you don’t want to bother with,” he said. “This will both improve your work on the tasks you want to do and free you from the ones you don’t want to do.”
It’s a fairly straightforward pitch. And I believe it’s precisely the wrong way to think about AI.
This question is on my mind for two reasons. First, I’ve been thinking more and more about the importance of rigor in the classroom, and the way that AI can reduce—or occasionally, increase—the rigor of an assignment. I wrote about this issue earlier this month on my teaching blog, if you’re interested.
The other reason this topic is on my mind is the opening anecdote in a Sunday New York Times profile of former Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer. In it, Mayer describes being given one of those “tell us about your child” surveys from her daughter’s school. The survey asked her to describe her daughter in three bullet points.
The reporter, Alexandra Alter, wrote that Mayer felt that the prompt was an “impossible task.” Mayer, according to Alter, was “overwhelmed by the range and complexity of possible answers.”
And so, because Mayer is a tech executive and because it’s 2026 (and because Mayer’s new startup is pushing an AI personal assistant), Mayer turned to AI. A few seconds later, her company’s AI personal assistant had spit out the perfect description of Mayer’s daughter, Mayer said.
How… cute?
You won’t be surprised to learn that social media erupted last weekend with users ridiculing Mayer’s apparent inability to produce bullet points about her own daughter.
To be honest, I sympathize with Mayer. I, too, would struggle to sum up my children in just a few bullet points. My kids are amazing and complicated and multitalented and multifaceted. Asking me to sum them up in just a few words would be very, very hard.
And that’s precisely the point.
Gates sees AI as a tool that can help people avoid tasks they don’t want to do. He’s not alone; many tech executives have pitched the idea that AI can help people ditch the menial tasks and focus on the fun ones. And sure, there’s an element of truth to that. But what if we took that to an extreme? What if we resigned any task that felt complex or difficult and instead opted only for what seemed easy or what felt good?
What if we never learned a new language or struggled to find just the right words or had a hard conversation or patiently taught our children a new skill?
It would be sad. We would lose something important. We would forfeit some part of our human experience, and donate it to a thoughtless, meaningless computer program.
As AI plays an increasingly prominent role in our society and our economy, we need to snap out of the idea that just because AI can do something, we should turn the task over to AI.
There are certainly plenty of things we could sensibly assign to AI. But the dividing line shouldn’t be ease. We shouldn’t turn hard stuff over to AI and reserve the easy stuff for humans.
Instead, the line should be more about meaning. If a task is meaningful, if it helps us learn, if it helps us connect to others, if it nourishes our souls, we should protect the task from AI. We should keep it fully human.
When teachers send home parent homework, parents shouldn’t use AI to cheat.