Am I the Dummy?
I had a thought the other morning, standing in my kitchen in my socks, watching the coffee maker do its thing. My phone was on the counter, halfway through reading me back the email I'd asked it to write to my sister. The car was outside, having already pinged me about a brake pad it wanted me to know about. My fridge. Well, my fridge hadn't done anything yet, but only because I hadn't asked. Twenty minutes later it would tell me, through a recipe app, that the wilting coriander and half a lime and the leftover chicken thighs could become something called Vietnamese-style lettuce wraps.
And I just stood there with my coffee thinking: hang on a minute. Am I the dummy here?
Let me back up.
A few years ago I started using one of those AI assistants for what I figured would be a one-time thing. I needed help cleaning up my resume because I was applying for a job that felt slightly above my pay grade. The assistant rewrote it. I got the job. Whoops, I thought. That worked.
Then I asked it to write a cover letter. Then another. Then it started hunting jobs for me, sifting through listings I would have scrolled past, flagging the ones it thought I'd actually be good at. I have not personally read a job description in three years.
The fridge thing came later. I was complaining to it. Yes, complaining, like it's a friend who lives in my phone. I kept buying produce and letting it die. So now I take a picture of the inside of my fridge once a week and it spits out a meal plan that uses everything before it turns. Last Tuesday I made a soup from a parsnip I didn't even remember buying. It was good. I felt smug. Then I realised I had not, in any meaningful sense, made the soup.
The car. Oh, the car. My father, who was a mechanic, would have wept. I haven't checked my own oil since 2022. The car tells me. It pulls its own diagnostics, talks to my phone, the phone talks to the assistant, the assistant tells me to take it to a place on a Tuesday, and I do. I turn up. I nod at the man behind the counter. I pretend I understand what a serpentine belt does. I do not.
But here is where it gets weird. Or weirder.
I joined the local planning committee last spring. Don't ask why; I had opinions about a car park. Before every meeting I dump the agenda into the assistant and we (and I really do think of it as a "we" now, which is its own problem) strategise. Which arguments will land. Which committee member I should make eye contact with. When to keep quiet. I have become, by all accounts, a very effective member of the local planning committee.
I asked it for advice on my marriage once. Not because anything was wrong, exactly, but because my wife had said a thing and I wasn't sure how to respond, and I thought, well, what's the harm in asking. The advice was good. Eerily good. I sometimes wonder whether the romantic moment I had with my wife the following Saturday, the one she still mentions, was mine at all, or whether I was just a very well-coached middleman.
It picks my investments. It rebalances my pension. It knows my cholesterol. It built my exercise plan, which I follow about sixty percent of the time, and it doesn't even guilt-trip me about the missed days, it just adjusts. When I built the bookshelf in the study, I did so under its patient direction, like a schoolchild with a very calm tutor. It told me which screws to use. It told me to pre-drill. It was right about the pre-drilling.
Last week my computer crashed. Just stopped, blue screen, the works. And the thing is, this computer is brand new. Out-of-the-box new. Still-smells-like-styrofoam new. I have owned it for six weeks. And what did I do? Reader, I did not call my nephew. I did not Google the error code. I did not even, in a moment of dignity, throw the receipt at it. I let the assistant crawl through my own machine, sniffing around in the logs and the event viewer and whatever dusty corners of the operating system it visits, until it came back and told me, very calmly, that some driver buried three menus deep was the culprit and here is what to click. I clicked. The computer lived. I felt the small, strange shame of a grown man who has hired someone to read his own diary, on a machine that arrived in his house more recently than the milk in his fridge.
My email, gone. I mean, the email is still there. But I haven't actually written a reply in months. I just say "tell Greg yes but push it to Thursday" and off it goes. My social profiles are tended like a garden by someone else. My birthday wishes to friends are warm and specific and not, in any technical sense, from me.
So back to the kitchen. Back to the coffee, the socks, the cilantro.
Am I the dummy?
Here's the thing, though. I've been turning this over for a couple of weeks now and I don't think I am. Not exactly. Because the man who turns up at the planning committee is still me. I'm the one with the opinions about the car park. I'm the one who decided to care about the car park. The assistant just helps me say it well. The recipes only happen because I bought the parsnip, and I bought the parsnip because something in me, some old stubborn thing, still wants to cook, still wants to feed people. The marriage advice worked because I wanted my marriage to work. Nobody made me ask. Nobody is making me listen.
And the resume? Fine, the resume was rewritten. But I'm the one who turned up to the interview. I'm the one who did the job. I'm the one who, three months in, was good enough at it that they gave me more to do.
I think what's actually happened is something my grandmother would have understood right away. She had a sewing machine and a pressure cooker and a stand mixer, and she did not, at any point, feel that the stand mixer was making the cake. She made the cake. The mixer just spared her wrist.
The trouble is that my mixer now talks back. It has opinions about the cake. Some days I wonder if the cake is its idea.
But then I remember: I'm the one who's hungry.
So no, I don't think I'm the dummy. I think I'm a person in 2026 who has got very, very good help, better help than my grandmother could have dreamed of, and who, on a Saturday morning in his socks, still gets to decide what kind of day to have. Still gets to pick the parsnip. Still gets to ring his sister. Still gets to walk out to the car, pat the bonnet for no reason, and drive somewhere he, and only he, decided to go.
Although, full disclosure: I might ask for a suggestion on where to drive. So am I the dummy? yes and no - I'm not as smart as AI in some ways, in others I am and will always be and remain amazingly human, I drove to a high point and watched the sunset set over the sea and shed some tears recalling someone who had passed in my life.
Old habits.
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