In your shorts ... Soma applies

Spark is Google’s new agentic answer for everything. | Image: Google

In your shorts applies as Spark will take over your digital existence painlessly. Plan a trip, Spark has you covered. Need to get the best price on a pair of shoes along with the nearest place to get said shoes, Spark's got you covered as Spark is the ultimate aggregator, complete with intense AI, yours for $99/month/Ultra but the price will drop as membership increases.

Like Soma, the drug of choice in Brave New World, Spark's painless unless the power goes off or, in the case of Soma, the drug is no longer available because the ability to do stuff becomes compromised while the suppliers of both entities hoover ever more personal data while being in your shorts 24/7.

BraveNewWorld FirstEdition

I had a very different experience using Spark, Google’s new always-on AI agent. Spark is a hugely ambitious thing: Google intends it to be the interface through which you can use external apps, and over time even operate your computer. (“OpenClaw with better internet access” is a not-wrong way to describe it.) Spark is currently rolling out to Google’s $99 / month AI Ultra plan, but Google allowed me to try it early. I tested some simple action-oriented stuff, like having Spark go through my Gmail inbox and suggest a bunch of things I should unsubscribe from and having it comb my Google Docs for old tasks I still haven’t finished. In both cases, it did a fine job, even creating me a nicely organized document with a bunch of links to quickly unsubscribe from various marketing emails.

Then I gave Spark a simple trip-planning job. “I’m going to be in Hershey PA with my wife, two kids, and dog the weekend of July 18th. Can you make a plan for the whole weekend, including places to stay, eat, things to do, and everything else?” I left out a few salient details, like the concert tickets I have for that Saturday night, but figured I’d start with the six most obvious things to do in Hershey and go from there.

The hook ...

The whole Spark itinerary was filled with details like this. It included my wife’s name, and took into consideration the fact that she doesn’t like to eat onions or scallions. It included the Thomas Rhett and Niall Horan concert on Saturday night, presumably based on the Ticketmaster confirmation in my email, and noted that parking is included in the tickets we bought. When I got to the part where it mentioned getting a babysitter that night, I remembered to note that my parents are coming along for just that purpose, so I added a note to the conversation.

On the other hand, I can’t shake the deeply creepy feeling I get from the whole thing. What Spark did feels sort of magical, and very invasive. It’s weird that Spark is so casually telling me the names and ages of my children, reminding me that it knows where I live, and finding information I know for a fact I’ve never volunteered to Google. Intellectually, I know that Google knows an incredible amount about me — add up my emails, my calendar, my photos, and my search history, and you’ve pretty much got me pegged. But seeing Spark treat all that data not as something to be protected, but as something to be mined, just feels bad.

Soma applies ...

This is the trade we’re all being asked to make right now. There is a direct correlation between how much of yourself you’re willing to share with an AI system and how useful that system can be. Google is in such a strong position precisely because it already has all that information, while OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest are desperately trying to figure out how to accumulate it. The AI tools we’re being promised are the ones that know us intimately, that can take action on our behalf, that can make decisions without even needing us around. None of that works unless we open ourselves up completely to the machine. So that’s what we’re being asked, even compelled, to do.

Resistance is futile - The Borg, or is it?

Yours truly has been a geek for 50 years on the user side. From DOS and Unix to Mac OS and the net, the litany of apps and how to use them applies but this is different. This is abdication and with it comes the atrophy of skill. I use Gemini every day. Extremely helpful when used with precision and consistency and I know Google knows a lot about me but Spark, in my shorts, 24/7? Nah. More convenient, without question, quantumly dangerous & addictive, you bet. I have Ultra and like it but at a distance. 

BRT did a piece titled Hotel California. The society died as there was no purpose, think about it. I have.

In 1968, a scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health created a perfect world — unlimited food, no predators, no disease. He wanted to see what would happen. What happened was extinction.

Factoid ... Microsoft's doing the same exact thing but at least they're being up front about it.

An internal Microsoft strategy document says that the plan for its just-announced “Scout” personal assistant AI is to “make people addicted” to the tool before rolling out additional functionality, 404 Media has learned. “Three phases from addictive app to agentic platform,” the documentation.

Microsoft has been piloting Scout as an internal tool for employees it was calling “ClawPilot,” since March. ClawPilot—and now Scout—are part of “Project Lobster,” which is a Microsoft plan to bring the popular OpenClaw AI tool to its Microsoft 365 suite of products in a way that nontechnical people can use. It is not particularly notable that Microsoft is developing new AI tools—the company has reoriented almost everything it does to focus on AI, and every major AI company has tried to figure out how to bring AI agents into their products after OpenClaw went viral earlier this year. OpenClaw allows users to create AI agents that can act on behalf of the person using it; it can send emails, edit calendars, publish blog posts, and more. What is notable is that the explicit goal of the people developing the product is to addict its users. Microsoft officially announced Scout Tuesday as an “always-on personal agent” that runs on OpenClaw and is integrated into Microsoft 365.