America is the home of the mindless consumer—a nation of cash-hungry dolts who, as George Carlin once put it, are trained to spend “money they don’t have on things they don’t need.” And it’s true that buying stuff—especially buying stuff online—can be a pretty mindless activity. However, it can also be quite a lot of work. It can take hours to find the right product and, more often than not, when you get it into your living room and unbox it, you’re still dissatisfied. Well, now, the few mental faculties it does require to buy stuff online will be cleanly automated away with a new artificial intelligence option from Amazon.
On Thursday, Amazon launched Help Me Decide, a tool that uses generative AI to analyze your buying habits, and then, if you’re stuck on what particular item to splurge on, it will just make the decision for you.
“Help Me Decide uses AI to analyze your browsing history and preferences to recommend the right product for you with just one tap,” the product’s announcement says. “The tool helps customers pick the right product, quickly,” it adds.
The feature will present itself as a pop-up in the top right corner of your screen if you’ve been scrolling just a little too long for a particular product, Amazon says. If you decide to use it, the feature will—like the e-commerce giant’s other automated features—use algorithms to analyze your buying activity. It then supposedly selects the product that is “right” for you.
Lest you think that Amazon will reflexively push you towards more expensive items, the company promises that it will provide you with a variety of price tiers, including “an upgrade pick and a budget option” (who knows whether they will be trustworthy or not, though).
© Amazon
“Help Me Decide saves you time by using AI to provide product recommendations tailored to your needs after you’ve been browsing several similar items, giving you confidence in your purchase decision,” said Daniel Lloyd, vice president of Personalization at Amazon. “Help Me Decide continues to build on our commitment to use AI to improve the customer experience by creating tools that make shopping easier and more enjoyable.”
In some sense, this is, yes, convenient, in that the hours that you might typically spend scanning Amazon and trying to decipher the difference between ten nearly identical products can now be greatly reduced. At the same time, it can’t help but feel like yet another step down the stupidification ladder that we are all collectively descending. AI can now write emails for you and read them to you. It can compose a message to a Tinder date, and tell you what to say when you’re actually on the date. And, yes, it can also decide what you want to buy and, if you programmed an AI agent correctly, could buy it for you too. To be clear, no one said AI is good at doing any of those things, but it can do them.
What’s next? An AI app to tell you when to make a bowel movement, and maybe a robot to help you do it? Oh, wait, yes, we already have both of those things.
