It’s bad enough that targeted advertising, including—but not at all limited to—algorithm-driven targeting, limits our choices when we go looking for products or services. That targeted advertising limits us to our “preferences” that advertisers create from our early choices and hinders our ability to see things beyond those early decisions, hinders our natural tendency to evolve our actual preferences as time, circumstance, and age progress. Those actually are weak hinderances, though.

Far more serious is this bit about the coming AI “advances,” as expressed in a Wall Street Journal article:

Agents will understand context, learn your preferences, and interact with you and other software to get stuff done: booking travel, ordering food, shopping for those new sneakers, etc.

No, I don’t need AI, nor any other software package, especially one of high sophistication and capability, acting for me on the preferences it thinks I have. I don’t need AI straitjacketing me in my thinking, keeping me within the bounds it thinks it’s identified based on those preferences.

Years ago, a bookseller centralized its inventory management system and limited all of its branches to carrying the inventory that the central office decided those branch customers customarily bought. Which limited what the branches had available to buy regardless of what the customers wanted. As a result, the customers didn’t buy, so the books weren’t available, so customers couldn’t buy—even as their tastes and interests changed, even as an individual store’s customer base itself changed. Sales fell, franchises folded, and bookseller itself folded.

I don’t need AI similarly limiting me to what I customarily (it thinks) think or want; I don’t even want its “suggestions” regarding what that software says might interest me. I prefer being able to think outside the box occasionally. Nor am I interested in wasting time and resources acting randomly just to break the AI’s hold.

“Agents” can help me solve difficult problems, but I’ll be the one identifying the problems to be solved, and I’ll be the one choosing among the solutions, most especially including the solutions I work out independently of that…help.

Spare me the convenience. It’s too limiting, and that’s no benefit. It’s not even convenient.