The people do not yearn for automation

24th April 2026 - Link Blog

**The people do not yearn for automation** ([via](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/23/patel-software-brain "John Gruber")) This written and video essay by Nilay Patel explores why AI is unpopular with the general public even as usage numbers for ChatGPT continue to skyrocket.

It’s a superb piece of commentary, and something I expect I’ll be thinking about for a long time to come.

Nilay’s core idea is that people afflicted with “software brain” - who see the world as something to be automated as much as possible, and attempt to model everything in terms of information flows and data - are becoming detached from everyone else.

[…] software brain has ruled the business world for a long time. AI has just made it easier than ever for more people to make more software than ever before — for every kind of business to automate big chunks of itself with software. It’s everywhere: the absolute cutting edge of advertising and marketing is automation with AI. It’s not being a creative.

But: not everything is a business. Not everything is a loop! The entire human experience cannot be captured in a database. _That’s_ the limit of software brain. That’s why people hate AI. It _flattens_ them.

Regular people don’t see the opportunity to write code as an opportunity at _all_. The people do not yearn for automation. I’m a full-on smart home sicko; the lights and shades and climate controls of my house are automated in dozens of ways. But huge companies like Apple, Google and Amazon have struggled for over a decade now to make regular people care about smart home automation at all. And they just don’t.