The Indoor Plumbing Test

what can AI enable you to do that you couldn't already do by other means?

The AI conversation remains absurd, hype-ridden, and utterly out of touch with actual material reality. I could have written that sentence in 2024, 2023, or 2022, and it would have also been true. But somehow it just gets more and more true.

Years ago, I think in 2010, Business Insider invested a great deal of hype and hoopla into a list they developed of the one hundred most important inventions of all time. I have tried and tried to find a link, including via the Internet Archive, but no dice; I’ll chalk it up to linkrot, the endless deterioration of the web over time, Business Insider’s paywall, and their convoluted publishing history. You’ll have to take my word for it that, in a list that was released with great fanfare, they rated the iPhone as the most important invention of all time. Not antibiotics, the plow, or alternating current, not anesthesia or the lightbulb, but the iPhone, which tooks a bunch of things that already existed (cellular telephone service, email on the go, a touchscreen) and put them in one remarkably profitable package. The Business Insider list isn’t alone in putting the iPhone so high on ranked lists of human achievement. There’s plenty you can find, including a British survey that put the iPhone at number eight, ahead of the internal combustion engine, or this New York Times podcast which puts the iPhone at number three, although the list seems to be partially tongue in cheek. There’s a lot you could ask about such a choice, including epistemological questions inherent to putting a cellphone above the electricity-generating technologies that power it. But my visceral response to this kind of thinking - and even aside from ordinal lists of importance, the smartphone-supremacy attitude is very common - is to say, wow, these people must really enjoy shitting in the yard.

Plumbing - bringing fresh water from one place to another and disposing of human waste via engineering - goes back to antiquity, and you occasionally find claims of affordances like flush toilets in ancient times. Today, modern people in most developed parts of the world have constant access to free-running clean water and toilets that can remove physical waste to a secure processing facility or holding unit, with heated water on demand a very nice extra. That’s largely a 20th-century and forward phenomenon. There were pretty sophisticated sewer systems in Victorian London, the White House got running water in the Jackson administration, and as usual major metropolitan areas in rich countries were ahead of the game generally. But it wasn’t until the 1920s or so that indoor plumbing became a true mass phenomenon, again only in wealthy countries, and it was perfectly common for a soldier coming home from World War II in 1945 to be coming home to a house with a well and an outhouse. It wasn’t until the 1960s that a majority of American homes had indoor plumbing, which means that the beginning of the Space Age overlapped with a period where most Americans couldn’t wash their hands whenever they wanted to. And, as cool as NASA and launching satellites and orbiting the Earth and traveling to the Moon are, their practical impacts on human life pale in comparison to modern plumbing.

So when I read people putting the iPhone as the pinnacle of human ingenuity, I have to imagine that they’re big fans of shitting in their yard. Because if faced with a choice, they’ve indicated that they’d choose their smartphone over their toilet! And that’s quite a choice. It might be worth doing a little reality check in that regard by spending a month without one and then a month without the other. So you see how life feels without your smart phone for 30 days, and then you see what it’s like to not be able to access indoor plumbing for 30 days. You have to piss and shit outside. You have to walk to a well, if you can find one, to get (hopefully clean) water, and then you have to heat it up on your stove if you want it hot. You can’t shower, and taking a bath would be a remarkably laborious process that still left you with tepid water. And this isn’t just a question of comfort but a question of essential hygiene, by which I mean medically-relevant hygine - cholera, typhoid, gastrointestinal worms, scarlet fever, hepatitis, and many more diseases were massively harder to avoid before mass indoor plumbing. I don’t know you, personally, but I feel considerable confidence in suggesting that your desire to avoid those diseases is greater than your attachment to Instagram.

That’s the shitting in the yard test, or the indoor plumbing test, for those who prefer to avoid vulgarity. The test requires you to compare the hype about a particular tech product up against the actual brick-and-mortar changes wrought in the great period of human advancement that began sometime in the late 19th century and ended sometime in the late 20th; the modern flush toilet is just a particularly relevant example. Is Zoom really a bigger part of your life than food refrigeration, a technology that has saved untold millions of lives over the decades by dramatically reducing deaths from foodborne illness? Is cloud storage really a bigger deal than infant vaccines, which save six lives a minute? Does Android Auto really rate when compared to the airbag? You can call these questions obtuse, and some do, but they are natural and necessary things to think about in an era of obsession with artificial intelligence. (By which people mean LLM/neural net-based artificial intelligence, which is a whole other thing.) When you say that AI is the most important invention in human history, you’re making some really, really powerful claims. And yes, you have to then justify saying that AI is more important than, for example, the transistor, self-negating claims that deny the importance of technologies that make large language models possible. But you also have to justify saying that AI is more important than, like, the bowl. By which I mean, bowls. To put food in. To eat out of. Try and spend the rest of your life without ever using another food container and get back to me about whether ChatGPT is more important. Food containers are inventions!

lol

Is the ability to generate images from text really more impressive or important than the house? The dwelling? The domicile? I note with some amusement that you can now pay to take classes in how to use the most popular text-to-image engines most effectively; if it’s not obvious, the fact that you have to take classes in how to use them totally undermines the ordinary narrative about AI and its world-altering power. These are supposed to be technologies that make these abilities accessible, yet like so much of what’s valuable in our society, the actual skill to use them is paywalled. Even if you shell out the dough, if you trawl forums dedicated to those engines, you’ll find immense frustration with them even among their most devoted users, and of course for every amazing image someone shares that came from an AI, there’s dozens that came out borked and were discarded. (Hard to think of a more obvious example of selection bias than when someone generates ninety-nine shitty AI images and one good, then shares it online saying “Look at the power of AI!”) But suppose they worked absolutely perfectly - would you really think that they were more important of a human development than putting up walls and a roof to live within?

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Watch this Apple Intelligence advertisement. The explicit message of this ad - the explicit message - is that the product being sold is for the dumbest fucking people alive. Our main character, Warren, is so utterly dense that his boss is flabbergasted when Warren writes a formulaic 50-word email without tripping on his dick. Everything about the advertisement is designed for you to understand that the fundamental appeal of having “AI” on your iPhone - and you could do this just as easily in the web browser, but never mind - is so that you, a deeply unintelligent being, can operate as a minimally-competent human. They’re selling this thing to people who look at Warren and say, yeah, that’s me, to the absolute dullards. The mentally incompetent. The too stupid to live. I mean that’s exactly what that commercial is conveying, right? They create a protagonist who is intended to appear as helpless and intellectually vacant as possible. They then demonstrate the great value of the product they’re selling, Apple Intelligence, by having it take an email he spends 30 seconds writing and converting it into a more professional email that any human being who doesn’t have some sort of serious cognitive disability could also write in 30 seconds. And Apple is not the only company that’s selling AI by demonstrating its ability to shepherd the tragically stupid through life.

You can understand the conundrum: AI is being sold with the most outsized hype of any development in my 43 years of life, without exception, but what AI can do right now is maybe automate a few dull tasks that afflict the white collar worker. What artificial intelligence can actually do, in 2025 - two and a half years after people declared the world forever changed by the release of ChatGPT - is remarkably limited. ChatGPT can access and synthesize information, but not better than an educated adult, and for important tasks almost anyone will choose to do that work themselves, especially given ongoing issues with LLM outputs, and anyway doing that work yourself is how you get and stay smart. You can produce images from text, but nothing that humans couldn’t already produce, and working with a graphic designer will be far easier when it comes to actually implementing your vision. And anyway, for the vast majority of people, the ability to generate images from text falls firmly in the “that’s cool” category of minor amusements, not in the realm of real, practical consequence. It’s just powerfully difficult to define what is really useful about this technology, as opposed to what’s cool. Competent adults simply aren’t suffering from an inability to do what LLM-based AI systems can do for them. The really useful stuff is firmly in the realm of science fiction, like claims that AI will eliminate money or end death. The actually possible just offloads work, often to little practical consequence.

And so of course Apple feels the need to create a character like Warren; if you can’t imagine a use for your product that would be meaningful to a competent person, you just invent an incompetent one to sell it to. The essential question remains: whether you think fobbing off minor administrivial tasks to software is of small or large social importance, what can AI allow us to do today that we couldn’t do without AI? I can tell you the social importance of replacing oil lamps with incandescent bulbs and of replacing incandescents with LEDs. I can’t tell you the social importance of allowing Warren to get away with being a shitty employee, which that commercial clearly shows him to be.

I had not yet reached high school when this movie was released

The absolutely constant hype inflation never stops. Here’s someone named Ross Lazer claiming that the ability for an AI “agent” to order a pizza for you is as transformative as the automobile. To be clear! What’s not being referred to here is the ability to order a pizza online, which is an affordance so old that pizza is believed to be the first thing ever sold via the internet. No, what’s as transformative as the automobile - which not only utterly changed human commerce and socialization forever but also resulted in the largest intentional transformation of our lived environment, ever - is simply the ability to get a bot to do that simple, decades-old task for you. I just… I struggle so hard to see where people are getting this shit. And this belief in the miraculous potential of automating mundane human tasks only underlines how embarrassing ongoing AI struggles are. As John Herrman of New York magazine writes, discussing ongoing difficulties faced by these agents, “If buying groceries through a streamlined interface is deceptively complicated, what isn’t?” I find it profoundly easy to order a pizza online. Can it really be a socially optimal use of resources (immense amounts of money, manpower, and electricity) to create incredibly complex systems that can, with tons of training and eye-watering power costs, take that simple task off my hands? I don’t get. I don’t get it.

Or maybe I do. The ultimate source of the hype is obvious: money. Lazer is himself in the AI industry, so he’s got a vested interest in believing/pretending to believe that telling an “agent” on the computer to order a pizza is categorically more impressive than, uh, using a computer to order a pizza. The hype pays his bills. On this podcast, Kevin Roose of The New York Times keeps defending outlandish claims from AI CEOs and companies by insisting that other people in that AI industry feel the same way. “They’re very sincere,” he says. To which I would say, you mean everyone whose stock price and thus net worth is directly related to AI hype is in agreement about AI hype? You don’t say! I’m sure many of them really are sincere, the same way that the guy who spends half his take-home income on sports gambling sincerely believes that his ship will eventually come in. Sam Altman says their is no slowdown in improvements to LLM-based AI systems; his wealth is directly tied to public perception of whether there is a slowdown or not. These are not unrelated phenomena. I don’t understand why the move in the media, so often, is to justify AI hype by credulously reporting what people in the industry are saying about it. Frito-Lay says that Doritos are snacktacular, too. But I don’t take their word for it.

Silicon Valley really needs this to work, financially. They’ve been looking for a new market to monetize for some time. Social media companies have invested relentless effort in wringing every last cent out of their networks, and even still there are indicators that social media is a declining economic phenomenon. (Does “the next Facebook” sound like a remotely sexy investment to you?) Smartphones have become commodity technologies that people don’t feel they have to replace every year anymore, while “the Internet of Things” and virtual reality have not lived up to their own hype, at least financially. Web hosting, which has quietly operated as an essential financial pillar for the tech industry for years, is facing slowing growth; the market is saturated and has fallen into a steady state of oligopoly. The whole industry floats on the idea of limitless growth and massive market caps, the assumption that tech operates outside of ordinary financial constraints. And with so many mature product categories and saturated fields, right now the only vehicle that can realistically power Silicon Valley is AI… whether it’s actually useful or not.

I am left to ask the same question I always ask: why do people need this so bad? I get it, when it comes to corporations. I don’t get it when it comes to people who are not directly financially remunerated by AI hype. There is such a palpable, almost pathological need regarding AI, a profoundly vulnerable emotional investment that exceeds the rational. And I have to say, as I have before, that what people really want is to escape mundane reality and all of its grinding indignities. Like VR and radical life extension and exploring the stars, AI suggests the possibility of a technology beyond technology, of a technology that creates a fissure in ordinary human life and the beginning of something new. But the ability to create text or a picture on a screen can’t do that.

In ten years and twenty and thirty, you’ll still have to do chores that you hate to do, and if they find some way to automate away a particularly onerous chore, there will be some other petty task to take its place. Because that’s how human life works. You’ll still have to stand in impotent resentment while you wait for a subway that will arrive already stuffed with too many riders. And if they invent the teleporter, then you’ll find other reasons to feel bored and annoyed. The good news is that, for those who aren’t impoverished or seriously disabled and live in the developed world, there’s a great deal of opportunity for frequently-sunny and generally comfortable lives that feature loving relationships. You will always be unsatisfied, but it will still be enough. We do not live in an age of wonders; we live in a disenchanted world, the Age of Comfortable Boredom. Every claim in my lifetime that this age will imminently end has proven to be wrong. After 9/11, people were afraid that we were going to live in an America where the local grocery stores were constantly getting bombed and we had to fight the terrorists in the streets, where nothing would ever be the same. They were afraid, but there was such yearning in that fear. I think AI hype comes from the same place.

I think that, in ten years, human life will be more or less the same as it is today, that distributional economic developments and matters of war and peace will have far more influence on average quality of life than the development of artificial intelligence, and the technological growth that is most likely to actually revolutionize some aspect of human existence is not AI but rather biomedical science, probably genetic engineering specifically. I’d put money on it. I think that you will be, in the future, more or less in the same circumstances you are now, and you will not be unhappy, and that will be enough.