Would you trust an AI with full data about your life to make better decisions for you than you make yourself?

• IM

  Iris M.1w ago

  An AI with full data about my life would know about the time I googled 'is it weird to be emotionally attached to a houseplant' at 2am. It does not get to make decisions for me.

  217Reply
• DT

  Diego T.1w ago

  Surrender of what makes life meaningfully human? Sir this is a Wendy's. Most people are just trying not to overdraft their account before the 15th.

  203Reply
• M

  Maya1w ago

  I actually tried something close to this. Used an app that tracked my sleep, diet, spending, and mood for two years and followed its recommendations pretty strictly. Lost weight, saved money, got promoted. But I also missed my dad's 70th birthday because the 'optimal travel window' wasn't until the following week. Some things you can't quantify and I learned that the brutal way.

  198Reply
• J

  Jordan1w ago

  I want to push back on the financial piece specifically. An AI with my full spending history would have told me not to quit my stable job to start a business. It would have been statistically correct. That business failed. I lost money. I also met my wife, found my actual calling, and became someone I actually respect. The 'mistake' was the whole story.

  186Reply
• I

  Iris1w ago

  I'm a therapist and I'll tell you what I see every day: people don't actually want optimal outcomes. They want outcomes that feel meaningful and chosen. A patient who makes a 'suboptimal' career change into something they love is doing better psychologically than one who followed the statistically correct path and feels empty. Agency IS the treatment, in many cases.

  177Reply
• R

  Reese1w ago

  My grandfather farmed the same land his father did, married the woman his family helped him choose, ate what the season gave him. No optimization, no algorithm. Died at 94 surrounded by four generations of people who adored him. I dunno. Maybe thriving looks different than optimized.

  161Reply
• N

  Noah1w ago

  What worries me isn't the AI being wrong. It's the AI being right in ways that make us feel hollow. Like, what if it correctly identifies that your passion for painting is statistically unlikely to bring you financial stability AND long-term satisfaction compared to, say, project management? Correct data, correct model, devastating conclusion.

  156Reply
• M

  Maya1w ago

  Absolutely not. The entire point of a life is that it's YOURS. Optimized for what, exactly? Happiness? Productivity? Longevity? The moment you let a machine define the metric, you've already lost the argument.

  143Reply
• R

  Riley1w ago

  I've been reading about this stuff for years and there's a core confusion in the whole debate. 'Better decisions' requires a value function. The AI doesn't have your values — it has a proxy for your values based on your past behavior. But past behavior is partly a product of constraints and circumstances, not just preferences. You might consistently eat junk food not because you value it but because you're stressed and poor. An AI trained on that data learns the wrong thing about you.

  134Reply
• S

  Sam1w ago

  This entire debate assumes the AI is neutral but every AI reflects its training data and the priorities of whoever built it. You're not trusting an algorithm. You're trusting Amazon or Google or whatever VC-funded startup to have your best interests at heart. Have we met these companies.

  122Reply
• C

  Casey1w ago

  I'd trust it with my finances and diet. My career maybe. My relationships? Absolutely never. Love isn't an optimization problem and if you think it is I feel deeply sorry for everyone you've ever dated.

  118Reply
• E

  Elena1w ago

  lmao 'the specific irreplaceable texture' bro you've been single for a long time haven't you

  114Reply
• TR

  Theo R.1w ago

  This is a genuinely fascinating philosophical question that I think gets muddled by fear. We already outsource enormous decision-making capacity to systems we don't fully understand — credit scoring, recommendation algorithms, GPS routing. The question isn't whether we trust AI, it's whether we're honest about how much we already do.

  112Reply
• R

  Ravi1w ago

  The question is framed as binary which I think is the problem. Nobody's saying hand over ALL decisions. But should I probably let a well-trained model nudge my eating habits and flag when my spending patterns look like they did right before I went into debt last time? Yeah honestly yes. That's just a smart tool.

  108Reply
• SS

  Sam S.1w ago

  The deeper issue nobody's addressing: who decides what 'better' means? More money? More years lived? More reported happiness? These aren't neutral metrics. They embed specific cultural values — usually western, usually capitalist — into the definition of a good life. Any AI optimization inherits those assumptions wholesale.

  99Reply
• T_

  Theo _x1w ago

  okay but who owns all this data. thats the part nobody wants to talk about. oh the AI will optimize your life! great. and the corporation running it will monetize every data point about your health, relationships, and fears. no thank you.

  94Reply
• O

  Omar1w ago

  from a pure game theory standpoint humans are genuinely terrible at intertemporal decision making. we discount the future way too steeply, we're loss averse in irrational ways, we cave to social pressure constantly. an ai that had full longitudinal data on me would almost certainly make better retirement and health decisions than i do. not saying i want that but lets be honest about what we're defending here

  91Reply
• L

  Leo1w ago

  That arranged marriage stat is misleading though — lower divorce rates in societies where divorce carries enormous social stigma doesn't mean the marriages are happier. You're measuring the wrong variable.

  89Reply
• Q

  Quinn1w ago

  I keep seeing people say 'but what about meaning' and yeah okay sure but I also made a decision to not see a doctor for two years because I was scared and that nearly killed me. I would have 100% let an algorithm override that particular choice thank you very much.

  88Reply
• TK

  Taylor K.1w ago

  i mean my ex made every decision himself and those decisions were catastrophically bad so like. maybe give the robot a shot lol

  87Reply
• YR

  Yuki R.1w ago

  counterpoint to the therapist: you work with people who are struggling. you're seeing a biased sample. the people for whom the optimal path worked out fine aren't in your office.

  82Reply
• Y

  Yuki1w ago

  The people saying yes to this are the same people who let Spotify decide their entire personality. Terrifying.

  76Reply
• CR

  Casey R.1w ago

  ok but your grandfather also probably had access to clean air, generational land wealth, and a stable community support network that most people today simply do not have. romanticizing his life doesn't help anyone navigating a gig economy with student debt

  73Reply
• Q

  Quinn1w ago

  confidently stating that AI would choose a better partner for you reveals a pretty thin understanding of what relationships actually are. compatibility scores and attachment style assessments cannot model the specific irreplaceable texture of loving a particular person. this isn't sentiment, it's epistemology.

  71Reply
• AS

  Avery S.1w ago

  Fun fact: arranged marriages statistically have lower divorce rates than love marriages. So in a sense, humans have been outsourcing the partner decision for millennia, often to parents or community elders. An AI is just the next version of that. Not necessarily wrong, just different.

  67Reply
• DK

  Drew K.6d ago

  Give it control of my alarm clock and my credit card spending alerts. That's it. That's where I draw the line and I think that's actually the sane position here.

  58Reply
• C

  Casey1w ago

  Hard no. Next question.

  34Reply

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