As kids, we eat like raccoons – always hungry and rummaging constantly. Our food magically appears – prepared – on demand. We enjoy the unburdened deep sleep that comes with an enforced bedtime, no gainful employment and little understanding of a supply and demand economy.

I became an adult the day I realized that now, if someone forced me to eat three healthy meals a day, get to bed on time and took care of the bills? I'd marry them.

Mom was right. Someday I would thank her.

I realized the other day that AI is a technological child. Rummaging the Internet and consuming everything – while paying no bill. Delighting us like a toddler with it's ability to paint, compose poetry, talk like a grown up, and demand more and more and more attention. If our focus shifts, there's an occasional tantrum. Love me or I'll get you fired. AI's parents are just as bad: embrace my child or prepare to be rendered obsolete! There are hallucinatory night terrors caused by a steady diet of social media hashtags.

Sure, there are a few Doogie Howsers, that can accurately diagnose a rare disease. But they are all undisciplined children at heart. No experience. No empathy. No humanity.

OpenAI can teach me how to program better in PHP, but why can't it simply reformat my poorly indented code into a clean page without breaking something? Because that part's a drag. Learning is fun. Grinding is not.

AI isn't stupid.

AI meal planners will happily envision millions of exotic dining choices. But it cannot earn money for groceries. It can't shop, put groceries away, plan even a simple a meal and make it. It can't clear a table, or do the dishes. And it can't repeat this process to the grave multiple times a day.

If I have to stand in front of my toaster saying, "browner... browner... no... too much," which of us is really the "smart" one? Smart devices are happy to burn a dozen slices of bread as they zero in on my exact desires. Like a child, squealing with joy, "again! again!"

Either way it's too much interaction before I've had my coffee.

There is a joy in doing.

Sometimes that joy is found in doing something new like baking sourdough bread. Joy can be immediate – like a BLT when you really wanted a BLT. It can be simple like the sensory overload of a freshly mowed lawn. It can be as complex as realizing that your life in hindsight was not the clusterf*** that it felt like going forward.

A lot of times joy is found in the simple grind of living. Breaking down a bunch of Amazon boxes and recycling them to free up garage space is my Sisyphean task. Just like the Greek myth, it has its paradox. Recycle every week and there's one small pile. Skip a week and you need a dump truck. Why? I have mined the joy in this task precisely because it has no end. Not because I enjoy it.

But AI is robbing us of our joy. It's jumping the line to take the good jobs: art, film, poetry, writing, and in a few years, sex. It perverts our very understanding of joy when it reproduces Van Gogh like art in a few seconds while mocking the very humanity of the tortured artist who questioned his own value constantly:

“If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.”

AI's pitch is that AI "works for us." While it can "do" many things, let me be clear – it cannot work unsupervised. When I assist AI, I am working for it.

AI cannot do even the simplest jobs. Mind you, my washer can't seem to get clothes into the dryer without my help either, but at least my washer has no allusions of pitching a screenplay to Netflix.

Put AI on a Joy Diet

The answer is not to convince millions of people to shun AI. That's what AI wants. AI is the spouse that does such a lousy job of cooking or cleaning or shopping that they are relieved of the responsibility – for life. We all know these people.

The answer is to take our joy back.

Here's my simple benchmark: I want things done to my satisfaction without my involvement. These repetitive chores are not difficult or abstract: shovel snow, rake leaves, take out the trash... and if you prove you can handle the responsibility? We'll chat about that screenplay.

Improve your AI. Make it work for me – instead of me working as an unpaid intern to every AI firm by constantly babysitting OpenAI's love child. The minimum requirement is that it can listen to me and do what I want it to do – unaided.

But until you start paying some bills? You're just a child. Before you threaten to take my job? Maybe you should start by getting a job – on your own.

Because right now, the only thing AI can take over is my joy-heavy tasks, freeing me up for days of endless grinding for the scraps of left over joy from AI's dinner.