Let AI Do the Hard Parts of Your Holiday Shopping

"you can save time by asking Google to call stores on your behalf."

I might have to make popcorn to watch the fallout on this idea.

I already told my loved ones to stop getting me gifts for my bday / holidays a few years ago. I have everything I want that wouldn't be obscenely expensive and in poor taste to request. Whatever people got me ended up on a shelf or in a drawer and was just a waste (with a couple of rare exceptions when someone made / crafted me a gift, and then it's really wonderful).

I can't imagine how useless an unthinking AI would be at this when my own family and friends who, and this is important, _know me_, can't find anything to get me that doesn't land in the above categories. I wouldn't have expected gifts to be a source of AI resource waste, but I must not be very imaginative.

What is the point of this? Shopping is the primary reason people work, people love shopping. Not only that, people don't know what they what to buy so they learn in by looking at the options for ideas.

Also, the point of buying presents isn't charity or wealth transfer but thinking about the person.

This is a the case of having a solution looking for a problem.

What is the points of gifts? For children it is of course obvious why they enjoy gifts, they have no/few other means of obtaining these things.

But why do adult humans, who almost always have the ability to just buy the gifts, give and receive gifts?

I personally hate gifts, but I can imagine why people enjoy giving and receiving them. The reason is that it demonstrates that someone else cared, that they took their time and spent energy for you. Likewise giving a gift is an act of appreciation for the other person for the same reason.

But this also means that the idea of automating gift selection makes the whole thing redundant. What purpose is there in AI gift selection? It becomes just a stupid ritual, in which people spend money to fulfill some social obligation.

It is insane that the thoughtful act of gift giving has been reduced into a checklist item. What is the point anymore?

It's hard to avoid putting my sarcasm hat on. There we go. Finally. The AI killer APP. Not only can we supercharge consumerism by automatically buying amazon slop for your loved ones. But there are whole new product landscapes to monetize - the gift slop stream, the shops optimized for AI to buy the gifts from, the ads for the AI optimized Shopify sites, the SEO for the ads for the AI optimized shopping. And there are even new frontiers to disrupt - what if we skip the AD and SEO middleman and pay chatbots directly for traffic. Amazing.

This circumvents the whole thoughtfulness of gifting thing.

I predict a resurgence in homemade gifts will the eventual backlash to this flavor of soulless consumerism.

Time to go ask ChatGPT what thoughtful homemade gifts I can make for my loved ones.

Yet another instance of tech bros trying to automate away the things that humans should be doing instead of trying to automate away actually hard or dangerous things that humans should _not_ be doing.

Google is promoting this with a holiday angle, but this is impressive versatile AI agent functionality. With the phone call capability, it sounds much more advanced than OpenAI's similar feature.

As time goes on, tech seems to become increasingly detached from the lifestyles of normal people. AI friends, automated gift-giving, sunglasses you can talk to. Nobody wants this — it doesn’t meet people where they’re at and resolve real friction in their lives — but billions will be spent convincing us otherwise.

Maybe this is a side effect of tech workers themselves becoming more detached from the rest of the population. You are statistically unlikely to get a job at Google or Meta if you were not cultivated from day one as a high-achieving box ticking grinder. Anything that does not contribute to TC maximization is unimportant here. Beauty, human experiences, and other such intangibles are irrelevant in that worldview.

SV didn’t used to be this way; there were all different manners of perspective and smarts, which led to genuine innovation. Now we are dominated mostly by a hybrid of hyper-efficient, paperclip maximizing engineering and sociopathic MBA share price optimization.

Next up: an agent that manages returning impersonal, unwanted gifts and getting a refund. Then, it can delegate to the gift buying agent who can use the funds to buy more gifts!

If you’re using AI to help you get gifts for people, then you should just stop giving gifts. No surprise this is coming from a company that makes its money selling ads for other companies making shit you don’t need.

Give your loved ones the gift of not giving them more crap.

> We all love finding the perfect holiday gift, but shopping can often become a chore. Endless scrolling, tracking prices and jumping between tabs — it can feel like work.

It's all so shallow and empty of any meaning. Depressingly lame what consumerism does to our traditions.

I use LLMs to find items for me all the time and it's great. I still have to use my human capacities for consideration and kindness as well as my deep understanding for the people in my life who I care about to suggest what gift I might want to get them. I still need to care. The people in my life have very specific needs and finding the right vendor for a gift involves a lot of searching and reading. Not to mention navigating the brilliant tariffs that have recently made shopping such a joy. LLM tools turn this 3-5h process into a 5 minute exploration.

I'm glad to see this being made mainstream. Hopefully nobody imagines that this will let them care less about people in their lives, since we need a lot more people to care about each other in my opinion.

> "Behind the scenes, AI does the work for you, calling to see if stores nearby have what you're looking for, how much it costs and if there are any special promos...This feature is powered by our Duplex technology"

RIP anyone who has to answer phones at a store. Also, I'm excited/horrified that Duplex is making an appearance. It seemed like it disappeared after they announced it in 2018.

Why do holiday shopping when you can do holiday slopping?

It doesn't make any sense, maybe for some people it is a pleasant thing, searching for presents for loved ones, why do someone want to give all the fun to AI? Let it do the boring and repetitive tasks, workflow automation for instance!

This holiday season, consider giving the gift of a well-researched gift list, and then letting them decide if they want to buy it or not. Most people don't want more stuff, they just want to know you understand them and care about them.

DDOS by Google calls sure is interesting.

I've never connected with how most people do holiday shopping. "Ill just spend $50 on something you want, and you just spend $50 on something I want, and we'll be done!"

Even more degenerate is "You tell me something I should buy, and I'll tell you something you should buy!" At that point the holidays have evolved into a justification of consumerism.

At that point I just stop gift exchanges. To me the point of holiday shopping is to find something they would enjoy that they never would have thought of getting themself. I know its hard, but isn't that the point? It's supposed to be a time of thoughtfulness not "let me just spend $100 and get it over with".