At a recent technology conference, Marc Lore, the billionaire cofounder of Diapers.com and Jet.com, was describing his newest venture.
It’s called Wonder, and it operates about 120 “tech-enabled” kitchens across the northeastern U.S., each one a fast-casual storefront that Lore calls a “programmable culinary platform”: an all-electric kitchen with a 700-ingredient library, a staff of up to 12, and a growing complement of conveyors and robotic arms capable of preparing meals from 30 different restaurant brands simultaneously in one location. The company has partnerships with Bobby Flay and José Andrés, and it recently bought the robotics firm that automated Sweetgreen’s kitchens.
The secret sauce to Lore’s newest food venture, however, is not grandma’s recipe. It is AI that helps you decide what to eat. “Ninety percent of my meals that I’m eating on a daily basis, weekly basis, are AI-directed,” Lore said recently. “I’m not choosing what to eat. AI is telling me what to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner most days.”
Silicon Valley has spent decades engineering “friction” out of every corner of life, and it has been remarkably successful, in good ways and bad.
The sweeping vision, which is helping fuel interest in a 2027 IPO that could value the company beyond its current $9 billion valuation, is to make all of this available to anyone, anywhere. Lore describes the endgame as a “Shopify front end with an AI prompt.” You type in the restaurant you want to exist, and AI generates the name, branding, menu, pricing, and recipes, then launches it across every Wonder kitchen in the country. Lore says he envisions 10,000 locations by 2040.
At the center of Lore’s quest for epicurean domination is a robot he calls the “infinite bowl machine.” It assembles salads and grain bowls on a magnetized spinning platform — 500 flawless bowls per hour — and it exists to solve what Lore identifies as a restaurant’s biggest weakness: humans. “Probably the most inconsistency that we’re seeing is in bowls, because humans are making it, and they sort of make it with different portion sizes, or they might miss an ingredient,” he said. (One commenter on YouTube, having watched Lore’s presentation, asked, “Are these people insane?”)
I don’t mean to pick on Lore, who is by all accounts a brilliant guy chasing a worthy mission: making good food cheaper for more people. He is simply articulating, with unusual candor, the belief system of the AI age: that because machines can absorb ever more of the physical and mental labor of daily life, they should. Silicon Valley has spent decades engineering “friction” out of every corner of life — deciding what to eat, hailing a taxi, speaking to another human being — and it has been remarkably successful, in good ways and bad.
Today, if you call your pharmacy, you will not get a pharmacist but a chatbot. Want to check a bag at the airport? Head to the touchscreen kiosk. Flight canceled? Speak to the AI. Many hotels are replacing front desks with iPads connected to agents overseas, and speech-recognition systems now take your order at fast-food drive-thrus. In the promised vision of agentic AI, humans will no longer have to do, well, anything. Your AI agent will do your banking, order your groceries, and pick out your kid’s Christmas presents, along with hundreds of other tasks.
We push to one extreme and then eventually course-correct back. I suspect our current era will be no different. The faceless AI-powered boom will ultimately lead to a deep desire to reclaim what was lost: human connection.
The underlying promise of modern technology is that these tools will free us from mundane tasks, leaving us with more space to connect with one another. The irony is that much of the evidence suggests the opposite: As our tools have made us more connected to the digital world, our society has become increasingly disconnected.
I’m hardly a Luddite. I call Ubers all the time, and I recently used AI to diagnose a problem with my washing machine. It was great and probably saved me a few hundred bucks in repair costs. I enjoy the convenience of these tools as much as anyone. I’m just increasingly curious — and sometimes concerned — about what happens when our tools of convenience get taken to their logical extreme.
According to the American Time Use Survey, the amount of time American adults spent socializing face-to-face dropped by about 30% between 2003 and 2022. For teens, the drop was close to 50%. While young people spent an hour a day interacting with friends in 2003, they now spend less than half that, and in 2024, for the first time ever, Americans over 50 years old spent more time socializing in person than their peers under 25. On average, Americans spend about five and a half hours a day alone.
In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General described loneliness as a public health crisis with an impact on mortality comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. We are living with the most advanced connection technology that has ever been made, and we are conducting a national experiment in isolation.
But this is not a doomer essay. In fact, the more miserable these statistics get, the more optimistic I become because one era’s excess has an uncanny tendency to foster desire for its complete opposite.
Culture acts on a pendulum. We swing too far to one side, only to inevitably swing to the other. The bleak working conditions of the Industrial Revolution brought on the labor movement, which introduced the idea of weekends. The miracle of ready-made foods in the 1950s gave way to farmers markets and the organic food movement. Mass manufacturing created a resurgence in craft. We push to one extreme and then eventually course-correct back. I suspect our current era will be no different. The faceless AI-powered boom will ultimately lead to a deep desire to reclaim what was lost: human connection.
In Korean culture, there is a philosophical concept called jeong. Candidly, it is hard to define. Charlotte Cho, the author of The Little Book of Jeong, describes it as the opposite of love at first sight: a connection that deepens gradually, over years. “It takes time to create jeong,” she writes, “but the process encourages generosity, empathy, and the cultivation of lasting bonds.”
We’ve all experienced our own versions of jeong.
A few months back, I had a run-of-the-mill Zoom conversation with someone I met through work. It was a totally innocuous and pleasant conversation, with no reason for any particular follow-up. I didn’t think much about it until a few days later when I checked my mail and found a handwritten note from him, saying how much he enjoyed the conversation and hoped to keep in touch.
A few weeks later, we ended up having dinner and are now working on a project together. Without the note, I suspect neither would have happened. It was a tiny, inefficient gesture that turned a largely forgettable professional interaction into an actual relationship, and it opened the door to a professional project neither of us anticipated. He could have scheduled an AI-generated email to land in my inbox a few weeks after our Zoom chat, but I doubt I would have felt the same joy or interest in meeting in person knowing I was receiving an algorithm’s output.
What makes jeong especially interesting now is that it runs counter to the prevailing logic of Silicon Valley, with its thirst for efficiency and the stripping of the human element from our day-to-day interactions. While AI promises to make our lives easier, jeong suggests that our inefficient interactions with people are precisely what make life meaningful in the first place. It requires exactly what our era’s belief system is engineered to eliminate: waiting, repetition, small talk, inconsistency, randomness, and the very serendipity of ordinary life.
AI promises to make our lives easier, but jeong suggests that our inefficient interactions with people are what make life meaningful.
The writer Shawn Smucker recently published “Please Use AI,” a piece of satire that captures our moment brilliantly. Written as mock advice, it cheerfully urges the reader to hand every human task to the machine. “Be sure to use AI when making your next, I don’t know, meal plan, for example,” he writes. “Definitely do not call your friend who loves to cook and ask her for her favorite recipes or tips or ways to save time making meals, because you will end up talking for longer than you had hoped, hearing, perhaps, about her father’s cancer diagnosis or how lonely she’s been or even what she’s planted in her spring garden and then lost with the early frost.”
Here I should say again: I am a fan of technologies that improve our lives. I do not want to hand-wash my clothes, and I am glad the machines took that job. The question of our era is not so much whether machines should do more, which of course they will. The question is what we do with the time we are granted.
And this is where I find the philosophy of jeong useful.
Handwritten notes? Go for it. Waiting in line? Ask the person next to you how their day is going. Got a spare hour? Call a friend and go for a walk. Talk to the bartender. Talk to your Uber driver. Someone crosses your mind? Send them a text. Cook too much? Walk the extra plate next door. Jeong does not distinguish between important occasions and unimportant ones, and in truth, we rarely know which moments will be the important ones in the long run.
That’s the serendipity of life.
I am confident the pendulum will swing back, and in some corners, it already is. The number of independent bookstores in America has grown roughly 70% since 2020, with four stores now opening for every one that closes. People, it turns out, want community with their paperbacks. Run clubs are multiplying even faster: The number of new clubs on Strava nearly quadrupled last year, and nearly one in five Gen Z members has gone on a date with someone they met through one. Authentic moments between real people are increasingly scarce, but scarcity creates value, and human authenticity is fast becoming the scarcest good in the economy.
It’s on each of us to ensure that in automating the labor of life, we do not automate away its substance.
The robots are coming, yes, and many of them will genuinely help us lead safer, healthier lives. But it’s on each of us to ensure that in automating the labor of life, we do not automate away its substance: the bond of community.
Which is, in the end, the purpose of being alive.
So go ahead: Enjoy your infinite bowl for lunch. It will be flawless, and it will arrive on time, and who knows, it may even taste good. But on your way out, maybe hold the door for someone. Ask the person at the register how their day is going. It will seem like a small thing, but it just might be the most important thing you do all day.
This article Why the AI boom is creating a hunger for human connection is featured on Big Think.