A senior editor at The Verge is questioning whether AI assistants like Google's new Gemini agent "Spark" are actually solving the right problems. In a June 3, 2026 column, TC Sottek — who has covered tech since 2011 and previously worked as a National Park System advocate — argued that as AI gets more capable, its focus on "productivity" reveals a deeper emptiness at the heart of the industry's pitch. Sottek's colleagues David Pierce and Jay Peters tested Spark hands-on and found it eerily effective: it knew Pierce's dog is named Frida and knew Peters' wife's first name, even though neither had explicitly shared that information with Google. Sottek acknowledged the technology's impressiveness but pushed back on the broader narrative being sold by Google, Microsoft, Apple, and other tech giants. He pointed out that these companies spent decades blurring the line between office life and personal life, then turned around and offered AI tools to help manage the chaos they helped create. He referenced the "busy trap" and "software brain" — the modern condition of treating every computer task as both urgent and important — and noted that the French government went so far as to declare a legal "right to disconnect" from work, a concept Sottek admitted still feels radical from his American perspective. The deeper critique, Sottek wrote, is that the tech industry frames productivity as a moral virtue, even invoking old proverbs like "idle hands are the devil's workshop" to shame people who step back. While he's not arguing for laziness, he believes consumers should recognize AI assistants for what they really are: tools designed to optimize a work-and-life structure that was already broken before the algorithms arrived. As Spark handles tasks like color-coding calendars and pulling personal details from scattered data, Sottek said the real question isn't how efficient the assistant can be — it's whether efficiency was ever the thing we actually needed.