Does Outsourcing Our Certainty Compromise Our Intuition?

I listened to an episode of The Daily podcast last week while on a walk. The host was interviewing a fellow New York Times reporter who’d published a story about smart baby monitors. 

Yes. You read that right. Smart Baby Monitors. 

Think WHOOP or the Ōura ring but make it for baby. 

The one they were talking about is called Nanit, and it uses AI to track sleep, monitor breathing motion and send real time safety notifications to caregivers. From what I can gather, it’s also able to deliver updates on health and developmental milestones based on the data it collects.

On the one hand, WOW. 

I vividly remember the anxiety of having a newborn. The constant checking, worrying and wondering…are they sleeping, are they breathing, is the room the right temperature, are they awake, should I check on them, is this normal? 

So a device that can reduce that anxiety with real-time, accurate data delivered to my phone – wherever whenever? Yeah, I can see that being super appealing. 

On the other hand, YIKES! 

I am all for leveraging technology to make life less complicated. And, feel free to call me old-school here (or just plain OLD), but I'm so glad the internet didn't exist when I was a new mom, because, it was all that not knowing, worrying, incessant checking, constant mistake-making and figuring it out the hard way that built both my character and confidence as a parent. 

By baby #3, I still worried (because, well, babies), but I was much more apt to trust my own instincts – a mother’s intuition, so to speak – because of the battle scars and earned wisdom from the first two go-rounds. 

Sincere apologies to Aly, the OG guinea pig.

Progress, privacy and parenting choices aside, I think the bigger question this story surfaces is one I keep asking myself as AI becomes woven into more and more aspects of life:  

What happens to our self-trust and intuition when we constantly outsource our certainty?

And, by the by, AI came up with that phrase. My ego needs you to know the theory is all mine. The bot just named it. 

It's giving meta, no? 

The truth is, I do reach for AI when I want instant answers and don't have the time or attention to do the research. I do reach for AI when I know that outsourcing a task frees me up to focus on the people and the things that need me.

I’m also acutely aware that my choice to delegate to AI opens me up to potential risk and misfires. It can’t read my mind, and it can miss the mark if the input or prompt lacks specificity. That’s just part of the deal at this point.

Where I get more twitchy is when I notice myself looking to ‘the robots’ for confirmation and certainty.

Whenever I'm writing an email, Gmail now automatically offers up suggestions to make a sentence more concise. My husband appreciates it. “Why use 9 words when I can use 3 to say the same thing,” he says. Noted. 

And also, as someone who loves to write – and thinks she does a pretty good job at it – I resent the seed of doubt the ‘Make Concise,’ ‘Smart Compose’ and automatic word suggestions plant.

The emotional cycle goes something like this:

Indignation: I wrote what I wrote. It’s good. Screw you. You don’t know me and what I want to convey.

Doubt and second guessing: Wait…does the ‘Make Concise’ actually sound better?

Option A: Resignedly accept the suggestion and move on because for this email, it doesn’t matter that much.

Or

Option B: Rewrite the whole damn line in my own voice until there are no purple dots underneath it, meaning it passed muster with Gmail’s AI filter. Wait…ugh.

So much for efficiency and self-trust.

And let’s face it, AI and data optimization are only getting more pervasive. Many of these tools show up automatically, without our consent. I didn’t ask for them, yet here they are. And I'm pretty sure I have to go into settings to opt out of them.

It’s a bit like the unsolicited advice new moms get from well-meaning relatives and strangers, no? Today’s versions just make it harder and harder to avoid. 

And, perhaps it’s telling that I haven’t opted out yet.

Smart tools like the ones in Gmail, the Nanit and the Ōura ring are programmed to help replace doubt with data; to take away the stress of uncertainty, simplify and optimize our lives.

But when your wellness tracker says your sleep score is 92 and you still feel exhausted, who do you believe? Your body? Or your bot?

Does unlimited access to certainty replace our own certitude? Do we start to chip away, email by email, device by device, at our own inner knowing?

To be clear, it’s not just me struggling with this existential question.

Earlier this year, the Global Wellness Summit released its Future of Wellness report. "The Over-Optimization Backlash" was the big headline. The report noted that as health data multiplies, people start experiencing analysis paralysis rather than clarity, and get overwhelmed by constant self-tracking and a fear of "getting it wrong." 

As if we didn’t already have enough to worry about, we can add “not hitting 10,000 steps" to the running tab of things we feel bad about on a daily basis. 

What really got me, though, was the “fear of getting it wrong." 

Because isn't that all of us? In every facet of life? How often do I think to myself, or utter out loud “what if I’m wrong?” 

Early in our parenting days, Joel and I thought Aly was crying because she was cutting a tooth. We rubbed her gums all night long with Baby Anbesol until she finally settled down. The next day, I got a call at work from day care. Her eardrum had burst. The poor baby had a raging ear infection. 

We never made that mistake again. 

(Really sorry Aly.)  

Mistakes become earned wisdom.  

Earned wisdom becomes self-trust and inner knowing.

Which brings me back to the podcast and the Nanit and to whether outsourcing our certainty ultimately leads to the demise of our intuition – whether that be as first-time parents or while navigating one of life's many transitions that render us beginners again. That's when it's most tempting to ask the robots to tell us we're right, right? 

But how would they know? 

This is a developing story. And if the backlash against over-optimization is any indication, the antidote to outsourced certainty is turning inward; learning to listen and pay attention to our own body. 

Maybe protecting our self-trust starts with that same level of noticing – along with a healthy dose of curiosity:

Noticing when we’re reaching for the robots, and why. 

Noticing if it's to help with efficiency or to tell us that what we’re doing is ‘right’. 

Do we accept its answers blindly? Or do we pressure-test against our own earned wisdom and knowing?

No judgement. No pressure. Just possibility.