Whose Voice Is Choosing the Destination?

Pt 3 of 3: From Twin Tub to Trolley Tech

In Part 1, I started with a twin-tub washing machine and ended with an AI-powered supermarket trolley. In Part 2, I asked who that trolley was actually working for. Both pieces have brought me to a question that feels considerably bigger than either washing machines or supermarkets:

Why do we do what we do — and why do we not always do what we wanted to do?

We can know what we want and still do something else. We can make a plan and abandon it. We can genuinely want change and find ourselves repeating the same behaviour. We can spend years working towards something before stopping to ask whether we actually chose the destination in the first place. The more I have thought about AI, automation and influence, the more I have come back to something profoundly human: our ability to choose.

Having choices is not the same as choosing

We live in a world with an extraordinary number of choices. What to eat, what to buy, where to work, what to watch, who to follow, how to spend our time and, increasingly, how much of our lives we want technology to assist with. Yet having more choices available does not automatically make us more autonomous.

Every choice exists within an environment. We bring our history, habits, emotions, beliefs and expectations into it. Then we add other people's opinions, cultural expectations, advertising, workplace norms, social media and increasingly algorithms capable of learning what captures our attention. There is a lot of noise.

Some of it is obvious. Some of it has been around for so long that it simply sounds like truth. Work hard. Be productive. Earn more. Look like this. Want that. Do not waste time. You should be further ahead by now. Be grateful for what you have. Do more. Do less.

Eventually it can become surprisingly difficult to distinguish between something we have consciously chosen and something we have simply become very good at pursuing.

Compliance is not autonomy

The imaginary AI trolley from Part 2 helped me see something else. Imagine I tell it I want to change something about the way I eat. I pick up a product and the trolley tells me to put it back. Perhaps I comply. I follow the instruction. I am a “good girl”. I do exactly what I said I would do and perhaps, from the outside, it looks as though the technology is working brilliantly.

Yet if my behaviour depends entirely upon an external voice telling me what I am allowed to choose, have I strengthened my autonomy? I am not convinced I have.

This matters well beyond food. We can spend enormous parts of our lives being very good at doing what is expected of us. We meet expectations, follow rules, achieve things and receive approval. Sometimes that is entirely appropriate. Living alongside other humans necessarily involves compromise, responsibility and consideration.

The interesting question is what happens when compliance becomes our default way of navigating our own lives. If I am always looking outside myself for the correct answer, eventually I may become very good at hearing everybody else's voice and considerably less practised at hearing my own.

Rebellion is not autonomy either

There is another response to control: rebellion. Tell me I cannot have it and suddenly I want it more. Tell me what I should do often enough and eventually I may do precisely the opposite, simply to prove that the decision is mine. It can feel wonderfully freeing, except I am not sure that is autonomy either.

If somebody tells me to turn left and I automatically turn right because I refuse to be told what to do, they are still influencing my direction. Compliance says, I will do what you tell me. Rebellion says, I will show you that you cannot tell me what to do.

Autonomy asks a different question: Which way do I actually want to go?

That distinction feels increasingly important to me.

Why do we not do what we wanted to do?

This is where the question becomes more personal. Most of us have experienced the gap between intention and action. We were going to do something. We said we wanted something. We promised ourselves we would make time for it. We genuinely meant to change. Then life happened. Researchers call this the intention–behaviour gap.

Sometimes the obstacle is practical. Sometimes it is habit, fear, competing priorities or simply exhaustion. Sometimes the immediate reward is more powerful than the distant one. Sometimes we discover that the goal we thought we wanted was actually built around somebody else's expectation.

Sometimes we rebel against our own rules. That last one fascinates me. We can create such rigid expectations for ourselves that we eventually experience our own plan as another form of control. The person issuing the instructions and the person rebelling against them are both us.

Perhaps the answer is not always more discipline. Sometimes it may be better understanding.

Nothing has to be wrong

This is something I have become increasingly interested in through coaching. Nothing has to be wrong with your life to want more from it. You can be grateful and still curious. You can love your work and wonder whether you want to work quite so much. You can have achieved things you once desperately wanted and discover that the person you are now wants something different.

Sometimes there is no crisis. There is simply a quiet question: Is this still what I want?

I recognise that one personally. There have been times when the apparent answer to wanting greater balance was obvious: work less. Except that did not quite fit me. I realised I did not necessarily want somebody else's version of balance. I did not need to justify enjoying work or wanting to do a lot of it. What I needed was the freedom to understand what myversion of enough looked like.

A life that looks beautifully balanced to somebody else may feel entirely wrong to me. A life that looks extraordinarily busy to somebody else may be exactly what I consciously choose. Autonomy is not choosing the culturally approved answer. It is being able to recognise your own.

Perhaps finding your voice starts with hearing the noise

We often talk about finding your voice as though it is something hidden somewhere inside us waiting to be discovered. Perhaps part of finding it is learning to recognise everything that is not it: the shoulds, the expectations, the habits, the messages we have absorbed, the things we pursue because everybody around us appears to value them, the algorithms showing us more of whatever held our attention yesterday and the commercial systems becoming increasingly good at predicting what might persuade us tomorrow.

None of those influences automatically makes the resulting choice wrong. I can see something advertised and genuinely decide I want it. Somebody can give me excellent advice and I can choose to follow it. An AI system can suggest an option I had never considered and I can decide it is perfect for me.

Autonomy does not require shutting out influence. It requires retaining the ability to notice it and choose.

Find it. Hear it. Act on it. Strengthen it.

Perhaps there is a progression here: find your voice, hear your voice, act on your voice, strengthen your voice.

Finding it is only the beginning. Hearing it means creating enough space amongst everything competing for our attention to notice what we actually think, feel and want. Acting on it is harder. A choice does not become meaningful simply because we recognised it. At some point we have to behave differently.

Then comes something I am increasingly interested in: strengthening it. Every time we make a conscious choice and act upon it, perhaps we become a little more practised at autonomy. We gather evidence that we can listen to ourselves, make decisions, change our minds when new information appears and take responsibility for what follows.

Not because nobody else influenced us, and not because we always got it right, but because the final choice became ours.

This changes how I think about coaching

For me, good coaching is not about having somebody tell you what to do. There are already plenty of voices available for that. Its value can be in creating enough space to notice what is happening underneath the obvious answer.

What matters to you? What do you want? What would enough look, sound or feel like? What are you doing because you consciously choose it, and what are you doing because you have always done it? Sometimes the most useful question is not How do I achieve this? It is Do I actually want it?

That can be an extraordinarily powerful question. There is little value in becoming more efficient at reaching a destination that was never yours.

Which brings me back to AI

This is why I find the possibilities of AI exciting rather than simply frightening. AI can research, organise, compare, process, structure and remove repetitive work. It can reduce friction between an intention and acting upon it. Used thoughtfully, it can give us time and capacity back.

I want that. I simply do not want to outsource the decision about what that capacity is for.

If AI gives me five hours back, I want to notice what I do with them. If it helps me shop according to goals I have consciously chosen, wonderful. If it helps me work more efficiently because I have decided that the work matters to me, wonderful. If it gives me time to walk, think, spend time with somebody I love, create something, learn something or simply stop, that matters too.

The important part is that more capacity does not automatically have to become more output. Technology can assist my choices. I do not want it to replace my practice of choosing.

The destination is still ours

Perhaps that is where these three pieces have been heading all along. The twin tub asked whether accepting help diminishes us. The trolley asked who benefits when technology becomes increasingly capable of understanding and influencing us. The final question belongs to us.

What do I want? Why do I want it? What influences me? Why do I sometimes do something different? What does enough look like for me? Whose voice am I listening to?

There may never have been more technology available to help us get somewhere. There may also never have been more voices competing to tell us where somewhere should be. Perhaps one of the most valuable human skills in an increasingly intelligent world will be the ability to know ourselves well enough to tell the difference.

Find your voice. Hear it. Act on it. Strengthen it.

Then use the technology. Let it reduce the friction, carry some of the labour and give you back some of the time. Just make sure the destination is still yours.