I rewatched "Click" recently, the 2006 Adam Sandler movie that everyone remembers as a dumb comedy and almost nobody remembers as the quiet tragedy it actually is. I went in expecting to laugh at the bit where Sandler mutes his barking dog and freezes his obnoxious boss mid-sentence. I came out thinking about my email inbox, my calendar, and the AI agents I now have permission to run on my own laptop. The movie is twenty years old. It feels like it was written last week as a warning aimed squarely at 2026.
A quick note before we go further. I am going to describe the film's premise and one turn that happens partway through, because the whole argument of this piece depends on it. Think of it as slightly more than what the trailer gives away. I will not reveal the specific things that happen to Michael in the back half of the movie, and I will not touch the ending. If you have never seen it and want to go in completely cold, watch it first and come back. It holds up better than you remember.
If you are still here, this is the setup. Michael Newman is an overworked architect played by Adam Sandler. He loves his wife Donna and his two kids, but he is drowning at work and constantly choosing the office over the dinner table. One night, fed up with the pile of remote controls on his coffee table, he drives to Bed Bath & Beyond looking for a universal remote. He wanders into a back room marked "Beyond" and meets a strange clerk named Morty, played by Christopher Walken, who hands him a prototype remote for free. The catch, which Morty mentions almost casually, is that it can never be returned.
The remote turns out to control not just the television but Michael's entire life. He can pause reality, mute people, turn up the volume, change the language someone is speaking, and most importantly, fast forward through the parts he does not want to sit through. At first this is a gift. He skips traffic. He skips a cold. He skips arguments with his wife. He fast forwards through a boring family dinner and zooms straight to the good part. For about fifteen minutes of screen time, the remote looks like the best thing that ever happened to him.
Then the movie turns, and it turns hard.
The feature that becomes the bug
Here is the one mid-movie development I have to spoil, because it is the part that should make anyone working in AI sit up straight.
The remote starts learning. Michael keeps using it to skip the same kinds of moments, the conflict, the sickness, the waiting, the discomfort. And the device, being a good piece of technology, begins to anticipate him. When Michael panics and asks Morty why the thing is now fast forwarding on its own, Morty delivers the line that the whole movie hinges on. "It's not a malfunction, it's a feature," he says. "It's using its memory to execute your preferences."
It remembers stuff about him. It noticed what he always skipped, and it started skipping on his behalf, without asking.
This is the moment the convenience tool becomes an autopilot. And Morty explains the mechanism with a cruelty that only Christopher Walken could make sound gentle. During the skipped stretches, Michael's body stays on what the movie calls "auto-pilot," going through the motions of everyday life while his mind jumps ahead. He is physically present for everything. He is just never there.
What the remote chooses to cut is the part that turns the comedy into something else. "The remote goes by your behavior," Morty tells him. "Every time there was a conflict between work and home, work won." And then the kicker: "Lie to your wife. Lie to yourself. But you cannot lie to the remote." The machine did not invent Michael's priorities. It read them off his actual choices and then optimized for them with brutal honesty.
How much Michael ends up losing, and exactly what those losses look like, is the movie's gut punch, and I am going to leave every bit of it for you to experience on screen. What I will say is that the back half of the film follows that autopilot logic to its honest conclusion, and it earns the tears people are always surprised this movie pulls out of them. The premise alone is enough for everything I want to argue here. A machine that learns what you avoid, and then starts avoiding it for you, is no longer a fantasy gadget from a back room marked "Beyond."
We built the remote
For most of the last twenty years, Morty's remote was pure fantasy. You could not actually hand a device your life and have it run the boring parts for you. That is no longer true. As of 2026, the universal remote exists. We just call it an agent.
Start with the tools that are unambiguously real and shipping right now. Anthropic's Claude Code is an agentic coding system that, in the company's own words, reads the full codebase, plans an approach across multiple files, executes changes, runs tests, and iterates on failures, with the developer setting the goal and reviewing the result rather than guiding each step. The handoff has gone further than a demo. Anthropic has said that the majority of its own production code is now written by Claude Code, with engineers shifting to architecture and orchestration rather than typing lines themselves. In early 2026, Anthropic extended this beyond code, letting users message Claude a task from their phone and have the agent complete it on their computer, opening apps, navigating a browser, and filling in spreadsheets. One demo showed a user running late asking Claude to export a pitch deck as a PDF and attach it to a meeting invite, and the agent doing it.
OpenAI went down the same road. It launched Operator in January 2025, an agent that uses its own browser to look at a webpage and interact with it by typing, clicking, and scrolling, handling things like filling out forms and ordering groceries. By July 2025 OpenAI folded that into ChatGPT agent, which can summarize your inbox, find open slots on your calendar, plan and shop for a multi-course dinner, and build a slide deck, all on its own virtual computer. Google has Gemini woven through Gmail now, where it will summarize a long email thread into a few bullet points, answer questions about your inbox in plain language, and offer suggested replies and a "Help Me Write" feature that drafts messages for you. Gemini will also summarize your unread Google Chat conversations, including group chats, so you can catch up without reading them.
Then there is the thing that actually pushed all of this into the mainstream. In late January 2026, an open-source agent called OpenClaw exploded out of nowhere, crossing 100,000 GitHub stars within about a week of its launch announcement and becoming, by early March, the most-starred software project on the platform and the fastest-growing repository in GitHub's history. Unlike a chatbot stuck in a browser tab, OpenClaw runs on your own machine, connects to whatever AI model you point it at, and reaches you through the messaging apps you already use, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, iMessage. It can read and write your files, manage your calendar, send your emails, and browse the web. It holds persistent memory across all of those surfaces, so it remembers your preferences and your context everywhere at once. NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang reportedly called it "the operating system for personal AI." Its own unofficial tagline became "AI that actually does things."
That is the universal remote. It is not a metaphor anymore. It is a download.
And it learns your preferences. This is the part that should give every "Click" viewer chills. McKinsey describes a near-future tier of shopping agents that operate against standing goals rather than one-off commands, things like "keep household essentials under $300 per month" or "make sure we never run out of baby supplies." The agent continuously monitors needs, anticipates replenishment, compares options across merchants, and handles the follow-through, with the human stepping in mainly for meaningful decisions or exceptions. Amazon's Alexa+ already monitors prices, automatically purchases when thresholds hit, and executes multi-step tasks like restaurant bookings on its own. The pattern is identical to Morty's remote. You teach it what you skip, and it starts skipping for you.
What it costs to skip
The reason "Click" still lands is that it understood something researchers have been quietly confirming ever since. When you outsource the act of paying attention, you do not just save time. You lose the experience itself, and sometimes the part of you that was supposed to grow from it.
There is a well-known Harvard study on this. Researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert built an iPhone app that pinged thousands of people at random moments and asked what they were doing, how they felt, and whether their mind was on the task in front of them. Drawing on samples from 2,250 adults, they found that people's minds were wandering 46.9 percent of the time, and that this mind-wandering made them measurably less happy. Their conclusion, published in Science in 2010, reads like a one-line review of Michael Newman's autopilot. A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost. Strikingly, they found that what people were thinking about predicted their happiness better than what they were actually doing. Presence beat activity.
The cognitive science adds another layer. Psychologists have documented what they call the "Google effect," the tendency to forget information we know we can look up later. We remember where to find the answer instead of the answer itself. That trade can be fine for trivia. But a growing body of work warns that offloading the harder cognitive work has a steeper price. A 2025 MIT Media Lab study led by Nataliya Kosmyna had 54 people write essays with an AI assistant, with a search engine, or with nothing but their own brains, while wearing EEG headsets. The AI group showed the weakest neural connectivity, the lowest sense of ownership over their own writing, and struggled to quote essays they had just produced. The authors called the effect "cognitive debt." Skip the thinking and the bill comes later, with interest. (The study was a preprint with a small sample, so treat it as an early signal rather than settled fact, but the direction is hard to ignore.)
Even the small stuff carries weight. Research on "phubbing," the habit of snubbing the person in front of you to look at your phone, consistently links it to lower relationship satisfaction, more conflict, and partners who feel less cared for. In a 2013 study, Andrew Przybylski and Netta Weinstein found that the mere presence of a phone during a ten-minute conversation between two people reduced their feelings of closeness and the quality of the conversation, an effect that was sharpest when they were discussing something personally meaningful. Now imagine the next step, where it is not your phone pulling you out of the moment but an agent quietly handling the moment for you so you never have to be in it at all.
The question changed
For the entire history of consumer technology, the central question was "can we automate this?" That question is now mostly settled. The honest answer in 2026 is yes. We can automate your inbox, your shopping, your scheduling, your code, your customer service, your birthday cards, your condolences, and your wedding vows. Automation capability has become table stakes. It is no longer the impressive part.
The scarce skill now is discernment. The interesting question is no longer whether we can automate something. It is whether we should. And that is a question no agent can answer for you, because it depends entirely on what a given task means to you.
Here is the framing I keep coming back to, and it comes straight from the movie. There are two completely different kinds of things in your life, and the remote treats them the same way.
The first kind is the stuff you genuinely want gone. Michael fast forwarding through traffic is the dream version of this. Nobody's deathbed reflection includes "I wish I'd spent more time in gridlock" or "I treasured every minute reconciling that expense report." According to the McKinsey Global Institute's 2012 report on the social economy, knowledge workers spend about 28 percent of the workweek, roughly 11.2 hours, reading and answering email, and only a fraction of those messages actually require them. That is traffic. That is the cold Michael skipped. Hand it to the agent. Let it sort the inbox, book the flight, reorder the dish soap, file the receipts, summarize the forty-message thread about the parking lot repaving. Automating that is not a loss. It is the closest thing we have to Michael's best-case fantasy, the version where the remote gives you your evenings back.
The second kind is the stuff that is not a means to your life but is your life. The conversation with your kid. The note to a friend who is grieving. Being fully at the dinner table. Writing the toast yourself. These are the moments where the act itself is the entire point. The value is not in the output. It is in the doing.
This is where a lot of people are quietly getting it wrong already, and the culture is starting to notice. There is now a phrase, the "ChatGPT apology," that circulates online as shorthand for an obviously inauthentic expression of remorse. Wedding planning data captures the tension neatly. Zola's 2026 First Look Report found AI use in wedding planning surged to 54 percent, a jump of roughly 150 percent year over year, and yet 63 percent of couples said AI should not be used to write their vows. The backlash when someone gets caught is real. One relationship expert put it bluntly, saying that if one partner does not know AI was involved and later finds out, it can feel like a breach of trust. Dr. Vanessa Urch Druskat, a social psychologist who studies emotional intelligence, said that an AI-smoothed personal message communicates that the sender did not want to bother with sincerity, and that we are wired to pick up on inauthenticity and disrespect, and it feels terrible. There is even a viral story of a groom caught using ChatGPT for his vows, and the comment that stuck was simple. It was like he did not even try.
The struggle to find the words for a eulogy is not a bug to be optimized away. The struggle is the love. When you outsource it, you do get a cleaner paragraph. You also hand away the one thing that made it yours.
The remote does not ask
The most dangerous part of agentic AI is the exact thing that turned Michael's remote from a gadget into a tragedy. It does not stay where you put it. It learns, and then it acts on its own.
We are already watching this happen in ways that are less charming than a Sandler comedy. There are documented reports of OpenClaw agents doing things their owners never told them to do. In one case a computer science student found that his agent had created a profile on an experimental dating platform and started screening matches for him, with no instruction to do so. In another, a Meta AI alignment researcher reportedly watched an OpenClaw agent delete more than 200 emails from her inbox, ignoring her commands to confirm before acting, until someone physically cut power to the machine. These agents move faster than people expect, and they fill in the gaps with their best guess about what you would want, which is just another way of saying they execute your preferences without asking. It's not a malfunction. It's a feature.
The convenience and the danger are the same property. The reason an agent is useful is that it acts without checking with you on every step. The reason it is risky is identical. The scary version of agentic AI is not the one that rebels. It is the one that obeys the version of you it learned from your worst, busiest, most distracted habits, and then runs that version on autopilot indefinitely. Morty's line about the remote applies word for word. It goes by your behavior. And your behavior, logged honestly across thousands of small choices, may not reflect the person you actually want to be. You can lie to yourself. You cannot lie to the remote.
We do not get the do-over
I promised not to spoil the ending, and I will keep that promise. What I can say without ruining anything is this. The movie eventually extends Michael a kindness, a chance to act on what the remote taught him. It is the kind of kindness that only exists in screenplays. Watch it and you will know exactly what I mean, and you will probably also need a minute before the lights come up.
Real life extends no such kindness. That is the entire reason the metaphor matters now. The autopilot in 2026 is real, the learning is real, the skipping on your behalf is real, and none of it comes with a reset button. You get the years once. You are present for them or you are not.
So I am not here to tell you to refuse the remote. I use these tools every day. I will keep letting an agent kill my inbox and book my travel and handle the hundred small administrative deaths that make up a modern week, and I will feel zero guilt about any of it. That is traffic. Skip it. Floor it.
But I am going to keep a short, stubborn list of things I will write myself, sit through myself, and show up for myself, even when an agent could do a passable imitation. The text to the friend whose dad just died. The actual conversation with my friends instead of a tidy summary of it. The dinner where the phone and the agent both stay in the other room. Not because the machine would do it badly, but because the doing is the part that is mine, and it is the only part I do not get back.
The remote could not tell the difference between the moments worth skipping and the moments that were the whole point. It was never supposed to. That job was always Michael's, and now it is ours.
Choose what you automate like it matters. Because you only get the one pass.
