Let AI do the hard parts of your holiday shopping

What is the points of gifts? For children it is of course obvious why they enjoy gifts, they have no/few other means of obtaining these things.

But why do adult humans, who almost always have the ability to just buy the gifts, give and receive gifts?

I personally hate gifts, but I can imagine why people enjoy giving and receiving them. The reason is that it demonstrates that someone else cared, that they took their time and spent energy for you. Likewise giving a gift is an act of appreciation for the other person for the same reason.

But this also means that the idea of automating gift selection makes the whole thing redundant. What purpose is there in AI gift selection? It becomes just a stupid ritual, in which people spend money to fulfill some social obligation.

Everyone I know eventually comes to this conclusion as an adult. All my friends pretty much have "no gift" agreements with their spouses/partners.

I give thoughtful gifts. It would never occur to me to order Amazon slop just to mark some meaningless occasion as mandated by social/adbiz pressure.

The missus reads a lot so whatever book she mentioned that she'd like to read is usually my go to lol.

Yeah that's sensible. Obligatory gifting for birthdays/holidays is what I was really talking about.

An occasional thoughtful "surprise" gift is different and I wasn't intending to exclude that.

For generations, the tradition in my family has been that only children get gifts on holidays. Adults do not (except for gifts given by children to adults).

Adult do give gifts to each other, but not because of holidays. The gifts are because someone saw something and thought "Joe would really love this". They're a way of saying "I thought of you."