I was once married in the late aughts. A. was very tall and built for basketball. Before the short marriage, we spent the summer of 2007 traveling in Asia together. In Beijing, we went for foot massages after an afternoon of walking the Great Wall. The attendants were beside themselves with excitement. “Yao Ming! Yao Ming!” they called after him. Once in the pedicure chair, they delighted to hold their pale forearms against his size 16 foot.
On that trip, we flew from New York to Beijing to Chengdu to Lhasa, took an overland Land Cruiser from Lhasa to Kathmandu, and then flew from Kathmandu to Karachi and back to New York. Among the many things we learned about each other on that trip was that A. feared flying. Like, really feared it. He’d fold his gigantic frame into the very small airplane seat, knees jutting diagonally. His face slowly drained of blood; his ice-cold hands gripped the armrests and he was barely able to speak. This intense paralysis would last through take-off as if he was trying with all his strength to physically stop the plane. Once we hit 30,000 feet or so, he’d relax enough to pass out in sleep until the descent, when another wave of fear would kick in.
But the thing is: You can’t stop the plane.
That’s the image I’ve kept going back to this year. I’ve been swept up in the drama around AI. Partly it’s been a piece of my professional life — in both theoretical and practical ways — and partly I am spellbound by this period we’re living in. Yes, I believe the hype that this is a major inflection point in history — like the telephone — and it will forever change the way we interact with each other and the world. Team Elevate!
Oh wait Team Destroy wants a turn. My fear of AI is also very real. There is some Panic Point inside of me where I am trying to stop the plane. To follow my merited paranoia, this takeoff could mean the destruction of life on Earth.
And then something happened. A few months ago, I awoke at altitude and realized that I am — we all are — strapped in whether we like it or not, so best to start learning about this plane. And that’s where I am today. (I admit I listen to Ezra Klein as a Polish housewife who listens to the Pope—so basically if Ezra grapples with AI, so do I.)
In real terms this year, AI has made my professional writing life incrementally easier and I expect it to make it even better over time. I am wildly optimistic about the incredible advances poised for science, medicine, climate science, carbon mitigation, finance, logistics, waste mitigation, and on and on and on.
I am also terrified about the amount of horseshit that’s being inhaled by these models—and doubly terrified about what’s being left out. (Please read up on Timnit Gebru. She has very important things to say.) I tend to worry less about total planetary destruction than I do about the Black Mirror side effects of AI. It looks like this: “Your identity was stolen, copied, and assigned to 32,331 people who are all now using your identity and credit. You’ve committed a crime that YOU didn’t commit but since our facial algorithm is biased we have no idea how to unravel this knot. Have a nice day!”
Softly into the night
Yet here’s why I am ultimately excited. I think we’re at a different inflection point that’s about reclaiming all the areas that AI can’t and won’t and will never touch. Imagine that AI, as infinite as it is, is the inkblot. Right now, all we can see is the inkblot. But what about all the negative space around it that has no digital footprint, all the things that cannot make their way into large language models? All your private intuitions and chaotic mishmash of memories that can only be expressed through metaphor and art? All your ongoing grapples with god or no god, or your conscience? All the ways we connect nonsensical dots but result in new insight? All our illogical weirdness, coincidences, and serendipities that fall outside logic?
The last 30 years have seen the bottom drop out for anything resembling a degree in literature or the humanities or the arts. The market stopped rewarding critical thinking so the supply also dwindled. We non-STEM types were pushed to the sidelines by the headfirst rush into the hyper-logical #nerdsrule ascendancy as even we clutched our Walter Benjamin and Norton anthologies. (Nope, no schadenfreude here about the end of the brogrammer. One ruminated in the New Yorker,“As coding per se begins to matter less, maybe softer skills will shine.” Yes, yes they will.)
Now we finally have a leg up in my opinion. Sam Altman suggested it himself in a recent podcast:
Sam Altman
I expect, like — I expect that if we look forward to the future, things — everything that — things that we want to be cheap can get much cheaper, and things that we want to be expensive are going to be astronomically expensive.
Kevin Roose
Like what?
Sam Altman
Real estate, handmade goods, art. And so totally, like, there will be a huge premium on things like that. And there will be many people who really — there’s always been a — even when machine-made products have been much better, there has always been a premium on handmade products. And I’d expect that to intensify.
The AI obsession is fundamentally about scaled mechanical super-outcomes — it’s also about money but that’s a different rant. In many instances, outcomes are fantastic, like curing cancer. Great outcome, let’s do it! But your own practice, experience, and process — the way you pull your thigh bones back in downward dog, the way you warm the mustard seeds in the pan to release their fragrance to add to your red lentil soup, the way you feel when watching the joy of your dog on a good walk. There is no scaling that. This is a 1:1 boundless experience that will only become more precious and more knowable as the maw of our AI future opens wide.
I’ll paraphrase a parable I recently saw in Rick Rubin’s book “The Creative Act: A Way of Being.”
The story is about an old man who carries a clay bucket to a well, and slowly lowers it down by hand, careful to not let it knock around the stone well’s walls lest it break. A young traveler witnesses the main in this time-consuming task. He tells the old man he knows about pulley systems that would save time and make the work much more efficient. The old man replies, “I’ll keep doing it the way I always have; it takes a lot of focus. If I used the pulley system, it might be come so easy I’d think about other things and it would be done with no care and in no time. If I put so little care and time into it, then what might the water taste like?”
What will the water taste like?
Brilliant