Happy New Year Greenblasters!!!

I’ve missed you. Sincerely. (Ok enough mushy stuff.)

I don’t know about you, but I often have 2 seemingly opposite feelings at once:

• I feel ugly AND I think I look great

• I think I’m smarter than everyone AND a complete idiot

• I think my life is going great, AND I have minor anxiety attacks every time I think about how my life is going.

And that’s ALSO how I feel about the only topic that I can seem to think about these days:

A to the muthafuckin I.

Today, I want to explain why I’m TERRIFIED of what AI will bring, and why I’m OPTIMISTIC that humans can find a path forward without the worst dystopian scenarios coming true.

Also, I should preface it by saying I’m not a scientist, anthropologist, machine learning engineer or technological historian (but you guys knew that by now). However, I’m a concerned citizen who spend his days thinking about the ways humans communicate to each other, why that’s so important, and how to teach others to do it better.

So that’s my angle here:

Communication, and the way AI will fuck that up (and already is).

And what we can do to fight back.

Because it will be a fight. Just like you’ve fought with your phone for your attention, we’ll have to fight with AI for our ability to express ourselves.

Ready? Let’s go.

Why I’m terrified

The second I saw what ChatGPT was capable of, I knew that a line had been crossed.

The creation of language, at lightning speed, in a decent facsimile of human writing, was shocking, impressive and utterly disgusting to me.

I’m really not trying to exaggerate my emotions here. I have a visceral reaction to Generative AI (models that can produce images, text, music etc.) that I need to be honest about, because many people - especially in the business/tech world that I inhabit - have a hard time understanding my hatred of this technology.

To them, and to you, I say:

Generative A.I. is deeply, deeply inhuman.

It takes one of the only thing that makes us who we are as a species - language: the ability to encode our thoughts and feelings and share with others - and outsources it to a machine, who can do it for us, faster, easier and cheaper.

(Specifically, I’m talking about text and speech generation here. That’s my area of expertise and concern. Visual artists and musicians can talk about their domains.)

This is just too tempting for too many people. Think how many people struggle with communication. You might, for example. And I don’t blame you.

Writing is fucking HARD. Speaking is hard.

Because THINKING IN LANGUAGE is hard.

Giving voice to our complex emotions and experiences, while also trying to convey important information, while honouring customs and etiquette, while trying to not to overload the audience but also not under-explain yourself…

It takes years and years to master communication skills, if mastery can even be said to exist.

But like anything, the struggle makes the master.

As Ryan Holiday writes in his book The Obstacle Is The Way:

“The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.”

I remember learning this about meditation, that every time your attention wanders and you have to bring it back, that’s not failing, that IS the purpose of mediation.

So too with communication. And let me be as clear as I possibly can:

You will never get good at writing or speaking if you use ChatGPT to think of words for you.

You are removing the obstacle from your path. And then the path itself will disappear.

This is exactly what I fear far too many of us will do, slowly at first, until it becomes a habit:

Allow A.I. to create language for us because it’s easier and faster.

And then someday not so soon, our brains will become the mental version of this:

Why I’m optimistic 

Because, well…

What else is there to do?

My mum used to tell me that during the 60’s and nuclear proliferation, everyone thought for sure the humans would wipe each other - and themselves - out.

But we didn’t.

We’ve seen the incredibly toxic effects of social media - humanity’s most recent techno-utopian endeavour - as illustrated best by films like The Social Dilemma and Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation.

But we’ve also seen the incredible response to those works, and how people on both sides of the political aisle in the US are rallying around this issue.

I believe the thing that people crave, above all else, is genuine human connection.

When this is absent, people look for substitutes in drugs, alcohol, social media, and the promise of making money without effort.

But most of us realize that these things don’t fulfill us.

Struggling & striving allow us to connect with other people through our words and create meaning in our lives and construct a shared vision for the future.

So even though AI is here to stay, there will always be people like me holding the line, losing, but keeping up the struggle, for the sake of the struggle.

Love ya.