It’s been a while since I posted & I feel now an obligation not to justify the time away, but in the famous words of Phil McKnight, just do it – that is, write more posts at a higher frequency.
In the time away, however, I have dived into books as a way of learning from great writers, which if I am disciplined and graced with prose, can become by the end of my tiny life.
This post was written at work, while pondering the growing divide between each other in the advent of growing reasons not to need each other – this is frankly frightening & should create urgency in our society. Anyway, hope y’all like it.
We need more humans to be there for each other than ever before.
On the massive wave of the AI Revolution, I believe we humans will increasingly be searching for other humans to lean on, trust in, spend time with, & just be there for one another.
But equally, there are more & more reasons to stay indoors, play video games, watch netflix, ignore our neighbors, stick to our screens, & reinforce our social anxiety by doing so.
This should be very, very alarming for obvious reasons (without social connection & face-to-face interactions, we devolve as a species) & unobvious reasons (our connection to our devices becomes our preferred choice of interaction).
As we begin to put more & more trust into AI models, we put more & more trust in the AI companies behind them – marking a 2.7 trillion dollar combined valuation. This is creating an unprecedented amount of wealth for a very small group of technocrats.
People are treating their AI voice models like real people, confiding very sensitive information to these very few companies, whose privacy policies are primed for ad effectiveness not personal anonymity.
Originality is at the core of combating this trend and can be the future if we are adamant. People for thousands of years have used their ingenuity, creativity, & experience to write, create, talk, play, & produce original ideas – & still do!
Like this very blog post, which I am writing entirely on my own. Like I do every single blog post. This is not to taute my own originality, it is to stand by my own belief that I have plenty to say without the need for AI to expand my thoughts.
This is not to say that I don’t use spell-check or grammar-check in my posts, just that I steer clear of AI when it comes specifically to creative writing or asking for ideas.
The greatest books of all time, for instance, were written before this life-changing invention because we humans are pretty damn creative:
George Orwell’s 1984
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
Homer’s Iliad & The Odyssey
Paulo Ochelo’s The Alchemist
C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, Witch, & the Wardrobe
Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Shakespere’s Romeo & Juliet
Frank Herbert’s Dune
Tolkein’s Lord of Rings
Emily Diceknson’s Poems
J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter
…just to name a handful
What makes these books so relatable is that they are written by real humans with real pasts, real problems, & real imaginations – & it’s a real problem when books are written by AI.
Characters are manifestations of an author’s friends, family, mentors, enemies, & colleagues. Books are filled with these incredible manifestations, sometimes consuming the author whilst creating them. Frank Herbert’s own son once told an interviewer that Paul Atredies was more of a son to his father than he was.
AI can and never will be able to create these kinds of characters because it has no real past of its own, filled with emotions tied to experiences. It’s like the hive mind humans in Pluribus that combine all neurological activity like knowledge & reasoning into one shared mind, but lack individuality & independent thought.
Will AI be able to create complicated, artificial memories in the future, sure, but will it have good & bad, right & wrong, past experiences to link those memories to, no. Because it cannot attach what it does not have to memory: emotions.
In a great interview with Michael Polen, he describes the biggest difference between us & AI being how we think vs how an AI bot thinks. That a single neuron in the human brain is equal to thousands of lines of code in an AI script.
We are the single most complex (emotionally & physically) creatures we have yet to discover in the universe. That complexity is something to take note of & something that enabled the greatest minds to develop AI in the first place.
As we learn how to adapt to AI, like we did with automobiles, office jobs, the internet, social media, & every technological shift in the last twenty years; we must not lose our humanity.
The simple yet most important quality to being human is our ability to talk, face to face with each other. If we lose this, we lose what it means to be human – & sadly, our youth is losing this profound ability every day.
I encourage you to step outside your comfort zone: talk to a stranger in the street, call a friend, plan a family gathering, or attend a social event.
You don’t have to be a massive extrovert to do this, it may take more effort, but it is so worth it! Afterall, it is through real connection with each other that makes us the most human!
Thank you so much for reading. I’m on this journey with Mindfulness & to ultimately become a better writer each day (and to put excuses why not to write behind the dream of reading a new book a month & publishing a book of my own by the end of the year).
Three More Things