we must imagine
Nobody asked, but here’s what I think about AI.*
It is an immeasurable privilege to be able to think all day. If you’re like me and you work a desk job, or if you’re currently studying something in school, that’s essentially what your day consists of: thinking.
It might not be as sexy as medical research or rocket science or, like, Marxist philosophy, but sending emails is thinking. Doing spreadsheets is thinking. Scheduling meetings is thinking (and honestly it’s really hard).
How lucky am I, to have been born in a time and place where I can just use my brain all day.
Tens of thousands of years of human development have brought me here. I don’t have to grow or hunt for my food. I don’t have to run from predators. I don’t have to make my own clothing or build my own shelter or die from infection when I get a splinter from building the shelter. All these necessary tasks have been outsourced to other people and other systems that can keep me alive with startling efficiency.
Absurd, circumstantial luck has also brought me here. I could have been born in a place where people still throw their physical bodies against daily threats to their survival, because food and shelter and clothing are not magically produced for them like they are for me. Because the system that keeps me safe and comfortable in the imperial core has no such regard for people on the imperial periphery.
It is an extraordinary, immense privilege to live like this.
I have outsourced all the bodily human struggles of my existence to capitalism (NOT an endorsement btw), and the time and energy that this outsourcing has freed up allows me to spend most of my waking life just … thinking. Instead of exerting myself physically for the task of survival, I can pit my mind against challenges (some real, some invented) and produce any number of fantastic results.
Yeah, a lot of that mental exertion is sending emails and scheduling meetings. But I can also help people solve problems, or share something with a friend that makes her laugh, or learn how to do a craft online, or read a book, or write a book.
We of the leisure class have this incredible gift.
And I just think that to outsource that final, fun part of our existence — the thinking part — to ChatGPT for any reason at all is to show the utmost contempt for that gift.
I also think, because I read “The Myth of Sisyphus” at a formative age and because I have to lift heavy weights with some regularity in order to want to stay alive, that to struggle is to be human. I don’t mean the unjust, unnecessary struggle brought on by corrupt global systems, I merely mean applying ourselves to something.
Once, we might have applied our physical selves to a strenuous task for much of the day: farming, hunting, basket weaving. (And today a whole lot of people still do all this!) But for those of us who don’t do any of that, who have this extraordinary gift of leisure, our bodies are idle. There’s nothing left to apply but our minds.
It is good to think. It is good to dwell on a problem. It really does not matter how mundane the problem is! It is good to tap one’s pencil against one’s desk, become frustrated, get up for a cup of tea, and then return to the desk and push the mind just another inch toward a solution.
When we ask a world-eating, idea-stealing computer program to find a shortcut to that solution for us, we’re cheating ourselves of an opportunity to think. To push. To struggle. To become a little better, and a little more human.
And I think that’s such a ridiculous waste.
* By “AI,” of course, I mean the language learning models and image generators that aren’t actually intelligent but people like to call artificial intelligence because it sounds sexy.
Thank you for reading, here are more flowers:
Some good stuff I read recently:
Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian American activist abducted by ICE, wrote in the Washington Post: “What does my detention by ICE say about America?” (gift link)
Some San Franciscans actually managed to build community in their neighborhood by drinking coffee outside and I want to replicate this so badly.