I had an experience a month ago which did not entirely catch me by surprise.
(Well, maybe the context was unexpected. But only that.)
In late May/early June, I met with a father and son for an introductory “Are we a good fit?” Zoom call to discuss the potential of his son joining a highschool course I will be teaching in September. Halfway through our discussion, the father casually said, “Oh, by the way, my son developed this AI tool that would replace you in a few years. Son, go ahead and introduce your work.”
And so the young fellow did.
And boy, does this tech thingy do pretty much what I do.
(Just to note this: the irony of a student signing up for my class while having already created and launched an AI-powered educational device (and matching software platform) to replace teachers did not escape me.)
It got me thinking not only about how much longer I would want to teach English online (hint: ’25-’26 would probably be my last year) or whether this student was a good candidate for my English course (he is one of the best), but what it would mean for a life where everything that can be “AI-ed” is hooked up to an LLM.
Way before Ferris’ The 4-Hour Workweek became a bestseller, the idea of having people doing your things for you has been a goal for many – even if only as a symbol of status and wealth. Why clean your own toilets when you can hire a housecleaner? Why get your hands dirty if you could afford to pay someone else to weed your gardens and cut your grass for you?
Save your effort for things that are more important, they say. Your time is precious, you should enjoy life while you have it – outsource all the boring, mundane, and bothersome parts of your life so that every minute of your existence is pleasureable and Instagrammable. As long as you have the money, hey, why not? You are even creating jobs for other people. Why not live as efficiently, effectively, and enjoyably as you possibly could?
(While putting aside for now the obvious question begged by the above statements – which is answered in part by the neuroscience behind our natural “habituation to happiness” tendency that devolves perfect days to mediocre ones – let us take a stab at mulling over such an existential question.)
But what if, in the pursuit of crafting that perfectly optimized life, we overlook living altogether?
What makes a life?
Is it having devices (that could never be wrong or would not ever forget) telling us how many grams of this supplement to take in ten minutes, outlining your next podcast’s list of questions in ten seconds flat, or creating a curriculum for your “homeschooled” kids after you have fed your private LLM it what it needs to know to make one up for you?
Or, is it doing our own research, meeting people, making our own programs and schedules, sitting down with our kids (or students) and sharing space and goodwill and knowledge with them?
Put another way: Is missing out on the smiles, hello’s, and catching-up’s in the aisles of the small local market-store worth the speedy convenience of home-delivered groceries? Is having the immediacy and technically precise feedback of educational AI models more valuable than knowing another human being is engaging with your work and that said human cares about your growth as a reader and writer? Is having routine things done for you really better than having to do them yourself?
Granted, we cannot create, build, invent, fix, and replace every single item and activity we need for our own survival. A sort of exchange of value for service or product is necessary for the vague and fragile concept of “civilization” human society (in theory) seeks to move towards. As much as I want to wear clothes I sewed myself, sit on chairs I designed and crafted, use a computer I built from scratch, and play Go with a board and game pieces I had formed and sanded and woodburned myself, the tools and materials I would use to create those things would have come from someone else’s mind and efforts, from raw materials that no man has ever made.
Extreme as this mega-DIY desire is (which is also a life-long goal of mine I never expect to reach), there is much richness and life to be found in the struggle, both mental and physical, to work with things, to struggle with reality and its consequences, and to be patient as our minds and hands get used to a new skill or understanding of whatever we are focused on – more richness and humaness, I would argue, than is to be found in the feelings of pride over robots that could play the cello or devices that replace teachers. (Yes, even though it is humans creating and programming said bots. For now.)
(Is there a slight tone of bitterness in this essay? If you sense it, please forgive me, and allow the strong undercurrents of passion and care underlying my opinion to run their course into a calm awareness by the end of the post.)
There is a shade of inevitability over the constant flow of new gadgets and advancements I try to keep up-to-date on, which tempts my mind to think in a black-and-white, all-or-nothing approach to the question of how to remain human in light of a looming, somewhat existential “threat.” Some days it feels like a deluge I must either accept by using and supporting it, or risk being drowned out of significance by the people who do.
Is there a way to peacefully co-exist with something that has the potential to so fully take the “living” out of life?
If we step back, it gets easier to see that the threat of a living deadness – the succumbing to “an easy existence as a blob” – has always existed inside of us; it is only that we now have access to tools that bring that daydream within reach and still allow our physical bodies to continue to exist. As in centuries of human development, laziness, choosing the easy way out, avoiding pain – all of that is in us, and can overrule the more noble sides of us if we allow them.
(But there is nuance to this, as with everything else. After all, these same reasons are exactly what made teachers protest the introduction of calculators to students back in the day. That is why questions make up a good part of this post – my answers are quite limited and subjective.)
So, do we boil down the crafting of vacation schedules, health routines, family conflict resolutions, and artistic inspiration to a handful of prompt we feed into a textbox, and wait for a greater brain than ours to process, make sense of, and direct our decisions? It knows more than I do, after all, and it could generate “thoughts” and ideas far quicker.
(Does this actually signify a deeply-rooted diminishing of humanity’s faith in itself? When AI judges and doctors begin to be a thing, what does that mean for the people on the defendant’s seat or the operating table?
Part of me wants to think that if enough people care about the fact that a human wrote this book, that a human is playing that music, that it is a person teaching your child to write and not an AI model, there would be enough of human community and connection to withstand a widespread disintegration of that tenuous faith in the minimal civility of the stranger of the street, or the skill and heart of the professional and the artist in what they do, due to, among many things, a decreased understanding and appreciation of what it means to relate to each other as people.)
These days, I overhear snippets of conversations on the bus, in boba shops, at restaurants of people of all ages discussing how they use ChatGPT in their lives and how helpful it is, how AI this video is (in a negative way), how pretty that AI-generated image turned out to be, and things like that. It is part of the fabric of how we now sense the world as individuals – just as the internet opened up a digital world of possibilities and connections between the physical and the virtual to the point of making it nearly impossible (sometimes) to live in one without also living in the other, AI is slipping itself into the nooks and crannies of how we do what we do, how we learn things, and what we think tech means to us.
The temptation to either dive in or to retreat completely is strong, but neither address the core issue this tension highlights so well:
What kind of a being are you? What does existence mean for you?
Clarity on what you are comes before clarity on who you are. That clarity no one could take it away from you, nor return to you once you lose it.
Here, then, comes the final clincher: There is only so much you could outsource before you begin outsourcing your own existence.
- A quick example: I used to think that AI would turn the internet into an intellectual wasteland due to the creation of machine-generated content. I was wrong. It already is a wasteland (a big part of it, at least), and has been for a long time.
- The reason? Much of the content you see are regurgitations of what someone else has thought or discovered; the result is a mass of information and posts that are not worthy of the nouns “thoughts” and “opinions” (which denotes mental engagement, struggle, and growth) because the fingers that generated the articles and videos were not driven by a thinking brain but the desire to hop onto what is hot and trending, or what can get an emotional reaction.
That approach to “creation” and “writing/filming” is one way of outsourcing your own existence – instead of going through the process of figuring out things for yourself, you pretend to play long, walking the path of least resistance just because you can. And it could be fun and easy and even enjoyable, all the way to the end.
But the point of being alive is that you are alive – not someone else, not a conglomeration of different people, not the outcome of a bunch of random suggestions and tailored responses from a teleprompter. As long as you are living as a person who has life – a concept that runs deep but shall be criminally oversimplified here as to mean one who does not try to hide from reality or who does not try to have other things/people do all the heavy lifting for them – the AI-world does not need to concern you too much, because you would already be looking for how to interact with it (or not) in ways that feed even more life-energy and humanness into your existence, and not the other way around.
(This is one reason why, I think, objective morality is fundamentally quite simple: what leads to life is good, what leads to death is bad. The trouble with such a simplistic outline becomes apparent when you try to apply this non-paradoxically in a messy world. But that is a post for another day.)
So, live on.
This conclusion is abrupt, and I do not aplogoize for it – I have a feeling I would return to AI and relevant discussions around it every now and then, for as long as the internet is up and I am still writing.
And no matter what your opinions on AI might be, I do have a reminder to leave here that I hope would be both an encouragement and a challenge to you (and to me):
Be careful not to let go of the things a human life is made up of.