Let's stop talking about A.I. (via)
I apparently can’t hold a conversation with a friend, post on social media, or even daydream idly without the topic eventually turning to bloody A.I.
It’s not always me who brings it up, but it often is; I’ve rarely known such a “sticky” subject.
This resonates. Unlike Oliver Burkeman I do use AI more or less all day every day at work. But I also find myself talking about it so much more than I need to.
One answer is that the general topic is an unusually powerful trigger for a major disease of our times: overthinking.
This is an insightful take. Whatever you think of AI, it is upending many industries very quickly and has implications one way or another for the future of society. Whether you’re for or against, whether you use it or not, it’s become very difficult to ignore its pervasiveness in day to day discourse anymore. This diagnosis of the reason being that it naturally triggers all kinds of pre-existing neuroses about our place in the economy, the nature of our relationships, even what it means to be human in the first place, seems apt. These are all heavy, anxiety-inducing topics for many people and the way AI is often discussed very nonchalantly by those creating it as though it might ruin all of our lives is a bit hard to ignore.
Whatever the details, this is where overthinking kicks in, because it feels like the solution to the anxious feelings in your body is to scurry off into your head and think some more, read some more, argue some more, maybe use A.I. some more… But scurrying off to your head doesn’t work…
I think this is one of the key things software people get wrong about the world, and the source of a lot of the friction the tech industry is running into with regards to AI adoption. There’s a pervasive tendency among us to really highly overvalue intelligence, but not every problem can be resolved by just thinking harder.
Lives immeasurably fuller and more interesting than can be dreamt of in Silicon Valley’s ideology. Lives that encompass vastly more than what software can do.
I find this vision of what a good life can be so much richer and more appealing than what’s on offer in my tech bubble. It’s important to remember this. At the end of the day computers are just tools we can use to facilitate some of the things we want to work on, but have very little to do with what it means to live a full and interesting life.