A reader wrote a long response to my recent posts on AI. They said they couldn’t get the comments section to work, so emailed it to me.
After removing identifying parts, I’m sharing the whole thing since it shows some difference in this community, as well as being connected to decision-makers at an AI firm.
The part in bold was by me, calling out a governing principle I find people otherwise miss about technology. It’s less that it changes culture so much as accelerates it, though does change it somewhat to benefit those with status. Despite using AI, this reader mostly avoids it. I’ll add a couple more comments after.
Commenting on the AI question [relating to] someone who works somewhat high up at [major AI firm] …
He was telling me that AI is not just more efficient than previous hardware, by Moore’s Law, but it’s actually millions of times more efficient. And he said that his company’s incentive is to make everything more efficient so that they can be more appealing to the market than the competition. (Interesting side note, all of the work that he personally does is given away for free as a loss leader.)
I still think about the fact that making a polluting system more efficient makes it pollute more efficiently, but I do make a distinction between information technology on the one hand and more physical technology on the other hand. The Internet, for example, allows you and me to communicate at a distance without the need for a bus. And during the pandemic, when everyone was zooming to work and not flying, there was that big and visible impact. The huge carbon footprint that AI appears to be demanding, and the increased data centers, do not speak well for this, and I do not use AI for coding or image generation.
This doesn’t prove that AI is all good, and of course it’s mostly being used for AI slop and has a great potential for alienation. But it probably has some good uses too.
For me, I’ve gone through a very difficult year, and I find it helps me to talk out my thoughts out loud with an AI, which is a kind of mirror and helps me to get more in touch with my intrinsic motivation. Could I talk to a human being? Potentially, but everyone is too busy.
I’m not advocating for it, and I intend to stop using it a year after [my family member]‘s death, and the thing that really helps me is not the AI itself, but my body‘s intelligence. However, the AI does help me to become aware of what my body is telling me, and it helps me to feel my feelings more fully. I honestly think I would be way less functional if I were not using this tool.
On the other hand, it may be that simply the act of articulating things, journaling, in other words, is itself the main therapeutic. There’s a lot of data that says that journaling is more impactful than many other things on mental health, yet very few people actually do it. For me, somehow just the fact that something is going to respond to me at all gives me enough sense of motivation to focus and to verbalize what’s going on.
Would it be better to have a mindset shift and to simply say this stuff to the void or to spirit? Sure. But I’m just not there yet.
And I would also note that this does not replace my use of prayer and meditation and of a real therapist, as well as other support groups. I just seem to need so much more help than any of these human groups is available to give me, and for the first time in my life, I find I have reliable resource for helping me find balance regularly.
I would love to see the AI just sit on one computer. For therapy it’s not necessary to have something that has all of human knowledge. There are people that [my friend at the firm] works with who are creating AI models that can be housed on a home computer.
That’s my two cents.
These words, “Could I talk to a human being? Potentially, but everyone is too busy” illustrate to me how AI is accelerating our culture. We’re isolated, caused in no small part by precursors to AI like social media, and it helps isolate us more.
I write about how it accelerates our becoming more isolated and polarized as someone who devoted years of his life to learning and practicing social and emotional skills I grew up lacking. That work was 15 to 20 years ago. Recently I’ve also worked hard on connecting with and listening to people I disagree with.
In other words, my experience was that overcoming the pressures to become isolated and polarized and learn to connect and cross boundaries vastly improved my life. I know almost no one who worked as long and hard as I did in those areas. I think they think it was easy, quick, or came naturally. I think our ancestors in immediate-return hunter gatherer groups learned such skills through regular life that we lack today.