The breaking of the world

What happens when the things that make you a good friend become products machines deliver? 

Will we talk less to each other and more to software programmed to sound like us, but owned by companies with their own interests to serve? 

Does it matter if the shoulder you’re crying on belongs to a company? 

AI is breaking the world from what it has been to what it is becoming. 

I’ve spent much of my adult life at keyboards, interacting and building things for others in the digital world AI is now remaking. But increasingly I feel meaninglessness in what I once believed in.

I feel like a racecar driver in a world of driverless cars. A good direction giver in an age of Google Maps. An engaged conversationalist, but not one who catalogues and saves every part of a conversation to be reused and combined later into actionable insights.

These skills matter to me. They’re part of who I am. But I can feel their place in the world diminishing as the intricacies of life move from the world of humans into the world of machines.

I don’t want to stop needing other people and I don’t want other people to stop needing me. A good conversation doesn’t need to be saved and actionable to matter. It's about another person choosing to be there for you. The next time it might be you that's there for them. 

From the perspective of the companies selling this software, these are problems to commercialize and solve. But these “inefficiencies” are the little things that thread the texture of life.

“You are the product,” went the 2010s saying. Now it's more: we’re the raw material, too. The writing, images, conversations, and accumulated knowledge we put online became training data for machines built to produce their own versions of us. Only always on, always there, and for pay. 

In a Hacker News discussion about a recent batch of proposed mathematical proofs published by OpenAI, a commenter who had worked on one of the problems for 24 years writes:

“I don't know what to think exactly. I spent thousands of hours on that problem. I really enjoyed it. Hearing that it is solved somehow makes me sad in a far-off way, like hearing an ex-girlfriend died suddenly in a car crash. I don't know, there's probably a lot of people feeling odd emotions tonight.”

I recognize this odd emotional state. For me, it shows up as loss of trust. Because digital media is now so easy to produce and so hard to verify, all forms of digital expression feel less valuable to me than they did two years ago. I'm less open, more suspicious. When I encounter something interesting online, my first instinct is no longer to share it. Now I doubt whether it’s real. 

The state of things has changed my output too. I’ve delayed sending this piece for more than a month, and there’s another piece that’s been sitting in my drafts folder even longer. Why add to the noise when so little feels honest and true?

A single decision to replace original creative work with generated work can seem harmless. But as more people do it — when the rate of what’s published follows the rate of what can be generated — we might discover that we can say everything there is to say, but no one wants to hear it anymore. Our attention and belief the next victims of a tragedy of the commons. 

It doesn’t take everyone doing it for this to happen.

Would I give up AI to go back to how things were before? 

100%. Not even a question. 

I understand why someone with an enormous investment in these machines wants them to keep going. I get the attraction of being first as a founder. Race conditions are hard to escape. But those are incentives, not destinies.

"It's amazing how much we are willing to change everything without having any idea what's going to happen afterwards," mathematician Terence Tao said in a talk recently. "It's insane, the pace. And there's no reason to be this fast. No reason at all."

People describe AI as inevitable. Like a storm approaching on the horizon. But this isn’t the weather. These are decisions being made by a small number of people. What to build, how quickly to release it, what risks to take. Beneath it all, the promise of AGI calls: an apple offering total and complete knowledge.

But once we take that first bite, can we ever return to the garden?

I fear what gets destroyed on the way there. Livelihoods, skills, relationships, a reason to call someone. Our agency, our abilities, and our independence could very well diminish as we become more dependent on always-on machines and less on each other and ourselves.

In past eras workers destroyed industrial equipment to slow the rate of change. But today’s Luddites also have a factory in their pocket that makes their personal lives and spreading their ideas easier. Can you oppose the machinery at work while making the most of it at home?

What's my individual responsibility then? Should I boycott AI? How and where do we draw the lines? Should that mean hiring a human programmer even when using a coding agent would be cheaper? What are we saving now, and what might it cost us later? How are we supposed to weigh these choices in a world where not everyone will?

I do use these tools to augment my work and I’m still creating my own rules for how I use them in ways that protect my practice. 

I’ve started with some personal choices: I don’t want to use AI in place of a human relationship. I’m careful about what I share and give access to. I observe AI sabbaths — days entirely away from the models with room for my own thoughts and the people closest to me. I’m committed to keeping up the practices that help me figure out what I feel and think, and to using AI mainly to spot blind spots and handle logistics of projects already in motion.

A quick litmus test: am I using AI to avoid a conversation, hand over a decision, or skip something it would be more meaningful for me to develop on my own? If it’s just logistics, I'll prompt away. But if any of those other things are involved, I’ve learned to pause. 

Personal choices like these don’t settle the bigger questions. The fact that some of us use these tools doesn’t mean we chose the world that seems to be coming with them. The people who live through this do not all have the same power to shape it.

This is how the world we know breaks. Not with a bang. Not with a whimper. With a payoff. 

We hope.