Excuse Me Whilst I Stop Worrying About AI by Doing Literally Anything Other than Staring into a Screen
It’s not as big a thing — yet — as online discourse will have you believe
It’ll come as a surprise to no one to discover that when it comes to AI, I am firmly in the skeptic camp. Which probably means I’ll be first in line to have my organs harvested when our robot overlords realize The Matrix was a decent idea.
I jest… sort of.
But I do believe that AI isn’t quite as big a thing IRL as online discourse will have you believe.
Not yet, anyway.
To realize this, all you need to do is something — anything — other than inhaling AI discourse all day long.
It’s amazing how quickly all that AI BS melts away once you do.
Does your mom know what ChatGPT is?
How about the 60-year-old woman who sold me chicken legs in Split’s food market this morning?
Probably not.
A few months back, I told my mother about AI and ChatGPT This is a 78-year-old who had never even heard of the terms which made it an interesting experiment. How would someone who has no concept of AI react?
The answer was a smidgen of doubt, a pinch of skepticism, and rather a large dump of worry.
Frankly, my mother approached AI the way we all should.
And honestly, I think that is the way most people are approaching it. It’s just the loudest ones that are taking their love affair with AI to silly heights.
ChatGPT, for instance, is still overwhelmingly used by young males.
And let’s face it, the world still belongs to young male voices, especially on the internet. But that just makes ChatGPT an echo chamber run by those who find it the most fascinating.
You’d be forgiven for assuming that everyone is crushing on AI when they’re not.
Two of the world’s mega countries for instance — Russia and China — unsurprisingly don’t even have access to ChatGPT. Most people in the world are not using AI in its newest form — chatbots, AI art and the like.
Which means most people in the world are exactly where all the ChatGPT bros were 6 months ago.
Their jobs aren’t affected. Their lives are not being overtaken by AI overlords. They barely even think about it because they’re too busy doing the jobs that robots are unlikely to ever take over.
Simple and Straightforward doesn’t happen without its paying subscribers. Consider upgrading today for $5/mo or $50/yr. This gives you three newsletters a week plus access to a huge archive of essays, flexible recipes, and courses. Not only that, you’re keeping this project - and an indie writer - going!
AI isn’t about to take over everyone’s jobs
Back when I ran a wine store and bar I only spent a couple of my ten-hour work days online. The rest of it was spent recommending wines, serving glasses to customers plating food, and doing everything that a robot cannot yet do.
A bot couldn’t do my job. Moreover, I have enough faith in human beings to think that aside from the novelty value, most wouldn’t want to be served a glass of wine by a robot on the regular. That may be the fantasy of tech bros but for your average Joe?
I don’t think so.
The same goes for so many jobs across the world. The food markets of Europe, Thailand, China or Mexico aren’t about to be taken over by robots. Scholars are not about to be rubbed out of existence by a chatbot confidently spewing false information.
The likes of us online creators — people who are most susceptible to using AI tools like ChatGPT or DALL-E — may like to think we’re the most important working category but we’re outnumbered by pretty much everyone else.
People whose jobs will not be overtaken by AI.
Hopefully, they will be able to use these new technologies to assist them, if that’s appropriate.
But that’s completely down to how we approach AI from now on…
The future of AI is at a crossroads, and we’re the ones driving the car (for now)
Right now, we have no idea which way AI is going to go.
The way I see it, you’ve got two options. The first is that AI is used to enhance the human experience, augmenting our lives the way the internet did (and, with heavy curation, can still do).
This is the way I truly hope AI will go.
The second is that we can let it run wild.
If you read enough about AI online you’d be forgiven for assuming it’s already running amok. Even tech bigwigs are concerned about the power of AI, so much so the likes of Musk and Wozniak signed a petition back in March to halt AI developments.
People are worried. But they’re also exercising caution.
We all have a responsibility for the future of AI. It’s still something in our control — we can either guide down a responsible path or not.
What concerns me the most at the moment is how much people think about, talk about and worry about AI. It’s being given a serious amount of airtime, which means it could go the same way as Donald Trump and Brexit. A joke, given enough breathing space, can become reality.
The more we talk about AI, the more people worry about what it’s going to do to mankind, the more chance it’s going to become something that is unmanageably powerful.
I believe they call it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Shut much of the discourse down and perhaps we can give ourselves a little bit more breathing space to figure out exactly how we want our AI-augmented future to look.
AI can’t replace human experience
Yesterday, after writing the first draft of this article, I shut my laptop and took a bike ride to Marijan, a huge park just outside Split in Croatia.
I snapped this picture on the ride:
Can AI better this experience? Do I need smart glasses to identify the different plants around me, tell me the sea temperature, and map out my route?
No. I don’t.
At that point, I didn’t need all information about Marijan at my fingertips. What I needed was to move my body after writing all morning. I needed to clear my head, to breathe in fresh air, to reset.
Humans are not machines, whatever self-improvement bros tell you. We need more than what AI promises — perfection. Infinite knowledge and information on a 24/7 basis.
It’s why the best way to stop worrying about AI is to shut that laptop, stop reading AI discourse and do literally anything else. Ideally, something that reminds you that you are human. That your needs are greater and more complex and more interesting than what AI can give you.
It’s only then that you remember. AI is only one facet of life. And right now, it’s a very small one that only affects a small number of people.
There’s comfort in that.
I’m not so naive that I believe the world can avoid AI altogether. The cat is out of the proverbial bag now.
And I can’t say I’m not worried. I mean, look at this quote:
50% of AI researchers believe there’s a 10% or greater chance that humans go extinct from our inability to control AI.
I don’t like those percentages one bit.
But a lot of people are talking about AI as if it’s a done deal. As if we have no control over it.
It’s not. And we do. At least until we have our real-life Skynet moment.
For now, the best thing you can do — that we can all do — is give AI a little bit less oxygen. Shut the laptop. Go outside. Exercise. Spend time with your kids. Have sex.
Do anything other than read and think about AI (and yeah, I recognize the irony in writing an article about AI to ask you to stop thinking about AI, but needs must).
It’s not that powerful just yet. We can keep it that way.
THANKS FOR READING!
🌿 I WANT YOUR SIMPLE LIVING QUESTIONS! Every first Tuesday of the month I’ll answer reader questions on simple living, minimalism, and living sustainably. If you have a question for me, send it in here.
🌿🌿 GIVE ME A FOLLOW ELSEWHERE ON THE INTERNET - I’m on LinkedIn and I also write 2-3 extra essays a week at Medium (if you don’t have a Medium membership you can get one here).
QR codes, which aren't even a little bit AI, have already reduced the number of service staff needed. Wendy's has said they'll start using a bot for drive through orders, which makes sense, it's surprising that's not already been widely adopted.
Some global IT companies have suspended all recruitment, while they figure out what jobs will or won't still be needed.
Call centres are already largely replaced by online bots, which just got a whole lot better. Although there are still millions of service support roles around the world, real people, those numbers will continue to fall.
Meanwhile, white collar workers are already taking up these tools, which can do their job, and better, within minutes, not hours, or produce vast research that would take a person days or weeks.
Specialist AI tools are being rolled out daily. Individuals can even create their own.
The road has already been crossed, at speed.
China already has AI that can monitor their population and assign or deduct social points, and destroy lives. They don't need AI tools from the West. Russia is no doubt also building their own.
I absolutely love this. Thank you for the very welcome dose of common sense. The tech bro's are busily hyping AI in the same way that NFTs were apparently going to change the world. I think all of us, tech bro's included could do with a bit more offline time and a bit more real life.