We are having the Wrong Conversations
An Introduction
Everyone is talking about AI and technology, but just about everyone is having the wrong conversation. Will or won’t AI cause 20% unemployment? Will ChatGPT get to a point where it can autonomously do my work without human intervention? Is the stock market in an AI bubble? Is AI the future? Should I get better at using Claude so that I’m more prepared for the future? Are my kids old enough for TikTok and Instagram? How much is AI going to change the world? Is AGI even possible? Will I get left in the dust of the future?
These are distractions, and the wrong conversations. We’re bickering over the myriad possible future scenarios while we barrel down a path that is snaring our feet and eating at our souls in the present.
What we should be questioning is why we’re on this path in the first place. Do we feel like the mainstream of society and technology is leading us towards good things, true things, and beautiful things? Is the air getting clearer? What is happening to our humanity right now? How comfortable are we with the society we’re building for ourselves? How will our present mental state affect our future selves? Where is the human in all of our conversations?
Right now, how is our ability to meditate, contemplate, and exercise our creative and logical faculties? What is the present, immediate experience for our children growing up in this world? Are we giving them, to the best of our abilities, the childhood they should have? Are we giving ourselves the adulthood we should have? When we enter our twilight years, what kind of people will we be? Will we be panicky from years of doomscrolling and narcissistic from years of Instagram? Will we be content, calm, and at peace?
Questions and arguments about the future do have their place, but if that is all we’re thinking about, then they are simply distracting us from THIS MOMENT.
The progression of technology looks like a washing machine on the spin cycle, because the entire point of technology is to shorten the distance between your desire and satiating that desire. This is exactly why our felt experience of time and progress is accelerating. What is the number one selling point of technology? Faster internet, faster phones, faster laptops, faster streaming, so you can scroll more, stream more, multitask more, be entertained more. Every screen is larger and more vivid than before, so we can be even more immersed. We keep getting longer battery life so that we can be sucked into our phones in public for longer.
What are we doing here?
What we’re missing is that we CAN step off the road and out of the ever-accelerating mainstream. We don’t actually need to rocket along on this runaway train with everyone else, and our kids don’t either. We can put the phone down, take a deep breath, and take a long phone-free walk. We don’t need to have apps on our phones that just deteriorate our mental health. We can actually moderate our usage of technology. We don’t have to be carried off, against our will, along an unhealthy path towards some unsavory destination.
That is what I’m trying to work towards with this Substack. I want to help us all slow down, pull over to the side of the road, take a deep breath, and think through what we’re doing here with technology. I’m not under the illusion we can all go back to a pre-technological era. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but we don’t have talk to him either. We can slow down and think; there actually is no rush. Anyone trying to get you to rush is trying to sell you something.
Join me on this journey of being present and being human, of making a pilgrimage out of the machine and up the mountain. The air is clearer up there.