I AM NOT A.I.

And neither are you.

There is a lot of chatter about the power of a.i. Some love the tech for the sake of tech, heads high on the thought of human advancement, full speed ahead, the future is digital. The metaverse is life. Put on your goggles. Plug in. Don’t fight the inevitable.

For others there is a charm in human simplicity. A.i. isn’t like many previous technologies making life more efficient or pushing us from horse to buggy. Rather it’s fully replacing it. Substituting, or at least attempting to substitute, the very thing that makes what we do interesting… humanity.

In reality it will likely be somewhere in between. But even in between it is one thing inevitably: One more step towards homogeneity making the digital landscape and the work it produces something of a cross between google, meta, and Olive Garden. It will feed us no longer individualized thoughts and ideas, but instead thought salads the have been washed in the bleach water of censorship and the personal misgivings of the few programmers that direct it. Those few will be winking from within the salad bowl looking out at us, happy to know the entire world is no longer interesting. I already hate their snide grin. Their work will be informative. Proper. Maybe even clever, but after condensing and plagiarizing the countless works that feed it we are doomed to watch all personality fade from the public landscape. Even coding will become generic. Better perhaps in a technical view, but more generic.

As fewer and fewer human voices, individuals, create from within, all the arts, even non-arts, everything will taste like endless, Round-Up laden bread rolls that make us feel bloated and hungry. Charts and graphs will lose personality. Writing will lose personality. Ads will lose personality. Even the interesting banter throughout organizations is doomed to… lose all personality. Think Amazon Everything. The advancement of a.i. will indeed likely kill the soul, what little still exists, of the workplace. And it’s a shame. Humans, while ever claiming to despise work, prove time and time again to thrive in the right sort of work place. Especially ones with personality. Which ai will be killing, without any more intention than a strip mall or the part of every city and town in America that has a McDonalds, Barnes and Noble, Lowe’s, Home Depot, Chipotle, Verizon store, Arby’s, Furniture Row, Target and a Wells Fargo branch. Those cities, at least those parts of the cities are the exact same in every single town. They provide jobs and rather efficiently serve the masses with their products but they are neither high quality nor have personality. This is what I expect is about to happen across the landscapes of anything related to the digital world with rapid acceleration.

So are we without hope?

I’m not.

Humans thrive when they have to learn. Humans love to learn, even when, offered the short cut to knowledge. It’s not the destination we are after, it’s the journey there, Tolkien and what not. We crave the journey and even when we fall into the illusionous spell of shortcuts, eventually they tire.  We get bored with shortcuts. The car stops. We get out and look at the flat. We decide to walk and listen to the birds. The shortcut we sometimes get tricked into thinking is a good thing rarely is. Fast food sucks. There is no part of town I’d rather avoid than the part with all the chains.

After a decade of heavy digital consumption (at least it has felt heavy, running and building a digital presence and community online) I find myself seeking ever less time in the digital lands. And I think there is a common feeling around this. We aren’t abandoning the internet but we are limiting its presence in our minds, our attention. There are a lot of us who even in using the internet are finding sites and connections that have more depth and less digital influence. Substack is thriving. Why? People have more space here to present a larger part of themselves. Long form. Room for nuance. Room for personal complexity. Personality. We are not computers. We like opposing things. We can find good and bad in the same thing at the same time, and if given the opportunity to connect with others, find understanding that as humans we are conflicted and have room to be not understood.

It’s a shame about the arts online. The new candy will woo the die hards but eventually like the fairgrounds the internet is becoming, most will realize it’s all shit and plastic, because it’s novel. It’s ubiquitous. Accessible to every single person who wants it, without any work. Humans are at our base creators and enjoy the fruits of our labors. We enjoy the work. We create fire. Shelter. Food systems. Clothing. Methods for movement. Each and every product up until now has had a person or at a minimum  group of persons inputting their own personality into the things created. But we’ve seen what happens with homogenization. We’ve already seen the loss of character in architecture. In food. In clothing. In transportation. But now we are about to see a whole new level of it across large industries.

So, where is the hope? In small producers. In craftsmanship and local communities. The products that will come from those that step a bit outside the digital landscape, for at least part of what they do, and create things themselves. I’m sure a.i. will assist in this, a point a group of people reading this are already tersely saying out loud as if I need to hear it. It’s true, a.i. is here and will be part of even the small producers, but the difference is, they would still create that thing or something different with or without it. Conversely the largest part of the digital landscape, the one that will continue to dominate the day in and day out of at least part of our society, that part will be made by people that likely would never undertake the unique challenges necessary for creating outside the world of artificial intelligence.

It’s not real intelligence. Remember that. It’s an amalgamation of people’s ideas but it’s generic. Homogenized. It’s a mixture of Van Gogh and the guy who brainlessly draws a penis on a napkin at Perkins. But humans are drawn to individuals that are talented and unique. Not Perkins guy mixed with a genius. We thrive in seeing other individuals excel in their own unique and wild ideas. It’s what creates insanity and genius at the same time. So I have hope for us as we reinvest in individuals we know. I have hope that more will bore of the digitalverse and set out to create real things. Even, no especially, non-monetized things. I hope for a future where more people knit and read books. Books written by individuals, with mistakes, confusion, absurdity and things that are hard to understand. I hope more people go for walks. Take up birding. Falconry. Whittling. Guitar. I have hope because I think we get bored of the homogeneity and monotony as everything begins looking generic and fake. It’s the reason craft beer and coffee have sky rocketed. It’s the reason so many have CSAs from local farms. It’s the reason small restaurants line the best places parts of each town while the shittiest parts of almost every city is the part that looks like every other city.

So a.i. is coming. It’s got a lot of insane potential. Frightening and horrific on some paths and wonderful on others. But in the end, regardless of how many of those paths it takes, expect to see an Arby’s, a Lowe’s, and a Verizon store on the way. But for many of us, the screen will be turned off, left inside, and we’ll be walking under real trees watching the leaves sway in the wind and listening to the birdsong.