Artificially Intelligent & The Joy of Writing

I often joke with people that I started this blog/substack so I wouldn’t annoy my friends and family with all my crazy ideas or bore them to sleep as I tried to explain my newest obsession of study. I don’t think this is entirely untrue, but it is not the core reason I write. I write because it is something I genuinely enjoy, and figuring out how to articulate ideas in my own words is very enjoyable. It also spares my friends and family from having to listen to me ramble on. I first began writing when I was eleven or twelve years old. I still have over fifty thousand words written on an epic fantasy story I once wrote about a young woman who is thrust into a world of magic and chaos when her home is attacked by a pack of werewolf-like creatures called “Tanugar” who were once men but became trapped in their animalistic form. It’s a story that I spent hundreds of hours developing, and it has now sat on the shelf for many years as I have focused on other things in life. I also have a short story about “Thorn the Immortal,” a man who has lived a thousand lives and was cursed never to rest yet has died thousands upon thousands of times. Maybe I will revive these stories as I think through what I want to write about in the upcoming months. I would love to share this world of my imagination with others. But this is not what I want to write about today, though I would love to hear from you if you’d be interested in reading these stories. And I would love to find a way to share these here on Substack.

Artificially Intelligent

Artificial intelligence has taken the world by storm over the last twelve months. Companies like OpenAI have released product after product that allows us to use the wealth of information on the internet, and they have managed to bring to life ideas that once only existed in the imaginations of the kids who grew up watching Star Wars and Star Trek. Today, this technology has become increasingly powerful, and its capabilities are growing so fast that no one can keep up with it. Hollywood screenwriters have gone on strike as they see the writing on the wall, and their positions and livelihoods are threatened. In the last couple of weeks, new products have been introduced that allow AI to create video clips from text, and the internet has become saturated with AI influencers, most often taking the form of an Instagram model who can garner millions of views, and with our attention span having been reduced to that of a goldfish by Instagram Reels, Youtube Shorts, and TikTok clips we are already consuming AI content often without knowing it. It is a technology unleashed upon the world, and there is no putting this genie back in the bottle. As an avid tech nerd, I am simultaneously mesmerized and terrified of the possibilities. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, also has proposed a future of UBI (Universal Basic Income) as he believes in the future, there will no longer be a need for human workers as machines will be able to do everything better and faster than we can, and he believes this will create a Golden Age of technology where people will flourish as they will finally be set free from the drudgery of work and be allowed to travel at their leisure. This, to me, is one of the most terrifying ideas. As machines replace us, we will continue to see an escalation of rates of depression, and people will continue to seek out meaning and purpose in their lives. College will become increasingly irrelevant as white-collar jobs are taken on by machines, and our most prestigious positions become the domain of the machine.

Here, I have but scratched the surface of possibilities on the horizon, and with all this artificial intelligence, we have become and are increasingly becoming artificially intelligent. We once had the mental faculties to complete mathematical equations fully in our heads. Today, this practice has been outsourced to a computer that can do it better and faster than we can. Slowly but surely, we have outsourced all our skills to the machines. I still remember when I was young, and my parents would plan a family trip. They would pull out a paper map to plan what roads we would take. Today, many can’t navigate their city without the help of the navigational tools on their phones. The machines have not taken our jobs by force; instead, we have given them up willingly. But they will soon begin to take them as the Hollywood writers realized. The longer you follow this rabbit trail, the more you realize how far it can go.

Last year, I wrote a satire post about the incredible future of “AI girlfriends” and how exciting it was that soon we would no longer need to grow and become better as human beings, that soon we would have a machine that would love us just the way we are. We would never have to change or put in any real effort. Yet, today, it is a very real conversation, and companies are making billions already as they monetize people's loneliness. Some online personalities have created AI versions of themselves that allow their followers to interact with a virtual version of themselves and even allow those followers to flirt and develop a relationship with them. Some of these creators rake in seventy thousand dollars per week. Very soon, these machines will not be based on real people. Very soon, corporations will begin to create fully artificial people tailored to your tastes and preferences, and just as many seemingly can’t escape doom-scrolling on social media. So, too, very soon, the craving for connection will be satiated for many by a machine. The logical justification for this is that it’s better to have something, even if they know it’s not real, rather than nothing, and so one more thing will be given up to the machine.

Soon, we will ask the machine to explain to someone what we are thinking, as we can no longer manage to verbalize the idea in our head; all too soon, we will hear someone say something like “Hey Siri, help me explain X idea” and machine will dutifully obey and verbalize what you could not articulate yourself. This idea comes from an online clip I saw a few months ago where someone had clipped a young woman speaking, and in the span of sixty seconds, she used the word “like” thirty-plus times. This young woman was a college student, and yet she had not learned how to verbalize her ideas, so rather than have the ability to speak out her ideas precisely, she instead found herself using the word “like” to fill in the gaps of her vocabulary.

As humans, we naturally follow the path of least resistance. Just as a drop of water does the same. In a world that continuously removes all forms of resistance, it has become increasingly important for us to seek out challenges and to do “hard things” by choice. Chris Williamson recently said it this way.

“In a world where resistances have been removed, we have built these structures within which are stored these heavy objects. These objects are then picked up and moved from one spot to another, and then we place those objects down again where we found them. This is called a gym.”

I don’t quote him exactly, but it closely approximates what he said. And he is exactly correct; we have had to create artificial environments of resistance and challenge. Our natural inclination is to avoid, and our natural desire is to follow the path of least resistance. Yet, we are a creature uniquely equipped to defy our nature. We have been given the capacity to defy and become more than our appetites and desires. Our ability to think critically and independently devolves as we continue to outsource all challenges and we become a version of the human creature as seen on cave walls. As our cognitive abilities devolve, our ability to think independently from what we are told becomes harder, often because we don’t know any alternative. We become and are actively becoming increasingly artificial, physically and intellectually. We filter reality until it fulfills our desires rather than face the truth of reality. As has been the case since the fall of mankind, we seek to dictate reality and be god of the world rather than bend our knees to the true God who made heaven and earth.