Artist Robots and Mechanized humans
Why the our hope lies with becoming more human
I don't believe those LinkedIn posts that say that we are all safe because Artificial Intelligence will never be good at creativity.
The world is awash in images and videos and songs and oddly enough I'm not sure it more creative on average.
Everybody has the capacity to be creative, but few do.
Songs are optimized for the social media algorithm du jour.
SaaS Designers design-systemized themselves out of relevance.
Creative agencies bend to the conforming pressure of corporate clients.
Very few of us can compose a Symphony.
I believe another analogy illuminates our path forward. It does not comfort.
It is not utopian.
As a species, we are our tools. We create them and they change us in the process. Can't be avoided. And the story of technology is one of making hard things mundane.
Emperors of the past could not trade their entire world for the the comfort of endless cat memes.
What is rare becomes trivial. In the process, we also become something else.
I know I'm leaning hard on known images, but I need a few more:
Cars replaced horses. At first, having a car was an unbelievable luxury. And now having a horse is a much expressive marker of wealth. As technology makes (surface-level) creation mundane, the value of uniqueness will increase.
We can see this with content marketing. Content mills shifting towards fully synthetic scribes. A million trillion monkeys, on a million trillion typewriters. Only this time, not at random.
The clickity-clacking of the keys is deafening. And a trillion trillion monkeys observe from the sidelines, learning and ready to assume their stations and type some more.
Facing the industrialization of insight (via guessing how predictable some word structures are) being human is to play a different game.
Being weird is not safe, but necessary.
Surrounded by a desert of meaning, the shimmer of the oasis calls you. 1
Every grain of sand around tells you something. There's no way you could add to it. The promise of a spring is just right there. Over the apex of curvature.
You can ignore its call but that is the prelude to a vulture's delight.
What is that oasis?2
That oasis is a place for you to be you. Shielding you from those monkeys and those typewriters. In that oasis you can say things nobody else has said.
How many desiccated wanderers damned the impossible dilema of trusting the possibility of a lie or accepting one's fate. The desert covers many.
Almost a year ago, I played around with OpenAI's API and made my first software toys. It was imperfect but unstoppable. As an incompetent programmer (you have no idea) I was astounded. And then it kept getting better, and branching out. Like an accelerated montage of the amoeba turning into a T-Rex, then a Roman soldier, then a galaxy-bending entity.
The barriers to skill retreat further. You can learn anything. Anyone can learn what you know. Any thing can learn that too.
Craft is now polarized. You're either an AI-powered apprentice or an AI-proof master.
What remains?
Horses.
Because of our vanity and childishness we want toys. We will forever want them. DNA is coiled around our desire to play and discover. Increasingly, horses cease to be engines and settle into being living playthings.
In that desert, immersed in the words of inexhaustible monkeys, the oasis is a place to drop out of that race.
In the future, having access to ideas and insight will be trivial. To provide those things is not a defensible position.
We must be horses3. Not necessary, but enticing.
Not an efficient tool, but a captivating toy.
And stronger still, perhaps not entirely free (who is) but alive.
Emotion, the one we elicit in others is the oasis we can build.
My bet (is there ever any certainty anywhere?) is that any last stand against the engulfing will need three things:
The capacity to make people feel things and;
Openness and vulnerability to let others in and;
A perspective that is at least not easily described.
If you've been paying attention, this is a lot about why I believe that helping experts create their workshops is a good way forward.
I wrote this on November 13th, 2023. It is how I mostly see things today. Could change. It has to, like everything else.
Fun fact: I tried to ask an AI image generator to create a picture of a desert made of speech bubbles. 2 of 4 images it gave me were of desserts, cakes and pies. It won't be this dumb forever.
I notice that I cannot separate the word “oasis” from the idea of a promise.
Yes, it can be jarring to think this way. I do think that many people already think like this but with other labels.