AI's Temptation
Don't pay to diminish yourself
The hold that stuff has on humanity is one of the dangers the wise have warned against for millennia. Money can’t buy happiness, they caution. In a memento mori practice, people remind themselves they can’t take a single coin with them when they go. Everyone has heard these warnings but it is so easy to forget and rush to own more and more. And now a new category of possession drives the world economy. The richest billionaires and companies have already spent over two trillion dollars on AI. It’s the latest mania to tempt mankind.
In the 1500s artist Hans Holbein created a series of danse macabre images of death taking away what was most precious to the rich and powerful. The skeleton in these images always seems to surprise people with the truth they spent their lives in pursuit of things they cannot keep. The only right the dead have over their property is how to give it away. It is a pathetic thing to trade a life well lived for material possessions.
The temptation of AI is that it can buy in an instant things that would enrich a person if they worked on them over time. The time it takes to cultivate the skill to write a persuasive argument or a line of code can be skipped. One might never develop the social skills of leadership if they can buy some AI tokens rather than build a team. One might bypass the searching, reading and interpreting it takes to become knowledgeable about a topic with a quick research prompt. This mania has the unique risk of stealing from the soul what it buys with hard cash.
In the 1950s, the newly industrialized food industry rolled out TV-Dinners and wonder bread like it was a modern miracle. Now we know that subsisting on nothing but processed foods is perilous to health. Knowing how to do simple things like cook a healthy meal is still relevant even if microwaves are easier. In some ways, AI may prove like this generations processed foods. Eventually people will develop disciplines to enrich their minds despite all the AI shortcuts around them. But instead of larger waistlines and weaker hearts, people will be fighting against the threat of weakened minds and diminished selves.
Now is a great time to think about building a practice for the mind. With AI in the world, it is likely you will be asked to exercise your mind less and less in the course of everyday life. To keep your edge you will have to be intentional about using your mind in at least a few AI-free spaces.
I like writing for this purpose in my life. Writing is what LLMs did first and best. It would be so easy to skip the frustrations of figuring out what I think so I can say it on a page. But, I don’t want to diminish my capacity to think and so I write.
I notice the temptation now. The temptation to just put my hazy ideas into a few bullet points and feed it into an LLM. Let the language model come back with polished prose and then run a light edit to pretend the ideas are my own. But it isn’t the same as working through my own ideas and figuring out how they might fit together. To give up the frustrations of writing entirely to AI would diminish my own capacity to think.
Maybe for you it will be art. Putting a pencil to the paper and rendering how you see the world. AI can generate an image in a blink but creating your own can be a practice in keeping the way you see the world your own.
Whatever you do, think about what you want to keep safe from the great temptation of AI. Give too much of your own work away to machines and you may become diminished.
The skeletons of the danse macabre will laugh at the people who make that trade be they billionaires, politicians or corporate professionals. There is no possession worth the price of becoming much less than one could be.
— The Croak Section —
Ask Death a Question! Don’t wait. You have this day to satisfy that great yearning of curiosity. Every question is, after all, a question either about death or about what to do before death happens. Send your questions to askdeath@wecroak.com
Work with me. I coach people to build the life they want. Life is too short to stay stuck in a rut. Break free. www.tidepathcoach.com
Hansa
LOVE the comparison to microwave TV dinners. This really puts "using AI as a tool" in perspective. Thank you for sharing this talking point.
Yes, yes, yes, and hell yes to the final capping assertion. "There is no possession worth the price of becoming much less than one could be."