Call me slow, but I have taken a long while to join the AI party. I guess I am a bit ‘old school’ when it comes to making doing stuff – I like to think it’s all coming ‘out of my head’, that what I say, write, or make is ‘all me’.
But the more I read and listen about AI, and the ever growing power mush of automation, it is really isn’t that simple. So much of what I know, think, believe, etc., has in some sense been ‘given’ to me, ‘instilled’ by my upbringing and experience and not least by living through quite a few years of education. Given my social and historical background (in the 19th century and beyond into my anonymous ancestral past) my life is rich, broad and healthy in a way the vast majority of my ancestors could never have known.
Of course I know that their way of life – mostly rural, mostly hard, mostly short-lived – included elements that for those of us living in more bourgeios world might induce a nostalgic longing, But I also ‘know’ that their lives were, well, mostly shitty.
In short, my life is, already, the result of a great deal of automation, of things and ideas ‘made’ elsewhere and then ‘given’. And although I am ‘late to the the AI party’ most of of my daily life relies on an increasing ‘throughput’ of automated content – water, electricity, entertainment, travel, food … you name it, but it’s is all provided by automation on an industrial scale (even the screw caps on the milk we buy is added by a machine doing more or less its own thing!).
So I am ariving at the AI moment when unavoidably I find I have to engage in some way. But it’s risky because (i) pretty much everything I thought made me human is increasingly automated, and (ii) I am in danger of being cast aside as so much wastage, perhaps to return to a feudal past or, worse a subscription-only future.