The question about ourselves AI is forcing on us

I know exactly what this feels like. You’re good at something and despite your years of experience, it’s never easy. But the results are worth it. Money, respect and the mental workout. Then the alien minds arrived. Look at what they can do! Cool!

Then they got better at it, and poof. What I could do they can do too now. And faster. And cheaper. For me it wasn’t as harsh as for a lot of other people. It happened when I was supposed to retire anyway. Not that I am ever planning to do that. The way I dealt with it is that I promoted myself to be the kind of person that would normally hire me. Create software projects and hire my replacements, the alien minds.

The programming (in my case) was meaningful to me, but maybe not as meaningful as creating art is to the artist. The visual artists, the actors, the musicians. They surrendered more of who they are into their art. For them the replacement came out of left field. Many got hit hard and some carry a profound resentment towards that new tech that was supposed to stay inside sci-fi movies. To them, I am a member of the tribe that created the monster. Even though it ate me too.

This is not going to stop and no one knows where it will end. It has a ferocious appetite, even though it comes bringing many gifts.

The material challenges for someone who gets unexpectedly automated are real and some creative people reinvent themselves. But what about the person we left behind? The artisan, the engineer. Are they a stranger now? We were certain that that’s who we were, before the machine took it away. When we’re doing the new work we still feel like an imposter playing a part.

That challenge goes deeper than making another business card. It challenges our assumption that who we are is defined by what we have to offer to others. If the skill that got replaced didn’t define us, then what about the one we practice today, or any other skill? Maybe there are some skills that the machines won’t be able to replace, but we don’t know what they might be. We don’t know where it will end.

Some people will recognize this misalignment as the in-your-face version of a comfortable existential curiosity. That recognition took me a while. The curiosity started as a search to fill a religion-shaped hole, then turned into a deliberate quest and finally into a practice. Having a significant part of my identity removed turned the curiosity into an existential dilemma. The same question, but instead of me asking it, I became the question.

Of all the gifts and curses that the alien minds are bringing us, this can be one or the other. Do we resent our quest for knowledge being turned into an actual existential struggle? Or should we welcome the opportunity to get the kind of answers that only lived experience can provide? Technological changes have provided challenges and opportunities throughout history. Never before has any of them pressed the most fundamental questions about our existence this directly.