Life with Robots

A short take.

I see AI everywhere now. It corrects my grammar as I type, tells me where to go when I’m driving, and will tell me anything I want; all I have to do is ask. I know that when I resist it, I am clinging to that last human thing that is mine and mine alone - the opportunity to not know something, to not have the answer to something, to not even know exactly where I’m going or what the weather will be like today.

You know you’re getting old when you are not up for diving into something even a little bit. You allow it to move past you quickly and permanently. You allow yourself to stay behind, walking slowly, waving goodbye.

The young me would have probably been very interested in learning all about AI. I wouldn’t be afraid of it. I would close my eyes and do the cannonball - boom, right into the murky depths. The old me thinks shrinks back in fear. It’s too much. It’s too big. I don’t understand it. Don’t make me worry about the future like this.

I wrestle with it when it comes to writing and spelling. I don’t always want a little robot cleaning up my words. If I go along with it, it sometimes makes no sense or changes the meaning of the sentence or word. They make it acceptable, generic, correct. So I have to make more decisions — is that the better way, or is my way the better way?

AI is the perfect adaptation for the marriage between the modern American Left and the internet. The conformity, the obedience, the trained and policed language — AI does it all, guilt-free. It can spout whole paragraphs of woke nonsense if you want it to. It can also offend.

Elon’s Unhinged Grok is profane and vulgar, and it reminds me of the Old Left, back in the days of David Lynch and Ken Russell. AI is allowed to talk that way because it’s been given permission to do so and there are no limits, no one to shame or cancel, no one to purge, just a tweak here or there and it’s done.

Don’t watch this video if you are easily offended by vulgar language.

AI can take us back in time and gently shape our interpretation of history. It can swallow up our cliches, memes, and political figures and spit them back out as a form of expression, or social media posts.

Here is AI imagining various moments in history, past, and future:

Here is AI imagining Trump as the Gladiator:

Retro future:

Matsya:

Hop on board if you don’t want to be left behind. There are even classes for the OLDS:

In some ways, AI is the Fourth Turning. It is an entirely new way humans will engage with the world. It might even render colleges and universities pointless. Those of us humans who remember life before will seem like the Amish who insist on using horses and carriages.

I asked Grok about the dangers of AI and got a very AI answer:

Someday, people will say, imagine — that’s when they didn’t have AI. Think about 100 years ago, in 1924. How different it all was. The stock market hadn’t crashed, and WW2 hadn’t happened. People on the Left would say, “Trump hadn’t happened.” I wish for them a bigger world.

As they’re burning Teslas because they’re out of their minds:

Elon Musk’s Space-X is rescuing stranded astronauts:

It’s hard for us mere mortals to comprehend someone like Elon Musk. He seems almost like a new species of human. He seems to only to have come to our planet to help us. And yet, there are so many people skeptical of him. That they’ve decided he’s a Nazi is probably the thing about humans I hate the most - idiotic groupthink and mass hysteria.

We don’t have to fear Elon Musk. Maybe we don’t have to fear AI, except in the way that it might make us feel less like artists and more like machines. Why bother even trying to create if an AI can do it so much faster and so much better? But is it better?

Will children growing up with AI even bother trying to learn how to paint and draw, as my daughter has done? Will it be like playing computer Chess? What’s the point? If so many things we work harder to learn disappear, do we just move on to other things? Is this the “managed decline” we keep hearing about?

Just let us be humans with our limited brains struggling with the Chess board. And yet, there is a part of us that will always want to know THE ANSWER. Computer Chess gives us that answer. But once we know that, what is the point anymore?

I will admit that there is something about the development of AI that makes me feel a little hopeless. The smarter it gets, the better it is, the more hopeless I feel. Just tell me what we can do better than AI?

Art. We still have art. I will die on that hill. We can write better than AI if we’re free to do so and aren’t being policed by the scolds and the New Puritans. Granted, whatever they’re doing now in art, publishing, journalism, and fiction writing might as well be AI. I know we can do a lot better than that.

We can’t stop it anyway, even if we wanted to. It’s probably better to ride the wave and see where it takes us—and hope it doesn’t replace everything we love about being human.