"If I forget how to be uncomfortable, I forget how to grow"

The questions posed by this piece, and others like it, have been swirling around in my head lately.

In it, Jenny (a fellow Torontonian!) wonders what's underneath modern technology's promise of "convenience". She's pointing at artificial intelligence, but AI is just the neon lights version of the same story this industry has been telling for decades. In it, "convenience" means "productivity", which certainly serves the people selling the widgets but doesn't tend to serve us in the ways we may have expected.

I think about what, exactly is becoming more convenient. Is it companionship with fellow people? Not really. The ability to focus my time and energy on things that enrich my life and contribute to those around me? That hasn't been my experience.

On paper, this productivity means we get our work done faster and can deploy the time saved in other ways. In reality, finishing our work early means our employers can assign more work. And even if they didn't, the extra time we've saved is a precious resource that we're getting rusty at spending on the things that move society forward. The tools help us become better workers, not better people. We look inward, shielding ourselves from the inconvenience of others. But that friction, Jenny argues, is central to the human experience.

While I agree with the broad strokes of this characterization, I still believe AI is fundamentally a technology, therefore a tool, and therefore subject to the imperfect whims of its operators. The challenge is to look past the marketing and manipulation and find ways to apply this technology for good—like we've had to with every other technology that came before it. If AI can save us time (which in my experience it can), then it still falls to me to use the time saved in constructive ways. It's not AI's fault if I choose to use it for doomscrolling, workaholism, or social isolation. That's on me.

A lot of anti-AI sentiment seems to wish for a world in which the technology didn't exist. We don't live in that world. In this world, my goal has been to explore and encourage more creative ways of applying this new force. It can do more than just make work more efficient. Shareholder value isn't the only thing we can build with these bricks.

Here's what I highlighted:

“all destination and no journey” is a pretty good explanation for why using AI to create art is mainly compelling to people who think about creativity in terms of producing content and generating intellectual property. They just want the thing they can market and sell for money or clout; they don’t care how they got there.

I quite like thinking, and I think humans should do more of it, and I think the less we do it the more our thinking muscles will atrophy. This seems bad for everyone except for authoritarians who wish we were easier to control.

My refusal is a philosophical position more than it is a practical one, in the same way that my decisions not to use Amazon or Netflix or Spotify do more to introduce friction into my life in service of an abstract ideal than it does to actually engender pain for the corporate oligarchs I despise. I harbour no delusion that my individual refusal will slow AI’s death drive to destroy societal trust and goodwill any more than I believe that Jeff Bezos is personally mourning money I’m not spending in his little shoppe. But if I am not capable of withstanding even this small amount of friction in my otherwise materially comfortable life for my ideals, what discomfort would I be able to endure when it matters more?

It is not virtuous to suffer, and discomfort is not noble. But everything in my life that is worth having, love and friendship and art and community, I found by fighting my way through discomfort. Pain does not mean growth, but growth does require pain. It is so easy in our rotten modernity to choose convenience and ease, to avoid friction at all costs and tell ourselves it is self-care. I choose the friction of refusal because I worry that if I forget how to be uncomfortable, I will forget how to grow. Refusal, like acquiescence, is habit-forming.

There are probably tasks that generative AI could help me do more quickly, if I can get over my fundamental moral disagreement with the technology. Maybe I would be able to fit more things into my life if I embraced it. But more does not always mean better, and abundance is not an uncomplicated good. We express our values and identities in what we choose to make time for, and the act of being forced to give some things up so you can prioritize other things, the realization that we cannot in fact have it all, that is what gives our choices meaning in the first place.

The problem with AI “art” is that it was not the expression of a mortal being choosing to spend its one wild and precious life clawing its way through mediocrity to try and imperfectly communicate a feeling with other mortal beings who, by definition, can never fully comprehend it, and therefore it is fundamentally uninteresting to me.

If you can push a button and get a screenplay or a symphony or a painting at the cost of a nominal subscription fee that does not begin to cover the true expense of this technology to the world, if you did not have to at least subconsciously face your mortality and decide that the pursuit of this piece of art is what you want to spend your finite time on, if your desire to speak is not strong enough to overcome the friction of learning how to speak, is it something that needed to be said?

The friction that the political project of AI promises to remove is, by and large, the same friction that authoritarianism promises to remove: other people.