What AI Can't Take Away

Living well is inherently human.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what the world has to become, as AI replaces more and more work.

This sentiment tugs at me in particular:

Last week I talked about how education tends to be coercive. Forcing people to go through required courses in order to get the degree they want, even if they don’t see the point of those courses. And how that creates really bad incentives.

I think the opposite of that offers something really powerful. What would it be like for education to have to speak to the relevance and desire of students? How would learning and teaching transform if everyone involved in the system knew to entwine learners’ efforts with what’s relevant instead of with the feedback of some authority?

Well… we do see some instances of that actually! But it’s often focused on training for employability. Things like coding bootcamps. I imagine that some people go to those purely because they find programming fun. But I imagine that most people going to those are trying to get a job as a programmer, because it’s lucrative.

And as time goes on, AI will probably replace more and more of those kinds of jobs.

Which creates a really practical problem: if more and more human labor gets replaced with AI, who gets to participate in the economy at all? If no humans get jobs, who buys the products that machines create? How?

I don’t think we’re asking this question very skillfully as a civilization right now. We’re just… making it happen faster and faster. Because it’s profitable to do so.

I’d like to suggest a possible pathway for this transition to move in a good direction. I don’t know if it works, but hopefully it can at least help the conversation focus in a kind direction.

It seems to me that we need to focus on helping people transition to the kind of work that machines can never automate for us.

And yes, there absolutely are some. Here’s a bunch of examples:

• Savoring the taste of food.

• Enjoying a sunset.

• Being enriched by reading a piece of classical literature.

• Coming to a deeper understanding of morality in a way that impacts how you want to show up in your life.

• Falling in love.

• Erotic delight with another being.

• Being touched by music.

• Participating in camaraderie.

• Really understanding a mathematical theorem.

• Profound spiritual experiences.

In broad strokes, machines can never automate the process of living well for us. We cannot outsource that. Machines might be able to participate in or enhance these effects. (E.g. robot lovers aren’t out of the question, even if the idea is pretty sus.) But they cannot do these things for us.

If we were to collectively pivot to focusing on human enrichment, I think this would shape how we use AI, and what’s profitable for AI to become. I could imagine a world where there’s no longer a need for human hands to be involved in distributing food and essential medicine for instance. But I cannot imagine a good world in which we do not speak in community with each other, where we no longer remember and savor the works of Shakespeare, where we don’t hug one another when crying and celebrate our accomplishments when we worked hard on something.

I’m struck by how some people still hand-carve things like chairs. Not because there aren’t adequate chairs available from manufacturers. Not because it’s profitable. But because it’s good work. It means something to use a chair that you’ve built with your own hands. It means something to receive one as a gift from someone who poured labor into it in recognition that it would be helpful to you. It’s touching to the human heart in a way mass manufacture just cannot compete with.

So yes, there are things machines can never automate. And the human spirit knows it.

I see hope when I look at what we could do by focusing on what’s irreplaceable. I expect the transition to be hard; our economic system is currently made of people doing tasks that will eventually be replaced with AI or robots or some other cleverness, sooner or later. And it looks like a lot of that replacement could happen very rapidly quite soon. That’s going to be rough.

But we can pivot. We could even pivot quickly.

For instance, I know how to teach math kindly and profoundly. Like I named last week, most math classes are very coercive, embedded in a coercive system. They induce what I often call “math trauma”. But the trauma is actually to abuse, not to math. I’ve seen many people tremendously uplifted by having their reactions to math validated, and then showing them the gorgeous sacred thing at the core of math. In lots of cases they get quite angry at how they were treated, and at the fact that math is vastly more meaningful than they were shown. That they were threatened and shamed instead of enticed.

This anger is good and right. It’s part of healing.

If people wanted to come to me to heal this way, and to touch the true enrichment of the deep art, then their desire drives where we go. And I can act as a skillful guide. Helping them refine their own relationship to truth so that more and more it’s reality teaching them. I’m just nudging them along, asking strangely insightful and frustrating questions.

But slowly putting myself out of a job too. Because it’s not about me. I’m just a steward of this particular part of grace.

I could imagine that my role here could become automated. Current AIs can’t quite do it best as I can tell, but maybe someday quite soon they will.

But you know what?

If AIs automate guiding us to enrich our souls, I think we’re doing pretty well.

The reason we keep encountering more and more AI slop is that it’s economically relevant. Because the current economy is built on extracting usefulness out of humans, like milk out of dairy cows.

What would it be like if there were a growing distaste for things that distract us from enrichment?

What would happen if the addictive slop that keeps drawing people in, like those fake game ads or sexualized cartoon figures or headlines designed to outrage folk, inspired people to offer ways of helping us all become immune by feeding our hearts what we’re truly longing for?

There’s a wholesomeness possible here.

I think it might be the way forward.

Not based on condemning things we cannot stop or lamenting the way things are going…

…but by instead focusing on what is precious and irreplaceable about being human.

What would a noble education in literature look like? What there would deepen our souls? It’s not in training the five-paragraph essay format, probably. But it probably does involve mastering writing in some fashion, for instance, even though AI can write for us. The act of writing seems to help us learn to think better. How can we refine that practice? How might we use AI to zoom in on the parts of writing that are deeply relevant for us?

And even though AI can make drawings for us, it cannot express our souls for us. Works of art, done by hand, will still matter — much like the hand-carved chair.

Same with music. And poetry.

Machines might eventually do science better than us, but it cannot do our understanding and inner transformation for us. I still enjoy learning the nuances of physics even though other people know it much more deeply than I do, and even though it’s not obviously relevant in practical ways to my daily life. But it is relevant: it colors my experience of the blades of grass I touch, and the way I feel the wind, and how I hear the timbre of the voices of the people I love.

It’s a big ask, for the world to pivot in any direction. There are some deep laws that say it’ll be hard.

But I think it’s getting easier, now that so much of what we’ve had to do to survive is being replaced.

So in short, here’s my invitation:

• Let’s focus on human enrichment. Both for ourselves, and also in terms of what we support. Let’s focus on what we want more of.

• Let’s create things that transparently offer enrichment. Let people come because they can tell it’s worth checking out. Drop all coercion. Let’s dance with desire and meaningfulness instead.

And also, for reasons beyond the scope of this particular post, it’s important to me that this is taken as an invitation. I feel a lot of hope for this direction, but I’m also just one person. Even if I were totally right on the nose here, that matters only to the extent that others can see it themselves, without reference to me. And there might be important things I’ve overlooked or didn’t think to mention.

(In particular, I’m loosening my usual perfectionist standards so I can get an essay out each week! So this whole post is a bit messier than I’d prefer.)

So please take this as a starting point. If you feel inspired and it changes what you want to focus on, wonderful. I’d love to hear about it. If you have doubts, let those be voiced! As my dear friend and colleague Malcolm Ocean might say: distrust is sacred.

And the whole point I want to make here is:

Let’s deeply honor what’s truly sacred.

Photo by Ian Edokov on Unsplash