The Mortality Equation

On what AI can't do

Glass Century is out now, available in all formats, and you should absolutely buy a copy. Compact has called it a “New York epic for our time” and the Wall Street Journal says it’s “charged with heart-in-throat suspense.” Please remember to rate and review on Goodreads if you read the book and enjoyed!

On June 3rd, if you are in Portland, Oregon, please come and see me in conversation with the great Gabriel Kahane. We’ll be talking Glass Century, literature, the memoir, and all sorts of fascinating topics.

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I’ve been wrestling, of late, with what to make of artificial intelligence. Am I too much of a skeptic? A pessimist? I meet enough techno-optimists to second guess myself. I meet enough enthusiasts, or at least those who swear by its potential. AI is always forward-facing—more than any other recent innovation, the horizon line is nearly everything, that eternal promise. There were fewer arguments to be made about the smartphone, which simply arrived and became ubiquitous almost overnight. In the heady early years of the iPhone, few questioned whether the human race might be worse off for it. We’ve wised up since, and that may explain some of the debate and general defensiveness around AI. The evangelists know they have to fight a multifront war against humanists like me and also a tech-friendly public that is newly worried about what this all might mean in five or ten years.

In the fields of mathematics and medicine, I cannot argue against AI at all if the technology leads to genuine breakthroughs. For those who employ it for research, and are able to produce work that would be impossible if not for the new machines, what can I do otherwise but cheer? Calculators exist, after all, because the human body has limitations. We need machines for all sorts of work. We cannot run sixty miles per hour, we cannot fly, we cannot bore enormous holes into the earth in one afternoon. We cannot send messages to another person hundreds or thousands of miles away instantaneously. What if we called text messaging telepathy? It’s a physical act, sure, but it’s a style of communication that would have seemed like black magic a few decades ago—a pocket computer to summon any bit of information you may need and reach anyone else with that same pocket computer, as long as you had the phone number. International barriers melt away. The smartphone no longer inspires any awe in us. It has transitioned, like the television, to a forgettable part of daily existence, though it once seemed nearly beyond comprehension.

We will not be a Luddite society unless the bombs start falling and survivors have to pick through the radioactive wreckage. We will advance, because that’s what human beings do. But we also have autonomy—despite claims to the contrary, and a bevy of dystopian science fiction, we are not in fact slaves to machines. I enjoy the Matrix movies and they can seem prescient in the wake of AI’s emergence but they ultimately show a future that is not going to come to pass. The AI machines won’t harvest us for bioenergy while locking us into simulations of the distant past. That sort of malevolence is too cinematic. Rather, like Neil Postman, my fear has always been a Brave New World future, one we are halfway towards already. Screen entertainments are our soma. Society is increasingly arrayed around delivering extremely short-term pleasures, small dopamine hits to keep us sedate and perpetually scrolling. TikTok is the culmination of this downslope, and now AI threatens something entirely new—the death of effort, even the death of creation.

Creativity won’t lose this battle, nor will the individual artist. I do believe this. But it’s going to be a long war for the human soul. AI machines will convince human beings that there is no need to learn to paint, make music, write, or even engage with serious cinematography. There is a school of thought that posits the man who enters a prompt into a machine is still the author of the book the machine produces. I did it, see, I told the machine what to do. This is like driving an automobile for four laps on a track and claiming you ran the mile yourself. Or, more dismally, drawing a line on Google maps and calling that an exercise regimen. The trouble with our culture, which has become dominated by the tech ethos, is that we’ve grown obsessed with outputs. We are output-drunk. Process and effort for their own sake mean little as long as some product exists on the other side. ChatGPT will write the term papers and students will happily not perform the work because the work has been ascribed no value on its own. The thousands of hours it might take to perfect a craft mean little against the mad dash for new human simulacra. It’s like a human product, and the human wasn’t even necessary, so isn’t that good enough?

This is the new equation, it seems, for mortality. The eradication of resistance—for the act of creation is, almost always, infused with a kind of resistance, a struggle towards greatness—is what is prized most. For thousands of years, humans have not needed any help to paint, draw, write, or sing. AI performs tasks that human beings long ago mastered. We created movies, we created novels, and we created music. We—the collective flesh-and-blood mass of advanced and wondrous consciousness—have the record of creation. In the 2020s, some believe this does not matter any longer. If AI can imitate a screenwriter or voice actor, why bother with the original? If AI can write a mediocre book—and humans indulge in mediocrity, too—why dedicate yourself at all? There are two genuinely dangerous paths for AI, and neither have to do with machines enslaving humanity. Each path, in my view, intersects with the arts, which are under perpetual assault and require a muscular defense. If AI progresses as it does and we become, even more so, a world that is utterly dedicated to ChatGPT and Claude and all the rest—if we fall more in love—we lose the audience that can both make art and appreciate art. If an aspiring movie director or novelist offshores the act of creation to AI, it is unclear how either would ever become better at their art. How will they progress? Where will greatness come from? As a human race, we might lose, gradually, the collective artifacts that reflected our grandest achievements. In my own writing career, I only became better by doing the deed repeatedly. I wrote hundreds of thousands of words that were never published. Novels died on my hard drive. Through trial and error and a great deal of failure, I emerged, at least, as a writer who could begin to make an impact. This is an old story, and any artist can tell it. AI could, if left unchecked, kill it for good.

The second danger—the loss of audience—worries me just as much. If younger generations consume little but AI slop, they will lose the power of discernment. They will not know what it means to comprehend a moving work of literature, an affecting film, or transcendent music. They will gradually be infantilized. The future children will have parents who also grew up on this slop, who never developed any critical framework. They will be a ghost people, pale imitations of what humanity used to be. And this will have been self-inflicted: few people have cried out for this AI technology and it’s unclear, still, how the economy or any sort of material conditions are now being advanced. This is not the industrial revolution, electrifying homes and introducing indoor plumbing. It is, on the whole, more useless. I wish it weren’t so. It’s important, though, to not lose hope. There is a growing awareness of what is happening and what lies before us. Artists are asserting themselves. There is a resistance, a restive mood, and the likes of Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg cannot bottle it all up and make it go away. This explains some of the unhappiness of our tech titans. They are finding it harder to bend society to their will. It was much more doable in the 2000s and 2010s, which were sunnier climes for the tech class. AI isn’t quite “happening” as it should; it’s not making any kind of money, and its popularity relies on free products handed out to the masses. Maybe that kind of handing out can continue indefinitely. Does every bubble burst? We will find out soon enough. The future roars up to meet us.