The Paradox of AI Readiness

For some people, the experience of AI is primarily a moral one: it represents everything that is wrong with the world, and these people refuse to engage with it in any way. From a moral perspective, this position is sound. As of now, AI is costing a lot of environmental resources, is taking away jobs from hard-working people, and has had a proportionally more negative impact on low-income communities. It makes sense to oppose it.

For other people, the experience of AI is primarily one of fear and doubt. These people see the possibility of AI taking their jobs, or taking over the world, and their inclination is also to resist it, hoping that they can simply ignore it and it won’t impact them.

While opting out is morally sound, it seems to be becoming less and less of a practical choice as the tides of society turn, as AI takes over everything from coding to design to personal assistant tasks. It’s hard to imagine a world, at this point, where AI fades into obscurity at this point. While it makes moral and emotional sense to oppose and resist its rise, it may not make practical sense.

The third camp of people seem to have gone the other way, fully embracing AI’s capacity to simplify and speed up tasks and increase productivity. From this set of people, you’re likely to see a lot of constructions like: “That’s not a tone shift. It’s an attitude transformation,” or a sudden tendency toward words like “genuine,” “real,” “quiet,” and “matters.”

The challenge with the third camp is that if they are using AI to replace the work they were doing before, losing connection to what they themselves had to offer before they had access to AI, then eventually AI will be able to do their role entirely.

If we’re going to maintain ourselves, as individuals and as a species, we need to find a way to draw on AI while holding onto what makes us uniquely human, and what sets each of us apart.

As usual, there is no one right answer here.

Dr. Dan Siegel talks about two river banks – rigidity and chaos – and how when we can flow fluidly down the river between the two, we stay moving inside stable flexibility, or flexible stability, without getting stuck in either extreme.

The AI era calls for that same flow, where rigidity is holding too tightly to the past and not embracing the new, so the technology keeps expanding, but we opt out of being involved in shaping the way it takes hold, and chaos is allowing the new in without questions or boundaries, with no accountability about the costs or who bears them.

At a societal level, the river in between is where we engage with it while pushing for transparency, equity, and accountability in its use. I am going to leave that exploration for another day and stick with the practical, individual question of using AI in our every-day work lives.

At an individual level, the river in between is where we experiment with what AI can add to what we already bring to the table, what it can automate or speed up so that we can bring our unique creativity, skill, and presence to the work we’re doing. AI can be additive if we use it as a tool in our toolbox, amid the many others we’ve acquired in the course of our lives. If we avoid it altogether or let it take over entirely, we lose access to what it has to offer.

When I first discovered AI and started using it for writing, I was excited that it could do my writing for me. Pretty soon, however, I realized that AI can only write one way, in an abstract voice, using staccato sentences, with constant comparatives and lists of three. No matter how many directives I gave it, that’s all it ever produced. Over time, I found that while AI can be incredible at helping to structure ideas and catch mistakes, it wasn’t capable of actually writing in a way that felt rich and human.

I find that to be a relief. For now, at least, AI is something we can use to enhance our humanity, but it still can’t replace it, even if I structured this last sentence as a comparative and I won’t ever know if that’s the result of AI’s influence, or if I would’ve written it that way anyway.

– By Emily Pines