The Future Is Human

I wrote this Substack without using A.I. but I guess you just have to take my word for it. You are reading a paragraph written by a human right now, although I guess you just have to take my word for it. The writing is on the wall, more and more with articles newsletters, and eventually books too, it will get hard to distinguish LLM churned out pages from human written ones. I suspect as A.I. slop becomes more ubiquitous people will naturally gravitate towards the human, and stuff that is still done by hand, in person, human made, will become more valued.

In a world where writing is incredibly cheap to produce it will make embodiment and in person, face to face connections more valuable. Scarcity creates value. A surfeit cheapens the value of a thing. Gold is valued because it is rare. If it was as common as river bank clay, we might still think it was pretty to look at, but it would be economically worthless. It would be as valuable as a pretty seashell.

Now that writing (yes, like this very paragraph) is able to be produced at the touch of a button, it will devalue. That is going to change human society in ways that I don’t think anybody has fully understood yet because they are going to be weird, and surprising, and yet, in hind sight perhaps they will appear obvious.

Consider the plight of the modern male. Go back a century or two and one of the basic pillars of what it means to be manly—traditionally, came from the fact that the men of the species have more physical strength and were valued for being able to do physical labor, and so a lot of what it meant to be a man was being good at simple physical things like “pick up heavy object, move it over there, repeat.” Ever since the invention of the steam engine, and then machinery in general that meaning that telos (Greek for what a thing is for- it’s purpose) has been eroding. And so we find ourselves in the modern era where boys like the influencer Clavicular pursue the form without the function in Looksmaxxing. What it means to be manly is now just a thing on the surface, mostly looking like you could do a good job of physical labor, having a big biceps and a six pack etc. but it’s divorced from actually doing much. Looksmaxxing has it right there in the name; Looks. It’s just about the appearance, the shallow surface with no connection to anything deeper.

Lift heavy thing, move it, repeat - machines can do it better - and that hollowed out much of the surface meaning of being a man. And you can see the effect it is having on half the population, in the Manosphere, it is people chasing form over function.

But I digress . . . With all of the machinery and gadgets and inventions that have come to us since the industrial revolution, from the car to the toaster oven, there is convenience, and well, it’s easier to do things, it’s easier to get stuff done, faster. However, if you don’t want to be totally softy and weak you have to make the choice to go out there and exercise. To life heavy object and move it repeat. Nobody is going to make you do that. It’s called going to the gym, and exercise, and it’s totally optional.

As AI becomes more baked into everything, it is going to do for cognition what the industrial revolution has done for bodies. If you want to think and read, and write, and form you’re own opinions and connect and so forth, you are going to have to make a little extra effort to do so--because it is all going to become optional. But the tech version can’t compete with the real life version.

But the good news is that as AI replaces the drudge work, the things that will still be valuable and human and worth doing will be very human things. I see a future where we move away from our screens, and more in touch with our bodies. I see a future where the internet is so flooded with AI slop that more and more people choose to be present in the real, the actual. In fact, to face meetings, in time spent around other people. As the drudgery of white-collar work becomes automated - an endless tunnel of AI generated power slides, meeting transcripts, and excel presentations, made by robots, for robots.

My day job right now is working with Native American youth in the public schools. I love my job, and a lot of it is spent doing super fun activities, on a typical week. I might take a group of kids hiking in nature, or to play basketball or go bowling, and also be checking in with them about how they are doing in school, or even just hanging out and playing Uno. (Kids really love Uno.) But the fun in person stuff is just half my job and another half of it consists of entering a crazy amounts of paper work, into various databases and folders and janky programs, because that is how the work gets funded by grants.

That white collar drudge work is exactly the kind of stuff that AI could potentially handle a lot better, while leaving me the human more time and energy to do human stuff.

This same division applies to a lot of jobs, from social workers, to teachers, to doctors and lawyers. The jobs of the future will be more human not less, and that could be a great thing, and it’s well worth keeping in mind.

There is a viable future where we value and invest in and pay to the people who are good at what they do in person. Where a premium gets put on the experiences that involve being a in a shared physical space with other people. This is of course, also an aesthetic choice, that humans must choose. It is something we can lean into. Think of how the death of vinyl was declared long ago—but record stores are still popping up.

I see a possible future - for in person therapists, social workers, teachers, acupuncturists, potters, poets, bakers, entertainers, and somatic practitioners, and well, it sounds a bit hippy perhaps, and I mean that in the best way possible— I think there is a future that is a bit hippie and organic, and vinyl and about things you can do in person with your hands, in the sunlight . . .and it may very well be a subculture, a counter culture, offset from a version of the mainstream that is fully in the thrall of the digital. But it is an option. And there is no better time to start creating that future that you want to walk towards than today.

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