What AI Can't Do And What It Shouldn't Do

We're losing our capacity to think and connect. We can choose a different future.

Wow. The human femur is beautiful. Photo by Growtika on Unsplash

When I write, I think. That’s true for you, too. Writing is thinking. It’s part of our cognitive architecture. Artificial intelligence that writes for you, thinks for you. The ostensible return, instant and effortless communication, is ultimately a net negative. What you get back in time, you lose in capacity to discover, reflect, deliberate, sort, and dream.

We don’t become machines in the process of allowing them to write for us anymore than computers become human when we let them think for us. But while AI will never become human, as we extend more of our humanity into machines, we give up bits of ourselves. The exchange yields a flattened, monolithic cultural dynamic in which we speak the same few languages and say the same things, and nothing too interesting or meaningful or atypical. The risk of the homogenization of thought parallels a globalized era in which language, culture, media, dress, and so much more face a leveling to the grade of the global hegemon and its corporate underwriters. In that sense, the AI “revolution,” billed as it has been as the latest iteration of industrial upheaval, is the next step towards monoculture as a regression to the mean. How much poorer we’ll be for it.

I hasten to emphasize our growing poverty, a self-imposed impecunity, and how absurd a decision this is, to give up thought and struggle in exchange for a phoney baloney pretense to literacy while we rip one another off.

Artificial intelligence can’t actually think for us anymore than it can struggle for us, though it can displace our capacity to do each. The technology produces outputs based on vast amounts of data and patterns, guesses at what comes next in the sequence. To date, we’ve been the ones filling the stores of information from which AI draws, its stab at what follows drawn from hundreds, even thousands, of years of material produced by human hands and minds. To the extent we’ve shifted to using AI to write and decide for us, we’re standing on the shoulders of those who’ve done the work already, as if they’ve paid the collective human debt of thought and left us with enough surplus capital to coast until the sun burns out and we drift along as memories on a frozen, barren rock.

The struggle of sorting things out for yourself is part of the human story. That includes writing as thinking, but also the broader gifts that writing yields. Communities of writers and readers meet routinely throughout the world, at conferences and festivals and book launches and any sort of gathering or meet up or confab you can imagine. They meet as scholars, novelists, poets, non-fiction experts, technical report writers, and more. The communion of those gathered for the written word and for one another marks a high watermark of human achievement, an expression of devotion to thought and community. From these meetings, countless tendrils spread out in every direction imaginable and, perhaps, some that we can’t imagine, or at least can’t quantify.

In the most optimistic scenarios, including those imagined by thinkers including Karl Marx, automation, of which AI is a sort, can be put to good use to free us from the chains of labour drudgery. Let the machines do the work and let us flourish as artists, craftsmen, friends, lovers, and whatever else makes us human. Let the machines do the work and let us gather together to be together. We’ve turned our backs on this vision, opting instead to let the machines put us out of work while also doing the art and craft and even the loving, as reports of agentic romantic relationships suggest.

We’ve opted for the worst of all possible worlds, one in which AI thinks for us and erodes our ability to think for ourselves, in which AI does our work and our art, in which the relationships and communities that might have flourished in the extra time automation provides for us disappear as we turn inwards both literally and figuratively. Gen Z is drinking less, which is good news for public health, but one of the possible reasons they’re tipping fewer pints than their forebears is that they’re going out less. Instead, they’re at home, staring into the abyss, not noticing, as Nietzsche warned, that it has a tendency to stare right back into us.

It’s a cliché to say that we’ve never been more connected nor more lonely. It’s a cliché for good reason. It’s true.

At the very moment in which we ought to be connecting in coffee shops and bars, on sports pitches and tours of landmarks, at restaurants and concerts, in gardens and board game cafes, and wherever else we might find one another, we find ourselves inside alone or outside with others but separated from them, scrolling and tweeting and asking the AI agent if the sun above us is shining.

The problem is serious, but I can’t believe it’s unsolvable. In recent years, I’ve come to call myself a strategically hopeful person. In the face of, well, all of this, it’s easy to curl up into a ball and give up. It’s harder to hope, but it’s also more productive. If you begin from the premise that there’s nothing you can do about a problem, you’ve reached the end of your decision tree. If there’s nothing you can do, you stop. You give up. But if you start with the belief that you can do something, that a problem has a solution, then you’ve got something to work with. From there you proceed to think, to struggle, and to strive to solve the problem, ideally in concert with others.

As we face the challenge of AI replacing so much of what makes us human, I choose strategic hope and the task of joining the growing backlash and counter-movement that emphasizes that just because some technology can do something for us, it doesn’t follow that it should, or that we should let it. Despite what you hear from the sainted few who direct contemporary life from a handful of boardrooms in the wealthiest enclaves known to human history, we remain individually and collectively in charge of our future — at least while we maintain the ability to think for ourselves.