I don’t know why it’s so hard for people to hold these concepts at the same time: 1. AI is better at parts of many jobs than humans. 2. Humans will, for a very very long time, be better at many things than AI. Our work is now to parse these two and maximize #1 to benefit the most people.

There’s this beautiful essay by Wendell Berry on the day his father brought home their first tractor. For generations before they worked their land with a small team of mules, and suddenly he finds himself “resenting their slowness.” This may be the best way I can explain what is happening with AI. Berry goes on to unpack how the relationship between humans and animals working the land is a kind of natural moderator that, in its wild inefficiency, also is a kind of careful preservation and stewardship. A slowing down to recognize the limits of each, the need for care, for rest, for times of healing and nurturing. That the singular drive to efficiency, at times, can work against that end. “Mechanical farming makes it easy to think mechanically about the land and its creatures…even about oneself, and the tirelessness of tractors brought a new depth of weariness into human experience…” In this example, perhaps we’re the mules getting replaced by the relentless efficiency of AI. Perhaps we’re the farmers, and we now find ourselves in the strange place of “resenting the slowness” of our brains, our former abilities to write, to code, to process. I know we will look back on this time as a time of a productivity revolution, in such a way we can barely imagine. And I am confident that we are entering an era, if our institutions can survive, of enormous abundance… less disease, hyper personalized education, agents working like little genies to fulfill our every wish. But, I can’t help but think we’re still losing something.

42 million people, including 15 million children, losing basic nutrition assistance while he spends $300M on a tacky gilded ballroom that he will name after himself.

Dehumanizing people is manufacturing consent to rob them of their free speech, due process, and human rights. We know where this leads.