While there's still time
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: The watercolors are right here. The whole series is here.
"Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people don't have jobs."
That was Dario Amodei, the CEO of one of the biggest AI companies, describing this week what he says is a plausible, very near-term future. It’s worth reading the whole interview. If you’re an information worker—a coder, a middle manager, a writer, a lawyer, a banker, a consultant, a creative director, a filmmaker, a musician, or, on a slightly longer timeline, a doctor—the life you know is going away. There will be no adjacent retraining path back to comparable economic (or social) power, and the leverage against the change can appear to be nonexistent. The people with the keenest political interest in anticipating and heading off this upheaval—which is likely to be the definitive electoral issue in 2028 and well beyond—are busy applying 19th-century trade policy and vandalizing the welfare state. (The Biden people also were not great.) There is no plan to address 20 percent unemployment. It will be, as the Axios headline puts it, a blood bath. I’m not confident that that’s a figure of speech.
It’s a deep paradox of our paradox-filled time that we’re so close to seeing our civilization upturned—not like the iPhone, not like munitions or fertilizer or antibiotics, not like the printing press; bigger—by a handful of lost boys, and it occupies so little of our attention. But that issue will soon take care of itself. And who knows: Maybe, when tens of millions of politically empowered people lose their livelihoods over a year or two, our leaders will address the problem head-on, embrace enormous corporate taxation and wealth redistribution, and patch together a recognizable society for a bit longer. I believe that just beyond every existential peril on the AI road—for our species, at this stage of its development—lies another one, and eventually our luck will run out. But it might, conceivably, not be tomorrow.
The worry I bring to you today is a deeper one, actually. I’ve come to believe over the last few years—years of writing, music-making, deep physical inhabitation, love, and grief—that creative acts are how we participate in our existence. They’re how we give experience back to itself. They’re our reply to the question of being. I define that broadly, the creative act. It’s not so much a method or an outcome that makes it, as a phenomenology: the what-it’s-like to conceive of the new, to produce a spontaneous thing—not free of inputs, but the result in some way of all of them, the whole gamut since your consciousness first formed. And not just your consciousness, but those of all the people to whom you are connected. People are creative all the time, in every aspect of our lives, for good and for ill. It’s what we do. Our bodies are creativity machines.
The time when AI as we know it showed its menace, for me, was when the first popular uses were displacements of creative workers—illustrators, painters, photographers, musicians, and writers. Some of that work was, and has even remained, easy to dismiss. But it’s just a matter of time. To the hurdles of publishing a novel, for instance, we can now add the possibility that human authorship will be meaningless, even perhaps within months. Not every novel a near-future AI writes will be great, but some will. It’s just a question of volume.
The other day a friend sent me a picture of a fellow train passenger who was using ChatGPT. This person had typed in the prompt: “Give me 20 responses to thoughtful messages people have sent me for my 30th birthday.” On the screen, they’d highlighted one of the responses, presumably to copy and paste: “Your message really made me smile. Thank you.”
It’s not just jobs we’re going to lose. This is it. What makes us human is on the line. If we don’t find and choose some way off this path, our species will be dead in effect long before some callous permutation of superintelligence finishes the job.
Most people assume that the path is inevitable, that it’s not inside our power to change the outcome; it’s another uncomfortable but linear evolution of technology, and we must simply adapt as we always have.
If a bunch of highly valued companies were offering to distribute enriched uranium and bomb-making materials for free to teenagers, we would stop them. That’s within our agency as a society, as well as our obvious interest, in ways that cut across many personal variables. Every person has the power to say no to this. We will see, if not tomorrow then the next day or the one after that, that something far more dangerous than a bomb—to mind and spirit as well as organism—is unfolding right before our eyes. We will feel that we would give anything to be back on May 29, 2025, when there was still time.
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