Comfortably Dumb

I can’t be the only person these days who is subjected to a little rock dropped into conversations, to the effect of “Well, AI is going to…” and various dire predictions. This anxiety focused on AI is not especially new–I am still trying to get used to, and largely avoid, the so-called Internet of Things, the thinking ovens and thermostats and smooth Alexas and Siris that we are told all the time we soon can’t live without–not only because they’re convenient but also because the inevitable dependencies of “progress”will eventually force us to rely on them, just as we now can no longer imagine living without our phones.

My reaction surprises me. I am amazingly sanguine, a term I find especially apt to describe my feelings. I feel simultaneously bloodied and calm, fatalistic and optimistic, when my neighbor to whom I’ve brought a birthday cake announces that AI has doomed us all. Maybe it has.

Yet I am getting slightly better at resisting, these days, a little more in control of my times, wresting it from my digital overlords to go outside instead, and “touch grass” as the kids all say. I’ve been reading books again, real ones, created not on a fully mechanical and inky press but with the assist of robotic arms and smart assembly lines. I’ve just finished training in the very hands-on work of being a state naturalist, and my education is supported through the use of apps to identify and crowdshare species and their locations. I am meeting smart technologies with every dumb bone of my body.

Maybe, I think to myself, just maybe, we can turn the tide yet.