AI Is the Abdication of Being a Human

Stop pretending it isn’t.

As a sports fan, most of the games I watch are ones in which I have a definitive rooting interest: You should know that your party animal narrator spent his Friday evening simultaneously yelling in joy at his office television showing the Cardinals game and yelping in pain at his laptop showing the Knicks game. But I also regularly watch games between two teams I have no particular loyalty toward one way or another. I have developed a clear strategy for deciding whom I’m cheering for in these games: I watch them. If you are not sure who you want to win a game, simply watch for a little while — you will find yourself leaning toward one team over the other without necessarily trying to. The game itself will tell you. You often don’t know what you want, or even where you’re going, until you’re already on the road.

Roger Ebert once wrote “the muse visits during the act of creation, not before,” which is a fancy way of saying get to work; you’ll figure it out. Whatever your field of pursuit, no matter how well you plan, you can’t fully prepare yourself for everything you’re going to encounter. You just have to start — you just have to do it. We pick up everything we need along the way. The journey and the destination are inextricably linked; how you got there, and where you were ended up, are the exact same story.