3 new guidelines for doing stuff
No matter how much I think and rethink the creative work that I do, no matter how much I prepare and obsessively tinker with it, I notice...
Most importantly, we are becoming increasingly used to AI as an extension of our brains. We use it for research, guidance, self-expression, technical help, and many aspects of our private life.
I don’t want to sound like my high school teacher arguing against calculators, but I do think it’s important to consider the symbiotic relationships humans have with our technologies.
The medium as a metaphor
In “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, Neil Postman argues that each medium is a metaphor that teaches us how to think. A few examples of this are:
- Smoke signals limited discourse to brief, contextual information — alerts, warnings, simple announcements — with little room for abstract thought or extended reasoning.
- The telegraph, with its ability to travel at nearly the speed of light, collapsed distances, bringing a flood of fragmented information detached from context. For the first time in history, information circulated faster and further than our capacity to make sense and act upon it.
- This became exacerbated with the coming of Television, when fragmented and decontextualized information was reframed as a form of entertainment. Politics, religion and education began competing with talkshows, sitcoms and commercials in a war for our attention.
AI as a mediator of knowledge
A few decades after Postman first published his book, we find ourselves in the midst of yet another technological revolution.
The computer, with its bias towards modular thinking, gave way to social media’s virality of the extremes, and is currently shaping AI as a substitute for cognition.
Slowly but surely, we’re learning to trust an agent’s answers over the hassle of thinking, learning and doing at a humanly pace. It’s convenient, it’s efficient, it’s productive. It’s a superpower!
But here’s the catch: the more we rely on AI, the more we become dependent on it as a mediator of knowledge and its consequent baggage.
- The biases of current models shape the answers we’re given.
- Its blatant hallucinations create realities made out of fictions.
- The dubious morality of the corporations behind guides its development.
Delegating our thinking process to such a system is the perfect recipe for a society permanently reliant on a technology that will increasingly look like magic.
A sliver of hope
If this feels like a rather bleak Orwellian outlook, here’s a small sliver of hope: as much as AI companies have control over the evolution of the technology, users still have agency and responsibility over the way we interact with it.
We don’t have to accept the narrative that it’s “AI or bust”. If the AI bros of the world are vibe coding their way through life, let them.
As AI becomes more human-like, and the world lures us with its hypercontextualized delights, that which can’t be scaled to infinity will become more valuable than ever.
Presence, attention, creativity, and even the paradoxical contradictions we all hold within. Craft, taste, experience. None of these unique human qualities can be delegated away to a machine. They take time to develop and can’t be rushed.
I can very well see the raise of movements such as the Arts and Crafts of the late 1800’s, which arose as a form of protest against industrialized production, or Slow Food as an alternative to fast food.
These are proof that, even under the colossal momentum of progress, cultures that go against the grain can still thrive.
By all means, master the art of prompt engineering, but don’t engineer yourself out.
Stay human.
Sergio Camalich Morales
I am Mexican Graphic Designer, Photographer and Artist, writing about the underlying craziness of reality, and other stuff.
